A Dialogue with Jay Greenberg on Writing and Psychoanalysis

Luca Di Donna: Dear Jay, first, I would like to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to interview you for Rivista di Psicoanalisi. There is a great interest in the Italian psychoanalytic community to understand the psychoanalytic theories and practices in the Unites States. For years, many Italian analysts have followed the relational model of American psychoanalysis. As the current editor for North America of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and past editor of the journals Contemporary Psychoanalysis and of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis for North America, you have great knowledge of American psychoanalysis. Your book with Mitchell:Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, created a certain revolution, a shift, in my opinion, in American psychoanalysis. Before we discuss the importance of this book and your views on contemporary psychoanalysis, I would like to first ask about your background. Growing up in Brooklyn, how did you become interested in psychoanalysis? I too lived in Brooklyn for a short time. During my first winter in New York, I used the local library because it was freezing outside. I unexpectedly came across a book by an Italian priest, Gemelli, on psychoanalysis. I was very skeptical of his view on Freud. I felt like something was missing and I began to wonder about psychoanalysis. Brooklyn, in a way, was my salvation. What about you?

Jay Greenberg: Brooklyn is a great place for a psychoanalyst to be born. It is, of course, officially a part of New York City, but it is also different. When I grew up

we had our own baseball team, our own newspaper, and so on. When people went into Manhattan they said they were going «into the city», even though their homes were already in the city. I could say much the same thing about the United States as a whole; Brooklyn is part of it but we all had a keen awarene