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SGS: What was your initial reaction on reading these papers?
MB: Looking them over and thinking about when Stephen wrote them, it just amazed me, once again, that he was so brilliant. It was a little hard for me to read them, but it was also kind of nice to speak with him again.
SGS: What motivated Stephen to write these papers? What provoked his interest and moral anger about this particular issue?
MB: I think that people often take Stephen's writing in this area as a political statement, and that is certainly true, but Stephen was much more an intellectual than a political person. I think he might have been happy to move into the Yale library—as long as he had his bagels and his New York Times delivered, he probably could have lived there quite happily for a long period of time [laughs]. But he also had the rare gift of being an intellectual who was truly interested in the way that people's thinking affected their experience and, in a larger sense, the quality of their lives. He was interested in ideas, but not only in an abstract way.
Margaret Black is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Postgraduate Center, Board Director, Supervisor and, Director of Continuing Education at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
These particular papers were written toward the end of our analytic training. The preceding years had been very intense. We had been seeing our first analytic patients. As you know, those first patients become powerful experiences. You learn a great deal from them. Stephen was always extremely interested in how people thought and was very respectful of their perspectives. So, in his work with homosexual patients, he wanted to hear what they had to say about their experience rather than assuming their lives were best seen as pathological. He was really trying to hear them: How did this nonheterosexual orientation work out? Was this a good experience for them?