Shelley Orgel, outgoing Chairman of the Board on Professional Standards, delivered the following statement to the Meeting of Members in Montreal on May 6, 1988, as an expression of his own personal experience in working with Richard Simons.
A few words cannot capture the quality of my experience in working with Dick Simons. The words that come to mind when I try to describe my impressions of Dick in action are strength and even-handedness. In meetings, he is always curious about the ideas and views of others, typically listening attentively and respectfully to everyone in the room before he expresses his views. If convinced, he will incorporate some of what he's heard and change his original ideas to some extent; sometimes he will use his superb ability to synthesize, creating new ideas and solutions from the elements he has absorbed, and sometimes he will tell his opposing point of view in a manner which convinces the others because one knows Dick has first listened. Dick has not been afraid to act quickly and boldly, but he is not impelled by anxiety or narcissism to act before he is sure he cannot do better by more reflection and refinement of his decisions. For those of us who worked with him in the Executive Committee, there was the pleasure of being a part of a team bound together by love as well as informed by our shared ideals. We have been frank with each other, disagreed strenuously with each other on occasion, and enjoyed the give and take of improvising and crafting solutions to dilemmas. We relished doing the work and spending the time it took, and this was largely because Dick brought to our effort his greater responsibilities and greater sacrifices of time and personal comfort—his own uncomplaining commitment, humor in difficult moments, and willingness to go anywhere and do whatever was needed to serve this Association. And no president of the American, in my experience, has striven more generously and steadily to learn about all our members—in every locale, of all ages, with whatever professional interests, of any status or level of membership. Dick has been tireless in seeking people out and listening to them, attending to what each one believes, needs, fears, aspires to, thinks about. I cannot imagine when Dick was not on the phone when he was home in the evening or on weekends—when he was not attending to the American's business. Yet I know he maintains virtually a full-time practice doing analysis and has a full-time appointment in a department of psychiatry. How he has done it all, I can't imagine, but he never seemed to be unavailable, no work was ever delayed because Dick couldn't get to it. Never did I experience, when we spoke together, that he was hurried or that another obligation or task or person clamoring for his attention was more important. I think there are many, many people in this Association who would make the same statement about him. In the face of what must have been at times serious frustration, or provocation, or his own fatigue, I believe Dick never showed impatience to anyone.
He is not by any means, however, a cool person. He has passionate beliefs, and an intense sense of right and wrong, becoming very angry with those who willfully violate the moral code by which he himself lives, and which somewhat ingenuously at times he expects others will observe as well.
I will stop with this fragment of a profile of our President at work. I've left out much—including the deepening affection I've come to feel for Dick. To express this, we both require private occasions. We will have them. I also have not spoken about Dick's help and support to me in maintaining the vigor of the Board on Professional Standards we both believe to be vital to the strength of the American. I hope I have conveyed that we, the American, have been privileged to have as President a man who has never ended his own search for what is truest to his beliefs and sense of emotional rightness. Out of that internal quest has come his ability to call forth the best in us, individually and collectively, in behalf of psychoanalysis and the American.
I think his example as President will in the future be a model against which other leaders will measure themselves and their achievements. I will always be proud to have been part of Dick Simons' Executive Committee and to be his good friend.