The subject of the address, mutative influences in adulthood, arises from Judy's presidential experiences and her awareness of their impact on her own development. She brings to it the vantage point of a superb analytic clinician, rated as one of the outstanding analysts in Pittsburgh, and clearly the most sought after supervisor in the institute.
The roots of her development can be traced from her mother, a teacher; and her chemist-businessman father; and her education at Midwood High School in Brooklyn and at Radcliffe College, where she was an outstanding history major (not an inappropriate background for an analyst). She sought psychotherapy after taking a course with the psychiatrist Eric Lindeman, known for his pioneering work on mourning, and observing him enjoy himself attending symphony concerts. She worked at several jobs during college, and was selected to serve as a paid normal subject for a graduate course in psychological testing at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. I was then a graduate student in clinical psychology at that clinic, and we had just begun dating.
My assignment in that testing course was to give Judy the Rorschach. (My Rorschach report was, tactfully, ungraded by my professor, Eugenia Hanfman.)
An early expression of Judy's generativity was to encourage me to go to medical school and into psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She thought so well of her advice that she decided to follow it herself, despite family doubts about the support she could get from the dean and the college, since she had virtually none of the prerequisites. The dean was very encouraging, and after a painful struggle with chemistry that included alerting her famous chemistry professor, Louis Feiser, about not giving an examination on Yom Kippur, she was accepted at New York University-Bellevue College of Medicine. After a year of pediatrics, she went on to residency training, initially at Bellevue Hospital, then at New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Her psychoanalytic training was, by choice, at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research, created by Sandor Rado and several colleagues who had left the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her choice of an heretical institute, the Columbia Clinic, was primarily based on selection of supervisors and propinquity. The broad curriculum included courses in anthropology, neurophysiology, and genetics; the atmosphere was truly electric in the fifties.
Columbia analysts were interested in and writing about subjects as wide-ranging as psychosomatic disease, adoption, prejudice, and community outreach. Her analyst, Aaron Karush, was one of the coauthors of a formal critique of libido theory that was rejected for publication by all of the recognized analytic journals but finally published by the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Besides Karush, the analyst who had the most profound influence on her conception of psychoanalysis was a supervisor, Ruth Easser, who was my most influential supervisor as well. Easser was the first Canadian woman analyst; her vision of analysis was decades ahead of her time. Judy was appointed a training analyst at Columbia and started out as associate director of the low-fee clinic.
As adults we all continually face challenges and stresses, some sought, others unavoidable. Our move to Pittsburgh to provide a career opportunity for me and a better life for our family was one such challenge. In Pittsburgh Judy embarked on child analytic training and became involved in establishing the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center. Her subsequent career as treasurer of The American, defeated candidate for president, and director of the Pittsburgh institute are probably better known to the members.
Writing a plenary address to be presented to a large group of her colleagues was another such challenge. When these stresses verge on the traumatic, what components influence the response, which can range from the fearful or regressed to mastery, involving a determined mobilization of resources? And what is the role played by luck? Can it be said, “The harder I work the luckier I am?” What is distinctive about Judy's consideration of this subject is her breadth of view. Although she has a deep and solid understanding of analysis, she is not limited to any narrow domain of analysis and is acutely aware of the healthy strengths of the personality. This perspective, developed at Radcliffe and cultivated at Columbia, should provide a fresh look at personal development in adulthood.