Warren S. Poland is a friend. He is an independent, not a joiner, not a politician, not a bureaucrat, not a round peg. Capable of the greatest loyalty, he has been more willing than most to put principle before self-interest, before popularity, even before group cohesion. He keeps our standards high, but he does not do so at the price of friends. With warmth and compassion, he stands up for them as steadfastly as he stands up for principle.
Poland knows the problems when analysts move from the analytic chamber to group activities:
Like a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese, so might the plural for us be a consternation of analysts. Yet around the world there are colleagues who make me proud to be in the same species. What a wonderful way of life, where one can meet a person at a time of semicompetitive ambition and through 40 years of a shared career have competitiveness mature into such real affection.
How did Poland acquire this realistic yet appreciative attitude?
As an adolescent, he was a member of Habonim, a pioneering group that trained young people to live out their ideals of community on the land in Israel. He continued his education in the United States. In college he was fascinated by general semantics and dedicated to Adlai Stevenson. Although those two passions might seem disparate, they were in fact linked by Stevenson's clarity of thought and literary expressiveness.
Poland was fascinated by the combination of humanitarian, moral, and linguistic excellence that Stevenson brought to the public arena. He corresponded with Stevenson and organized a chapter of Students for Stevenson. Despite being threatened with expulsion by the dean of the University of Maryland if Senator Wayne Morse acted on his acceptance of Poland's invitation to visit and speak, Poland persisted.
Morse at that time was concerned with his role as a dissident in Congress. His conscience drove him to oppose popular xenophobic anti-intellectualism. On another campus, I interviewed Morse, who quoted to me Edmund Burke: “Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgment, and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” That quote, crucial in the Constitutional Congress meetings in Philadelphia in 1776, ties together Stevenson's, Morse's, and Poland's politics, as well as my own, capturing the tradition of searching for the values and principles behind immediate decisions.
Poland's special passions in college included his care for sentence structure, marking the beginning of his collection of favorite sentences. His ego ideals included Samuel Johnson and Gustave Flaubert, of whose writings he said he could read and re-read a paragraph just as one can listen over and over again to a favorite piece of music. Such a reader makes a special kind of writer. Poland began to write with a concern for style, grace, and cogency. Although such a central interest would hardly lead to medical school, he became a doctor, incorporating his first love to become a psychoanalytic writer of rare grace and serious purpose.
I met Poland just as he was beginning his psychiatric residency at the University of Maryland. He trained there because he had loved his undergraduate medical training under Jacob Finesinger, where psychiatry classes had focused on the Dora case, the “Three Essays on Sexuality,” and Anna Freud's “Ego and Mechanisms of Defence.” Psychoanalytic training followed, with quick progression up the ranks to training analyst. Poland enjoyed that status for only a few years before joining a group of 12 training analysts in a vain attempt to build a new analytic institute in Washington. He has been free from the institutional life of psychoanalytic politics ever since.
Immediacy and intimacy color his views. Invited to become a training analyst at other institutes, he has chosen to remain outside the official training of institutes, preferring to function independently despite the detriment to his practice.
He has been a frequent participant in study groups both established and familiar and those, here and abroad, he has helped establish on an ad hoc basis. Despite his image as an outsider, he has been a highly regarded and sought-after participant in many of the organizations of the analytic movement. He respects the need for both the analytic establishment and the analytic movement, respecting even the inevitable tension that accompanies their desired synergy.
With his special interest in writing, Poland has served on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Books, Gender and Psychoanalysis, Confrontations (Paris), The International Forum for Psychoanalysis, and The Journal of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis. His own literary interests have not lain dormant during his practice of analysis. He has reached for elegant writing in the tradition originated by Freud.
The earliest of his expressions in print was, not surprisingly, an appreciation of the place of humor in psychotherapy, a paper followed by a later study in greater depth. Both papers balanced a valuing of humor with the need for patient-oriented discipline within the clinical situation. His own ironic and self-deprecatory humor resonates through his book Melting the Darkness: the Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice, in which his ideas clearly reflect the place of humor in his own life and in his work.
The paper of Poland's that most affected my own development as an analyst was “Tact as a Psychoanalytic Function,” which addressed difficulties in treating easily offended patients. It is a measure of his judgment that he does not simply present tact as a technical precept but gracefully discusses pseudo-tact, showing how tact can also be used in the service of resistance. Always opposed to simple categorizations, he suggests that tact and pseudo-tact are not dichotomous but exist on a continuum.
Arlene Kramer Richards is a training and supervising analyst of the New York Freudian Society, a Fellow of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Another gem among his papers, one which has had less notice than his works that have been translated into French and Italian, is his brief communication “On Surmise.” In that short piece he equates the ability to be tentative in knowing what our patients feel with the maturity to acknowledge the validity of an other as a person separate in his or her own right. The admirable cogency of his statement and the economy with which he makes it have proved invaluable to me as I have taught young analysts how to do their work.
What is most interesting in Poland's work is its development and progress as he has moved along in his thinking. His papers have a logical progression of their own. Thoroughly grounded in the ego psychology that came out of the Hartmann era, his attention to what unfolded in his clinical practice, plus his own questioning attitude, led him to add to and modify what he had been taught. He was among the mainstream analysts who attended to the dynamics of the clinical engagement while keeping central attention on the exposure and exploration of unconscious forces. His openness to the analytic dyad has never been at the expense of his sense that the analyst's task was “to watch the store,” to protect the central aim of psychoanalytic inquiry into the patient's unconscious processes.
Poland's concern and contributions regarding the dyadic aspects of the analytic situation have led to his plenary presentation at the Toronto meeting, “On the Analyst's Witnessing and Otherness.” Stepping back from making a single point of view of the dyad into a statement of the total panorama, in this paper he confronts paradoxes intrinsic to separateness and to the necessity of maintaining multiple relational points of view.
His primary focus in this presentation will be on the role of the analyst as an active though silent witness to the patient's testimony. This approach is bom out of empathic holding or containing but developmentally matured in recognition of essential separateness and otherness. As usual for him, he will begin with familiar specific clinical experiences and will question them sufficiently to approach tentative theoretical and philosophical conclusions.