Retirement Can Wait: Finding a New Way to Contribute

After more than 40 years, I began to decrease my practice and had time to do something different. Retirement did not appeal. A colleague's interesting reports about her consultations with a university counseling service inspired me to call the director of the counseling service at the Case Western Reserve University where I had a clinical faculty appointment. He invited me to attend their weekly staff conference. At the conference were clinical psychologists, social workers, substance abuse specialists, cognitive behavioral therapists, graduate student interns, psychiatric residents, and a psychiatrist—matching my view that a range of services and modes of therapy should be available to provide optimal care. I added a dynamically oriented viewpoint to the discussion and they invited me to return.

That was September 2003. Attending that conference once a month for the next two years, I found the discussions were among the best clinical discussions I had ever heard and the staff appreciated my contribution. Not only was the group congenial but dedicated to providing the best service they could. In addition, a member of the staff asked for consultation and we met weekly for a year.

The director asked me to comment on a presentation of a new project the counseling service planned to propose to the university, a business plan for alternative housing for students who had been in drug or alcohol treatment programs and wanted to live in a sober setting. The counseling center planned to lease a house on the campus for six residents and a resident coordinator. Immediately interested in the proposal, I accepted their invitation to join the Recovery House Advisory Board.

Once the plan was accepted, the advisory board began to meet monthly with representatives from such university departments and services as student life, housing, disabilities, and maintenance, as well as with lawyers, business people, and others from the general and recovery communities. The board chair was the substance abuse specialist of the counseling service. The Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center became a sponsor of Recovery House.

Early on, the board saw the need for input from an experienced businessperson. I thought one of the Psychoanalytic Center Foundation Board members might be interested; he was and soon became active with the advisory board.

The topic that especially caught my attention was the relapse policy, which viewed relapse as an expected part of the treatment process. Our search into policies about relapse indicated that in the few universities that had such programs, most often a judicial process leading to expulsion of the offender was in place. As we discussed it, I recommended that the relapsed student be an active participant in whatever the process was. I accepted the offer to chair the board committee that would deal with relapse, which we named the Advocacy Committee, in keeping with its mission to advocate for the student as the process of dealing with relapse unfolded.

In 2005, I proposed changing my volunteer status and expanding my consultation time at the center as a paid staff development resource. Although I would not see students, I would be available for on the spot consultation and for the assessment of suicide risk, and would attend the weekly staff conference. The director accepted my proposal.

The following year, I brought to the conference one of the candidates in the Psychoanalyst Training Program of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center who had no prior clinical experience. Immediately accepting her, the group found her participation useful and especially liked the fact that she was a college teacher, who had used psychoanalytic concepts in her research and writing. This gave her an opportunity to experience clinicians from diverse backgrounds interacting around clinical problems. Eventually, when able to accept them, she received referrals from staff and discussed her work in beginning her psychotherapy practice with the group.

Another benefit has come from these new associations. The Recovery House Advisory Board chair, who is a social worker, enjoyed revisiting the psychoanalytic ideas that were part of her professional education decades ago. She joined the fledgling research group of the Psychoanalytic Center and was invited to become a member of the Psychoanalytic Center Board. It is clear what the Psychoanalytic Center and I have gained and the benefit to the candidate is clear, but what does the counseling center get from my participation? The director told me, “You are our compass.” He explained that my contributions served to remind them that beset by time and economic constraints, they, on occasion, make clinical decisions based less on the client's need than on administrative demands. I keep them focused on the individual's resources to meet the demands imposed by the college situation, their unique life stories, and their developmental status.