The much-appreciated humanitarian and scientific honors this Association and others have given me could not have occurred without luck. I was lucky to be born in Brooklyn in 1929 rather than in Kyiv or a shtetl near Odessa, where each and every one of my maternal great grandparents, great aunts, uncles, and cousins were killed in 1912 during a Russian czarist Cossacks pogrom. At the same time, I was extraordinarily unlucky to be born with a terrifying genetic disorder, one that had killed at least 15 members of my known ancestral family on my father's side. Called by the unfortunate name of “Lynch syndrome,” it produces multiple carcinomas involving many organ systems. My genetic misfortune began striking me hard, as it had my father, when I became forty-eight years old. Yet I had the extraordinary good luck that that my old medical school dormitory friend was Arthur Sicular, who had gone on to operate on my father. Luckily he warned me that, when my chronologic time came, I should not accept the ordinary advice of my regular surgeon. Sicular told me that I was not “cured” by the simple polypectomy given me at Sloan-Kettering. Then, saved by Sicular's prompt secondary radical surgery, I was further faced with the extraordinarily bad luck of multiple lymphatic metastases, cachexia, failed experimental treatments, liver perfusions, primary as well as secondary liver carcinoma, parathyroid carcinoma, multiple skin cancers, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, anemia, metastatic prostate carcinoma, months-long intestinal obstruction, prolonged hospitalization due to an inability to eat, weakening old incisions, and a thrombus of a branch of the right middle cerebral artery. Many times life seemed impossible, yet always desirable.
I had been a pilot since the age of twenty-three. When recovered enough from the daunting list of life-threatening conditions, I was surprised to be permitted by the FAA to return to flying. I then always took along a copilot to preserve my luck. Sometimes I flew to the Mexican border to do forensic work with asylum seekers. Once my son and I flew over the Andes to Buenos Aires to start an analytic preschool service. But three years ago, I had extraordinary bad luck when my airplane's landing gear collapsed on landing. I was abruptly and badly injured, with a subdural hematoma of the right parietal and frontal areas, and multiple vertebral fractures. Yet my life was saved because X-rays revealed what I did not yet know. I learned as a consequence of this accident that I had pelvic metastases, a silent invading enemy army likely to murder me like the czarist Cossacks had done to my ancestors. Luckily, treatment arrested the otherwise deadly incursion. Neuropsychological testing, on which I insisted for ethical reasons, showed an unusually lucky brain, and I felt enabled to continue my professional life.
I often waken with the pleasant sense of extraordinary luck that I am still alive and, I am told, still intellectually sharp at age ninety-two. To retain that sharpness is both lucky and a worry. But my decades of forensic expert work continue to have very good effects on defendant churches, foster care systems, and residential facilities. This work included expert evaluations, reports of psychological damages, deposition, and courtroom testimony. It gives powerful courtroom and television voices to child victims of abuse. I have encouraged some now prominently
voiced victims by my psychoanalytic listening and testifying. It gives me joy and satisfaction that some of the encouraged clients have been gripping the nation and even the world against traumatizing mass perpetrators—multiple archdioceses, Jeffrey Epstein, or St. Paul's Academy.
Another specialist in my genetic disorder recently met me for the first time. He wept with joyful surprise upon realizing that my life force, especially my adventurousness, courtroom testimonies, and continuing creativity, were in the person standing, cogently talking and lively in front of him. All of his many other Lynch syndrome patients had died at much earlier ages. None of them, I dare say, had the extraordinary luck of having been analyzed. Now in my third analysis, I am living testimony to the correctness of a hypothesis I urged Edward Jeffrey to study. His work, published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, proved with extraordinary and well-controlled statistical significance the hypothesis I suggested to him: psychoanalysis reduces mortality. I urge my fellow analysts to think of how we should make known this simple and very lucky fact of such great public value and potential media interest yet hardly known to the larger world.
I often waken with the pleasant sense of extraordinary luck that I am still alive.
Of course, not everything that seems lucky is due to chance. Much of my luck is because of transgenerational psychological strength. A great amount is due to an over thirty-year marriage to my amazing wife, Harriet Wolfe. Some is a privilege of innate biological strength, parents who encouraged intellectual assets, long academic and psychoanalytic study, good medical and surgical care, and helpful, ongoing analyses. My children and grandchildren also nurture and bring me life in many ways.
Now, with multiple good fortune, this Brooklyn-born boy with a genetic disorder is able to come full circle. He can help the Ukrainian children facing disasters not completely unlike the ones he escaped by the wisdom (and luck) of his own emigrating ancestors. For digital copies of the mental health instrument my team and I created for Ukrainian children and families look online at publications of harlemfamilyinstitute.org or write .
Allow me to describe a final example of extraordinary good luck. It is cognitive growth for child patients as a result of analysis that I luckily and “accidentally” discovered. The discovery began to come in 1968 when Anna Freud challenged me about the accuracy of quotations of my child patients' verbalizations. Diligent video recordings and psychometric testing of 143 children treated by dozens of different teams followed. I thus learned that a form of child analysis can regularly and very significantly raise intelligence quotients. The amount of rise is related to dose (quantity of sessions). It occurs among preschool patients in a variety of public and private settings, with a variety of serious disorders including autism and PTSD. The IQ rise is a phenomenon which does not so strongly, regularly, reliably, or significantly occur amongst comparison and control treated patients who are not receiving that form of analysis. Thus, I was honored by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Hardnosed though it is about psychoanalysis, the evidence persuaded that Academy to give me the Rieger Award. I hope my fellow psychoanalysts will take public relations advantage of the regularity of IQ rise finding, which may make psychoanalysis interesting to parents of seldom-helped, deeply needy, and unluckily disturbed preschoolers everywhere.
What a pleasure it is to be a recognized, multiply awarded psychoanalyst in the world, to survive so well against bad luck, and even be able to increasingly help unlucky others. Perhaps you and I will return to tune in together next year to think about work I have begun to grow at the Harlem Family Institute. There many psychoanalytic opportunities and flowerings tell me how fortunate it is to be alive. Check on us online to attend our Harlem Psychoanalytic Renaissance speakers series. Learn of our numerous guided activity workbooks, Reflective Network Therapy, Margaret Morgan Lawrence Acute Trauma Response service, and forensics for asylum seekers. See especially how we are increasingly training Black, Brown, and other marginalized persons to analyze Black, Brown, and other marginalized persons. Their patients have often not had my extraordinary luck of the draw.
Gilbert Kliman, M.D., is a graduate of Harvard Medical School; a child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst; a recipient of APsaA's Anna Freud and Humanitarian awards; and chairman of the Harlem Family Institute and the Children's Psychological Health Center.