The Development of My Ideas about Psychoanalysis

Where to begin? Perhaps with the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe and then my parents’ wretched childhoods and emigration to the United States, carrying with them poverty-tainted ideals of learning and little emotional preparation for gratifying family life; this leading to a childhood that featured more than enough bad times emotionally and an adolescence overshadowed by the sense of futility and pessimism engendered in the 1930s by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the massive discrimination against and persecution of Jews - all of which together fostered the deep feelings, “What's wrong with people?” and “What's wrong with me?” Under the influence of these feelings I adopted the role of cautious observer, outsider, and interpreter of what people said and did as well as doubter of the meaning and validity of my own ideas and feelings. It was in this soil that there grew my lifelong interest in interpretation, and it is the intensity of this interest that I consider the red thread running through my personal life, my occupational skills, and the development of my ideas about psychoanalysis.

I was helped to put these predispositions and interests to good use by a number of factors: my good native intelligence and my heightened feeling of integration and morale whenever I plunge myself conscientiously into work that uses my assets; my introduction to psychoanalysis and projective testing by the excellent psychology faculty of the Psychology Department at the City College of New York in the early 1940s; my subsequent employment by David Rapaport, then at the Menninger Clinic, as research assistant in his epoch-making research into, and development of,