The Readers' Right to Know

I feel the need to talk of my experiences in the world of psychoanalysis ... Life among the Analysts, so to speak. I'm looking for a place to air personal reflections, as well as commentary on psychoanalytic theory. 

Beginning Personal Reflections

Life exists only in the presence of Change while a notion of Identity permits us to recognize Similarities in Differences. 

The Living change and – to the extent that the Inert and the Dead share the characteristic of changing very slowly – when Change Ceases or Greatly Diminishes, we say that the Living have Died.

When we Bury the Dead, we speak of those to whom we say Good Bye as having “gone to their Eternal Rest.”

Freddie Mercury wrote and sang: “Love, too, must Die.”  I would suggest that Love must Change or it, too, has joined the Inert in the Death of those Beings and our Reflections-in-Language of those Beings.

I fell in love with Psychoanalysis much the way Young Lovers fall in love with each other. I read everything I could find that Freud wrote after he left the Neurology that occupied the first thirtyish years of his life. This included his Letters and his Clinical and Theoretical Writings. By the time I came to reading the Old Sorcerer, der Alte Hexenmeister fum Wien, these Writings had found a Standardized Version – at least in the English Language. My Mentor in Psychoanalysis from whom I garnered a great deal had instructed us at the end of our first training class to “begin reading Freud.” One of my fellow students, Anne Gilpin, asked Harold Feldman where we should begin. Without breaking stride in his movement toward and through the door, Harold  quietly noted that “Volume 24 was an index and you might skip that, if you choose.”

Harold was referring to the Canonized and Official version translated from Dr. Freud’s melodic/prosaic German into English under the final editorship of James Strachey. He was guiding us to “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud” published by the London Hogarth Press in volumes over a period of many years (1953-1974).

As I just now said: I fell in love with Psychoanalysis much the way Young Lovers fall in love with each other. Psychoanalysis became my continuous companion and I saw most everything through her eyes. I read all about her and largely ignored those who criticized her. I spent much of my money on her just as I had when I was courting M who now has shared the Changing Times with me for 50 years. Let me pause, here, and not shirk what I consider my responsibility to fulfill the Reader’s Right to Know (Covitz, 1997) a bit about the history of the writer who seeks their attention.

By the time I had begun training in Psychoanalysis, M and I had been married for 10 years, had two boys 8 and 9, and were expecting our third child. As we were Jewish, we had decided to attach our sons to the religion of their forbears with ritual surgery and, as our third child, a girl, required no such correctives, we called her the Perfect One, though we gave her a different public name. As she was the only one to follow me into the life of an hourly wage earner in the practice of psychotherapy, I might or might not continue to refer to her as the Perfect One – depending, that is, on my feelings on any given day towards my Calling and Profession in life.

My life before M was largely devoted to studying the Scriptural and Talmudic writings of my maternal ancestors, alongside Theoretical Mathematics. Mom arose from a Rabbinical family and my Dad, while Jewish, grew up in an immigrant family that was closer to Socialist and Labor concerns; I grew up, that is, in a Mixed Marriage. Talmudic thinking came from my Maternal Grandfather and plumbing, carpentry and auto mechanics came from my Dad/ Along these same lines, I found M exotic; she had been raised in a far-less ritualistic family. In my family, it was most typical – and I certainly followed this pattern – to attend schools that were modified transplants of the Yeshivas (Seminaries) of Central Europe.  I was one of those youngsters who had spent many years leaning over volumes written in Hebrew and Aramaic …  Yiddish was, in many ways, the preferred language in both of my parents’ families of origin and some curvature of the spine leading to late-life stenosis was no surprise when it arrived.

As I said, M was – for me – an exotic from the time I met her on the last day of February in 1965. Even her skin was darker (tanned) than my own pale derm. But back to the comparison with Psychoanalysis. All energies were directed to her and everything – all sensory data and all that was of value –  was interpreted through her eyes and through her reactions.  Had we courted in the age of Text Messaging, I suspect our Wireless bills would have been outrageous. As I observed a prohibition to ride on our Day of Rest, I would walk the 8 miles from where I lived to where she lived on most Sabbaths and by the 1960’s Summers of Love, we were busy changing the diapers of the fruit of our love and loins.  

I hope the picture is clear … Religious Writings, Mathematics, M and Psychoanalysis. Had I turned to Jung (we did try the Jungian Group in Zurich in the early 1970’s, but I couldn’t parse Jung’s thoughts), I would have called myself “the Juggler.”

Well ... I hope the picture is clarifying, anyway. Your author has an addictive personality … he gets hooked. Those early years before I began training in Psychoanalysis, I continued my Love of Mathematics and maintained a system of Metaphors from Scriptural sources rather than those that might have arisen from Pop Culture. I was a polyamor! By the time I began training in Psychoanalysis, I had written a last paper in Mathematics and was running a school for disturbed inner city adolescents, still reading religious sources, being pretty cozy with the World of Plumbing and Carpentry and Car Repair and was Dad and Husband.

Not so long ago, one of my in-law-kid’s Dad asked me to explain my life. Fifty Years of Marriage and Eighteen-Years-to-Life in Parenting, Forty years of teaching University Mathematics and Statistics, Twenty years of teaching Psychoanalysis and University Psychology, a Dozen years Directing a Psychoanalytic Training facility, a short time running a school for Disturbed Inner City Adolescents and quite a bit of time laying under our cars with the likes of a Torque Wrench or other Weapons of Repair in my hand. Last year, poor M tried to convince this Old Man to hire someone (like a Plumber?) to change a broken toilet in my office’s Waiting Room. … Good Luck, M!

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In any case, that’s a brief introduction to the stubborn guy who once fell in love with Psychoanalysis.

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