A Magic Carpet Ride

Silly grandpa. Words are nothing. They are just sounds people make when they want to tell somebody something.” On reflecting about my writing activity during my professional career, I reach immediately for the obvious. Because I am a full-time academic, the publish or perish mantra was instilled in me early and forcibly by my mentors, most of whom were themselves prolific writers with whom I identified. Publication was about advancement and establishing my bona fides with my fellow faculty members and students. It was also about making a mark in professional circles. I published two papers in JAPA as a psychoanalytic candidate, at least in part to legitimize my attendance at APsaA meetings. I remember fondly connecting with my regular gang of young author friends at the Waldorf in New York. We rarely mingled with the elderly, but our scholarly writing helped create a feeling of togetherness and belonging. The idea of writing as a way of connecting has remained a pivotal motive throughout my career.

I view myself primarily as an educator, and most if not all of my writing has been driven at least to some degree by my teaching activities. Writing about subjects that I teach has helped me feel articulate in the classroom, in discussions with colleagues, and as a supervisor and mentor.

In looking back over my written output as a psychoanalyst and academic, what immediately stands out to me is that almost every manuscript, whether paper or book, focuses on a single word or concept that I explore and attempt to clarify. The impetus for many of my publications has been an instance of hearing someone use those words or concepts in a way that I thought was imprecise, misleading, contradictory, overreaching, wrong. “Emptiness,” “empathy,” “neutrality,” “safety,” “regression,” “surface,” “negativism,” “suggestion.” In concert with my development as a teacher of theory and clinical practice at my institute and in my department, my subject matter increasingly centered on the theory of therapeutic technique.

Of course, there is another narrative—a much more personal one—that underlies my writing career. All the above sounds pragmatic, calculated, and reasonable. That I was able to write well came as a surprise, that I enjoyed doing it an even greater surprise. I grew up in a household of immigrants—rural and small-town escapees from Nazi Germany, parents and grandparents with little formal education and little or no English language skills. English was rarely spoken in my home. Growing up, I was keenly aware of and identified with my family members’ discomfort and reticence around Americans born and educated in the U.S. As a student, I was “good at” math and science; hence my progression to studying medicine. I always envied classmates who wrote well, spoke well, and were interested in literature, drama, art—domains where I was uncomfortable and in which I believed I could never succeed. In significant ways, becoming a psychoanalyst was an escape from math and science. My early analytic papers were a reparative foray into a forbidden milieu I believed I could never comfortably inhabit. Viewed from a personal historical perspective, even the content of these “academic, scholarly works” was inevitably autobiographical. I usually told the story of a term or concept; its initial, constricting attachment to its originator; its separation, via identification with subsequent powerful theorists with alternative views; and its gradual emancipation and autonomy in a general theory available to all. Likewise, my propensity to explore my subject matter from the perspective of neglected or disguised antitheses has its familial roots. Neutrality as advocacy; surface as access to depth; negativism as a means of connection; regression as progress; emptiness as denial of fullness . . . all these remind me of dinner table conversations in which my family argued about the real, hidden meanings of things. This was how we connected and loved each other. My written output connected me to colleagues with whom I argued, but toward whom I felt great affection.

When asked by senior colleagues about throwing my hat in the ring to become editor of JAPA, I wavered with familiar discomfort until scolded by my youngest daughter, who not so gently reminded me of my “encouraging” her to not back away from uncomfortable challenges. This daughter, of whom I am inordinately proud, is a poet and English professor at St. Edmund Hall, the oldest of Oxford’s colleges, and the mother of the five-year-old literary critic whose words begin this essay. (My father’s name was Edmund, no relation to the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury after whom the college is named!) My grandfather had a small Persian area rug that he brought from the old country and that lay next to his sitting room chair. Despite being stained by cigar butts and spittle, this rug made its way first to my clinical office—next to my analytic couch—and then to my daughter’s office, beside her writing desk at Oxford. Whenever I see it there, I wonder if my grandfather could ever have imagined where it has ended up. My writing is, in my mind, part of a magic carpet ride over four generations back and forth across the Atlantic.

Why do I write? To undo old hurts, to be a well-spoken teacher, to connect to valued others, past, present, and future. I do it because I need to, because I want to, because I like to, because I can. Because—why NOT, “The Akond of Swat.” ¹