ABSTRACT
This is a personal account of how the author became a psychoanalyst. It begins with his parents’ history of surviving the Holocaust and the intergenerational transmission of their trauma. Managing parental anxiety may have served as an early training ground for learning to manage patient anxiety. The author goes on to recount important influences and mentors in medical school and later in psychiatric training that led to becoming an analyst. He then gives a historical account of psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality that played a role in the psychoanalytic training institute he chose and the analytic identity he would eventually adopt.
