Afterword

Until Muriel Dimen asked me to give this opening address, I had never really known what people meant when they said, as they often do, that they felt honored by an invitation. So I wondered, as I rarely do, why this particular invitation, this special event, mattered to me quite as much as it did. I have to confess—though I realize in the circumstances that this is rather unfortunate—that I’m not very interested usually in why I feel things. I am more interested, when I’m interested at all, in quite what it is I happen to be feeling. As I thought about rereading Emmanuel Ghent’s papers and about what I might write, I realized, with a different kind of clarity, just how important to me a particular group of American psychoanalytic theorists had been. Having trained as a child psychotherapist in London in the 1970s—and having had a Middle Group analysis, and a training that included, and tried to combine with some unease, the work of Winnicott, Klein, and Anna Freud—I had come to New York and browsed the journals and books that my friends had. In blissful ignorance of the history and of the psychoanalytic politics—with very little sense of the institutional issues involved—I had read things by people called Eigen and Boris and Levenson, and Benjamin and Bromberg and Hoffman, and what was then to me a composite figure called Mitchell and Greenberg, and, of course, Ghent. And as I had read this stuff, it was as though I had found something that I hadn’t realized that I had been looking for. I had found, I thought, a new Independent group—one impressed by different deities. Instead of being haunted (and daunted) by Melanie Klein, they seemed inspired by Sullivan and Ferenczi; instead of melodramatic and sentimental metaphysics, American pragmatism; instead of the dogma of the Depressive 278position, the dogma of pluralism. In short, put less abstractly, they could all write. Even though, like the Middle Group writers I most admired, they had their own ferocious, well-mannered convictions; they did not seem hellbent on telling me the truth about human nature, so much as producing interesting descriptions of what they thought was going on. The emphasis in these papers—unlike that in the papers by the demonized Freudians and Kleinians—was quite explicitly that no one in the analytic encounter was in a position of inner superiority (one might say that, in the ideal form of the encounter, equality between patient and analyst wasn’t the aim of the treatment; it was the assumption on which the treatment was based). And what was perhaps most striking, and most of a piece with what I wanted an Independent group to be—that is, as genial and congenial as possible—was that these writers were keen to celebrate their so-called patients, and not unwilling to celebrate themselves. In other words, the pleasure of the work was being promoted, not its moral and intellectual superiority to other kinds of work. If to have Sullivan instead of Klein avoided what was for me a peculiarly coercive moralism, to have Ferenczi instead of Winnicott was to make explicit that the mutuality of the psychoanalytic encounter was integral to the work, and not an unfortunate consequence of it (Winnicott, I think, is akin to a Ferenczi-inspired and intimidated Klein). If this sounds like the naïveté of the tourist—one of those idealizations that makes us wonder—for me it was one of those growing recognitions that Mannie Ghent has shown us how to notice. And this preamble is by way of saying that Mannie’s work, it seems to me, invites us to have something far more interesting than the courage of our virtues, which is to have the courage of our affinities. That, properly described, what we are drawn to is what can draw us out. To recognize Mannie’s work, in other words—which I do here—is to recognize something startling about recognition itself.