ABSTRACT
Early in graduate school, I decided to train as a psychoanalyst. That choice had a long and, in some ways, natural history; both my parents were Freudian analysts. I had grown up with psychoanalytic jargon in my ears, had listened at the perim-eter to the complex and intriguing conversations of my parents’ analyst friends. Something special and a bit mysterious was going on behind those soundproof office doors. And so, when a high school English teacher introduced me to the fun-damentals of psychoanalytic thought, I followed my father’s intellectual tradition (he was also a literature scholar) by trying to apply it to Dostoyevsky. Being only 16, I didn’t do it very well. But my father encouraged me, implicitly inviting me into the grownup world and symbolically letting me know I could succeed there. That invitation would become crucial to my professional identity.
