ABSTRACT
It will help to give some background of my analytic education. It began when I was a student at Columbia University and someone suggested I should read Freud. I dutifully read through the then available Brill translation. Like so many others of my generation, I experienced a sense of instant revelation into myself and my adolescent miseries, into my friends, and into my world of politics and literature.This was a new way of seeing and understanding, an affirmation of my previously unvoiced conviction that more was going on than I was privy to, a primal scene fantasy, if you wish.Things seemed clearer than they ever had before. I asked a friend of mine what one had to do to become a psychoanalyst and he said you have to go to medical school. I had never thought of going to medical school.At times I had thought of law, sociology, or English literature, but I had no clear direction.With some difficulty I managed to go to medical school after the Army, thinking this would be the start of my analytic career, but it so happened that the medical school I went to had no department of psychiatry at that time.This turned out be something of a blessing,because I became
involved in physiology and did a research fellowship before my internship. My ideals and convictions about the merits of empirical research crystallized at that time, and have been a core of my psychoanalytic being, as I never gave up on the idea that psychoanalysis could contain a truly scientific vision without sacrificing any of its humanist core.
