ABSTRACT
I was once invited to participate on a panel discussing the creative process, and in thinking about what I might say, I remembered the words of French photographer Frederic Brenner. When asked why he had embarked upon a project of photographing people of the Jewish Diaspora, creating portraits of people in more than 40 countries over a 25-year period, Brenner said, “We do what we do, not because of what we know, but because of what we don’t know” (2003). A hopeful consequence of being engaged in a long-term project with another (such as in the psychoanalytic relationship) is that we learn more about ourselves and the other and about engaged relationships themselves, and this process produces surprises and a continuing appreciation of being all too human. Along the way, we might catch a glimpse of why the endeavor was so compelling to begin with.
