Transcripts of Tribute Speeches from Philip Bromberg Event
GURNEET KANWAL’S SPEECH FOR PHILIP BROMBERG
My tribute to Philip has the following three parts to it: My notion of Philip as a Mystic; My experience of Philip as “An Extraordinary Knowing”; And how I came to feel “the nearness of you.”
But, I have to start by telling you a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.
I was in a largish room, with various people milling around. Sitting on the floor was a man with a book on a small floor table. Across from him was another man looking into the same book – he had very strange reading glasses on. They had these huge, round lenses – two of them sticking out at an angle from each side of the spectacles – as if they could be interchanged as needed. In the dream, thought that was Philip. Interchangeable “I’s” at the flick of a finger! Not a bad idea! By now the man had stood up and turned towards me – and I realized it was actually someone who was a stand-in for him during a rehearsal. Then there was a lady coming around with shoes that she was offering to all the participants. They were formal, black leather shoes that would be appropriate for the event. In my dream I thought that she was a cross between Bonnie Litowitz and Adrienne Harris – Only in a dream! (Actually, they were both on my mind, because I was in the process of submitting something to JAPA!). So she offered me the shoes, and I said, “No thanks, I will stick with my own!”
That’s when I knew, there was only one way to for me to honor Philip, and that was to speak from my heart.
When I received Adrienne’s email asking if I would speak at this event, I found myself wondering – why are we honoring Philip Bromberg? But then I realized – the question I was asking was slightly different. What I was asking my-self was, why do I feel like I want to honor Philip Bromberg?
That question led me to examine my feeling of gratitude.
What is it that I experience gratitude to Philip for?
We have heard much about all the ways in which Philip’s writings have changed the field of psychoanalysis. There is, no doubt, much to be grateful for, in that.
But for me, my gratitude to Philip is actually much more importantly, about how the work of psychoanalysis has changed Philip.
Philip the Mystic
From my perspective as an Indian Psychoanalyst, a mystic is ‘One who is fearless enough to surrender the Logical in favor of living in the Paradoxical’.
But how would I know if psychoanalysis has changed Philip in this way? In a way that he is now able toSurrender the Logical and Live in the Paradoxical? Particularly since I certainly did not know Philip before he became a psychoanalyst?
So, this has to do with what Elizabeth Mayer calls “An Extraordinary Knowing”
Even though I should not have any way to know this for certain, I feel like I do know, not only that he has been changed, but I know the way in which he has been changed.
This knowledge I encountered all of a sudden, one day, a couple of years ago. And it was at that moment that I had a sweeping sense of gratitude. And what I wrote to him in response to that feeling was, “I am glad that you are out there, being you, with such fervor.”
It happened in the context of the White Institute going through some tough growing pains. Something Philip wrote on our listerve sent a chill down my spine. One reason for my reaction was that just the day before I had found myself wanting to say saying exactly that to a patient with a history of serious trauma. The other reason was that I could see very clearly what was at stake for Philip in saying what he was saying.
Philip was risking being misheard and misunderstood in what he was trying to articulate, He was risking experiencing what he has called in his writings, “a violation of the attachment-related core-self. … that begins to make one a stranger to one’s self.”
What would have been logical was for Philip to do what most people would consider reasonable, or “good enough”! What was paradoxical was that Philip was willing to risk an experience of relational traumathrough affective non-recognition by the very people, as well as for the very people, he felt this intimacy with!
I felt then that I had suddenly discovered Philip, as if for the first time! Not that he is not the Philip I knew back when I first started training at White, or that he hasn’t always had this kind of orientation – it is that ( to quote Philip himself!) he has ‘changed in this way while staying the same’.
That Philip could, and did do, what he did – i.e., demonstrate that psychoanalysis is not simply an “as if” endeavour, that it is OK to be changed by one’s patients, and that the integrity of being who one is is the fundamental rule – for that, I am personally grateful. And it is that gratitude that makes me feel like honoring him. The gratitude that he is out there, embodying something that can be so valuable to others, and was, in that moment, to me.
Which brings me to the part that has to do with “the nearness of you.” What is thrilling for me is that Philip has made it possible to practice psychoanalysis without having to be embarrassed to establish that kind of intersubjective nearness with our patients. And Philip, what is most deeply moving is that I have had a chance to experience “the nearness of you.” For that, Thank you!
MAGGIE ROBBINS’ TRIBUTE TO PHILIP BROMBERG
I’m an art therapist, and an analyst who trained at NIP, so I never had a chance to have Philip as an instructor or a supervisor. I was introduced to Philip by Max Cavitch, an old friend of mine, who had been introduced to Philip’s work by me. Max, who’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had put a chapter of Standing in the Spaces on a graduate-school English course syllabus. Philip had gotten wind of this, and had gotten in touch with Max to find out how Max had heard of his work. When Max told him, he asked Max to give me his email address in case I would like to be in touch.
I was a first-year candidate. I thought — “Wow. Okay. Sure!” Philip and I struck up an email conversation, and within a week I thought, “This man has got to be the liveliest, and quirkiest, pen-pal in cyberspace.”
Philip and I have sat down in person only a handful of times over the years, and hardly ever spoken on the phone—maybe twice—but, somehow…
Philip woke me up.
He shook me ’til my eyeballs rattled.
We played Ping-Pong with our inner organs.
He wouldn’t rest until all my self-states — or at least a lot more of them — could attend the same soirée.
I’m not talking amnesia; I’d just been … compartmentalizing. And the parts of me that had been put away long ago… he wanted to meet them.
There’s a book presently at Barnes & Noble called God Is a Verb. But god is not a verb; god is a noun. “Fillip” is a verb. Literally. In the dictionary. The example given is “He filliped her on the nose.” It’s spelled with an F and means: “to strike or tap with a fillip.”
So what’s a fillip? Meaning #1:
“A blow or gesture made by the sudden forcible straightening of a finger curled up against the thumb.” THIS: [do it a couple times.]
I wrote Philip about fillip when I came across it. I thought it was hilarious.
What I didn’t notice at the time is the secondary, figurative meaning (and I quote): “A fillip is a stimulus, aboost; an impetus, a spur; a push, a help, — a shot in the arm. (Also: a twist in the plot.)” To fillip can mean “to activate, motivate, excite, inflame, or provoke; to galvanize or revitalize; to raise, to rouse … toawaken.”
Finding out that Philip is a verb was no big surprise. Finding out what fillip means was no big surprise either.
Last spring, Max invited me to co-teach one class in an undergraduate course he was developing called Psychoanalysis and Literature. Part of my job was to talk about the clinical side — “what you do for a living,” Max said. That would mean broaching the subjects of mental multiplicity and how dissociation works. One reading Max had put on the syllabus for that day was “The Nearness of You.” I wanted to introduce Philip’s particular contributions to the field, but also Philip himself — in all his Philipness.
How was I going to do that? I looked at “The Nearness of You.” In it, Philip talks about a symposium he hosted as a candidate. In the middle of the second paragraph, he starts a sentence “Being me, …” It jumped off the page.
Of all his contributions, I think Philip’s most colossal is the degree to which he is himself, all the time. [to Philip:] It stuns. Your ability to be your whole self—with your different states each in high gear, working in unconscious consensus; your talent for helping other people be their whole selves — and your dedication to helping people help other people to be their whole selves, too.
Philip hasn’t allowed me to be myself. He’s demanded it.
And he’s given me a model of how to be … a stimulus, a boost — an impetus, a spur —a push and a help— a fillip — to others who are engaged in the same task.
LAWRENCE BROWN’S SPEECH FOR PHILIP BROMBERG
Philip, this special celebration is certainly deserved and fitting if only for the remarkable and profound effect that you have had on psychoanalysis writ large — how we think of Mind and human experiencing, and how we think about what it is that’s therapeutic about therapy. A special part of honoring you should also be tagged for being part of the tiny group of psychoanalysts who write a special kind of literature: the kind that’s a pleasure to read for its being so immediate and courageously inviting of the reader into your experience of the personal engagement with the patients that you’ve written about; the kind of literature that’s a MUST READ for anyone who thinks about human experiencing.
As you know, it’s a joyous event in our family that keeps me from being here, where I wish I could be in person. So through Adrienne’s reading this, I want to join this wonderful occasion honoring you, Philip, by simply saying first and gratefully how incredibly lucky I feel to have – all wrapped into one amazing person – these three relationships unified:
Above all, a dear, dear Friend, with whom sharing deep ideas about our intimate human experiencing, whimsical fantasying, as well as observations of and playing with the absurd “out there” and (with a pointing to the head) “in here,” is all and always profound, moving and intensely connecting;
My Co-Teacher with whom the duet we spontaneously do is always so rich, self-propagating, Self-stretching and so often, clearly so inspirational to those we’re teaching;
And my Teacher, still! In the therapeutic relationship, (as well as in the teaching, and all other relationships), you are extraordinary for your alertness and sensitivity to the detail of what’s alive and happening in yourself as you’re with another. Philip, you are extraordinary for your aliveness, sensitivity and connecting intentions in communicating your experience to the other so that “we’re creating this together” is a fundamental, pervasive beckoning to the Other to feel and think about all the momentary and durable parts of our Selves we’re each bringing to the creating, sustaining and risking in the ongoing relationship. How you do that in your dialogue with our students’ experiences with the clinical material we all listen to in class never fails to teach me – and I suspect all of us who have had the pleasure of teaching with you. You teach not only how to teach (especially in this business) through engagement in truly mutual discovery, but also how to create a safe enough space for that kind of engagement.
In this company there’s no need to detail how you, Philip, have so lucidly sensitized us to the effects of trauma at all levels of scale in our patients and ourselves, and its dissociative consequences on relationships and relating. Witnessing how you work with your attunement to that makes me think that both Ferenczi and Sullivan would be smiling today in recognition of your development of what they were getting at. Ferenzci for your showing us how letting go of our accustomed self-protective “professional hypocrisy” [Confusion of Tongues paper] and being “real” is the only way to be in a non-re-traumatizing relationship that can be healing and growth-affirming. Sullivan for showing us what a fully participant-observer par excellence is like in working with the elusive “detailed inquiry.” I might add that so often you make it look simple! So simple-seeming in fact, that I’ve caught myself thinking that the essence of what’s going on is that you have healed your trauma sufficiently to have grown the courage to be so your Self, that the Other in relationship with you can’t miss the exhilarating (i.e., scary/thrilling) opportunity to risk being their courageous Self with you. And then, moment by moment, with all the mess and mis-steps and repairs, there’s an expanding progression of more and more of that. And voila!, healing and growth!
I can’t speak of your courage to be your Self without honoring you for two very different kinds of memorable MUSTS. One is rooted in your obvious and deep love for the White Institute, and that is your dedication to asking of that community to pay attention to and think about dynamics going on in the Institute that is not healthy for the community. That ask hardly gets warm fuzzy responses, but your courage succeeds in waking the community up. The other . . . . many of you may remember a Division 39 meeting at the Waldorf. Philip’s plenary address took place in the very full ballroom, where he began his paper – “The Nearness of You” – with an out-loud announcement that we might get to hear him sing, depending on how he was feeling. As he came into the coda of the paper it became clear, to me at least, but knowing Philip, I thought it was becoming clear to him too, that unless he went the whole way of intimacy with the audience by singing the opening phrases of “The Nearness of You,” not the point, but the experience of the paper would be diminished. So, courage to be his Self? Philip sang to us in full voice the opening phrases of “The Nearness of You.” How’s that for courage?
[To Philip]: Through whatever relationship with you that each of us taken you in and learned from you, we thank you for being such a meaningful part of the analysts we’ve become. And in that way I’d say that the nearness of You, Philip, is an indelible treasure.
TONY BASS’ SPEECH FOR PHILIP BROMBERG
Thinking about Philip Bromberg
I first became aware of Philip Bromberg 40 years ago, when he gave a paper at an ICP symposium on Interpersonal Psychoanlysis and Regression. The presentation was published a couple of years later, in 1979, in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and it was one of my favorite papers at the time, while I was a doctoral student in clinical psychology. Actually, I still love that paper. Already, when I first encountered that paper, I was interested in the ways in which interpersonal theory and object relational theories complemented each other, a project that would become much more fully realized as relational psychoanalysis came into being and found its voice beginning in the 1980s.
Philip’s paper illustrated the ways in which some of the emphases in British Object Relations theories, such as the potentials inherent in therapeutic regression, had been excluded from Interpersonal Psychoanalysis for theoretical and political reasons that were limiting when it came to helping our patients have the deepest possible experience in analysis. In reading Philip’s paper a few years before Relational Psychoanalysis as a theoretical perspective came into being, before I believed that I had encountered someone with a sensibility that matched my own, and expressed with great clarify thoughts that for me were inchoate, but strongly felt nevertheless.. It was papers like Philip’s, describing the ways in which he was thinking and working with patients, that constituted the seeds from which Relational Psychoanalysis would begin to grow. I don’t think that Philip’s contribution to the evolution of relational psychoanalysis can be overstated.
The work of Bromberg, Mitchell, and Ghent in particular embodied this sensibility for me, each of them in their own way illuminating links between interpersonal and other, as Mitchell would put it, post classical perspectives , in ways that were inspiring to me personally, in that they articulated so clearly a way of working and thinking that just felt right to me, reflecting my experience as a patient and as the therapist that I was becoming. After hearing and then reading the regression paper, I followed Philip’s work closely from that point on. In 1986, now a few years in to my training at NYU Postdoc, having studied with Stephen Mitchell and Emanuel Ghent, my moles at the White Institute gave me a head’s up that Bromberg would be joining the faculty at NYU the next year; so I gave him a call right away to reserve a spot in supervision, which was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. I began supervision with Philip the following year, took his clinical seminar a year later. And we continued to work together, in a variety of ways, over the next several decades—supervision, supervision groups, collaborating in various ways in the development of the relational track, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, the Stephen Mitchell Center, IARPP and many other projects.
The first course I taught at a Psychoanalytic Institute was a course on Listening, using taped recordings of sessions, that Bromberg had taught for many years before, and for which he recommended me. My own clinical seminar at NYU and elsewhere, where strongly influenced by Bromberg’s teaching methods. Over these many years, we have became close friends too. It has been one of those rare relationships, possible in our field, that combine mentorship and friendship; Judging by the enthusiasm with which people approached this evening (this was the hottest ticket in town when the Ferenczi Center announced plan to honor Philip) I have the sense that Philip has been a mentor to many of us, over generations, who have been lucky enough to experience this special form of intimacy with him. When Adrienne Harris, Jeremy, Lew and some of us had the thought to honor Philip at the Ferenczi Center, it seems like a perfect setting to highlight Philip’s contribution. When I discovered Ferenczi’s work, while a candidate at NYU Postcoc, first the Confusion of Tongues paper in Manny Ghent’s class (my first at postdoc), and in 1988 The Clinical Diary, while in supervision with Philip, it was clear that Ferenczi’s work had anticipated so much of what we were beginning to think about as ‘relational.’ Bromberg’s emphasis on trauma, dissociation, multiple self states, the therapeutic relationship, the mutuality of vulnerability and shame, the requirement of the analyst’s openness to his or her own experience as the royal road to that of the patient’s—all these seemed like natural extensions of Ferenzzi’s work from the 1920 and early 1930’s.
Bromberg had picked up where Ferenczi’ left off, extending this groundbreaking work, inspiring new generations of therapists to find ways of reaching patients who had been hard to find, by paying careful attention to the parts of ourselves that show us how to locate our patients from the inside out . For those of us who have been fortunate enough to work with Philip directly, as his patients, students, and supervisees, and for those many others who have been inspired by his writings over these many years, we all owe you, Philip, a great debt of gratitude. Thank you.
JESSICA BENJAMIN’S TRIBUTE TO PHILIP BROMBERG
“I started my remarks by declaring informally just how much Philip as a person means to me, alongside his wonderful work. I said that when I was writing I couldn’t put on the page all the feelings I have, imagining speaking to so many people, because I have been so touched by Philip. But because of these feelings, I also was not going to express many other thoughts of a more intellectual nature which people can find in the discussion I wrote of his work in Contemporary in 2013—some of which finds its way into these remarks.
I always say that reading Philip made me feel so understood that I felt less alone in the world. Being his friend and sharing in this loving event meant so much to me, I don’t think I can express that on the page either. But it was just wonderful to be part of honoring and celebrating someone who has given so much, is such a vital part of what I believe in and the community I belong to.
Crossing the bridge of difference is essential to the form of understanding and recognition I find so inspiring in Philip’s work. I sense his constant struggle not to undo that difference even as he is trying very hard to find his way inside the other person’s experience—hence his oft-stated dislike of imposing meaning. Of course, I can imagine this might be because Philip is really not too pleased if one attempts to impose one’s own meaning upon him…but then again, I also feel that he is so involved with the happiness of being genuinely understood. Holding this tension between reach toward the other to gain understanding while bearing in mind that there is difference between us and within each of us that keeps us from knowing is a feat. I like watching Philip work the way I imagine an acrobat likes watching someone else walk on the balance beam. So this is how he does it! Watching him move helped me get the hang of something I intellectually believed in but wasn’t sure was possible.
It makes for the kind of constant tension I think defines trying to do something rather than merely succeeding or failing. This sense of trying rather than having to succeed is what marks the analytic attitude he inspires. For me personally, Philip’s paper on Potholes on the Royal Road was a landmark moment. It solved a dilemma I was only partly aware of—the problem of the analyst who leaves the patient alone without knowing it. It also helped clear up the confusion of that abandonment with some kind of knowing agenda or some purported effort not to impose knowing. Let me explain. What wasn’t available to me at all during my training years was a way to make the distinction between not-knowing as a useful kind of humility that does not presume to be grasping with the mind or equal to others’ suffering, and not-knowing as the ignorance of those who live in a world where such suffering is presumed impossible (not-knowing as denial). In those early years, the not-knowing as related to trauma was not yet on the horizon, since no one was talking about trauma. Because of what Philip wrote I could make a distinction between the old form of analysis that simply accepts the kind of split-off intellectual functioning Winnicott warned against and a relational analysis that accepts the fact of the analyst’s tendency to dissociate. And at the same time, this knowing about dissociation reassured me that he understood what an abandonment the other’s dissociation could be. The articulation of how we analysts can be avoidant, fail, in the face of the abyss allowed the distinction between absent and present kinds of not knowing. So what moved me, what was transformative, was his description of the problem of the analyst’s avoidance of the abyss, of how the analyst could take up a dissociative position too far away.
And at the same time what drew me in was the sense that his questioning of himself and others, as well as his awareness of difference, was definitely in the service of promoting “the nearness of you,” that is, becoming aware of when we have gone too far into our own heads and away from what the other is experiencing. What creates the nearness of us as analysts is for me the fact that Philip knows that we are going to dissociate along with the patient, because the creation of the not-me cocoon is what enables enacted communication of the not-me experience. But he also (40) says that a therapist is no different than anyone else when her it comes to her affective need for an alive partner being disconfirmed by another mind that is dead to it, that we are likely to lose our focus, that we will dissociate the part of self that knows things personally. .
So I will close with one of my favorite passages from Philip’s writings:
the more I can accept my patient’s ‘giftie’ of seeing myself through her eyes (especially those aspects of self I had been dissociating) the easier it becomes for my patient to negotiate the transition from experiencing me as an object to control or be controlled by, to experiencing me as a person who is committed to recognizing her subjectivity even though I am doing it badly at a given moment. (2011, p.19)
What I love is Philip’s way of describing an essential move from a world of objects one is “managing” to a world of relationships with the other as subject, based on the third of recognition. It is so about themutuality, Philip, and it is so about feeling recognized by you as a person. I am so grateful. Thank you.”
RICHARD CHEFETZ’S TRIBUTE TO PHILIP BROMBERG
“It is an honor and a privilege to be here this evening in praise of you, Philip. We have known each other a scant 17 years or so, and, knowing you, I can think of no better way to introduce what I have to say than to quote Emily Dickinson. (Tell all the truth but tell it slant—)
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
(Dickinson sure did know about the conduct of a psychotherapy, didn’t she?) It has been a good run, Philip, hasn’t it? While you are my senior by more than a couple of years, at this point neither of us can claim immunity from the stunning reality that there is more time behind us than ahead, as we move along the Great Circle of Life. Getting older is neither for the weak of heart, nor of mind. I once had a sweet ignorance of the finality of loss. I now prefer the knowing, not just a sort-of knowing, but the full Monty. The cruelty of real endings makes the love in my life that much more compelling, an actively cherished and fully alive love. This paradox arrived with the stillborn death of my grandson, Tej, just before this last Christmas. Hindi for radiance, his name is much easier to say now. He left his family with a gift of love glowing so bright nobody could fail to notice even while struggling to emerge from under the mountain of our grief.
And that’s part of why I’m here this evening, Philip, to openly and unabashedly tell you I love you, while I have the chance to speak and you have the chance to hear. For those of you expecting a review of Philip’s work, take a break. This is personal. And it’s the only way for me to speak on an occasion like this.
Once upon a time, a patient of yours gave you the tapes of a conference on things dissociative, and they wanted you to hear the work of some guy named Chefetz. That led you to send me some of your work, an invitation to engage. I let the reprint sit on its envelope. I was up to my eyeballs in casework and didn’t respond. But you wouldn’t take my silence for an answer. You called me, we talked, and you invited me to come to New York and discuss papers you and Gerry Stechler had each written for the first IARPP meeting. I had no idea then, but I sure know now, what kind of invitation that was. Still it wasn’t the invitation itself that stands out. It was the time we spent together at that first IARPP meeting, several days of shoulder to shoulder connection. We talked about everything we heard and a lot more. There was a brotherhood joined during that time. And by the end of the meeting the energy between the two of us gave birth to a plan to present our work together. Talking with Me and Not-Me was a four to five hour gig that nearly filled the 500 seats of the auditorium at Mount Sinai. The year after, when we published 70 some pages of text for that day in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, you told me it wasn’t something you did, publish with somebody else. And, you insisted that my name be present as lead author. Those were heady days and I’ll never forget the magic we generated with each other.
All that said, the biggest gift you ever gave me was your respect for my mind. I know you must have appreciated my respect for yours. We didn’t talk about these things directly; they were implicit in the hours we spent in weekend telephone conversations. Both Margot and Kathryn wondered what there was to talk about for so long and when would their husbands would be free to be with them? These affairs of the mind are quite something. It was a new experience for me, thrilling and enlivening.
And talk we did. After five or six years you told me yourself that if my work was going to be appreciated and accepted I had to write a book of my own. I’d already thought about it, but shied away from the task. But I knew you we right. And so I wrote. You recommended John Kerr to me, and he was the perfect non-believer private editor. (He didn’t know what to make of the dissociative disorders, but he sure did when we were done with my book.)
I thought it might take a year, but I didn’t plan on five, nor did I plan on constant writing in every spare moment for the last three, vacations, holidays, everything. And Philip, these were years when we hardly spoke. You stopped traveling to most meetings, but not before you gave a plenary at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a gift to me, and the organization, that people still appreciate.
Remember when you told me you didn’t have a third book in you, and that you were done with books? I challenged you, and not too gently, in reply. I was indignant, on your side, with the idea there was no third book in you. I don’t imagine it was just that conversation that got your engine started again and ended up with you standing under a tsunami with your patients, thoughtfully, just like you had in other spaces. I’m glad you wrote it, and so are a lot of other people.
I came to appreciate how you spoke the truth about your casework, Philip, but with a slant. You talked at length about dissociation, not about disorders. In doing that you never touched what I have called the third-rail of psychotherapy, talking about treating what was first called multiple personality disorder. Instead, not having glorified a disorder to distract them left your readers to think about dissociation, in all its magic. That was a stroke of genius. It gave people room to wonder about things dissociative in their own casework and not become preoccupied about going on a hunt to find a disorder.
So, now I’ve published my own book on dissociative processes, and explored the treatment of dissociative identity disorder while keeping in my mind a clinical sensibility that had accumulated in me, most significantly from our discussions. I’ve no need to avoid the third-rail, I sit on it with regularity. I have the scorch marks to prove it. I have nevertheless worked hard to maintain an analytic attitude in the world of traumatology. You and I don’t agree on everything, and that’s natural. It’s also true that we agree on a great deal of what’s centrally important, especially when it comes to the respect we have for our patients, the relationship, the work of others, and the responsibility we feel to our professional communities.
I want you to know, Philip, that your work has gone far beyond psychoanalytic circles of thought and practice. In your willingness to be part of my trauma and dissociation listserv, with 1500 other clinicians, you’ve introduced many clinicians to the carefully nuanced ideas you spell out from time to time when you reply to postings. You also recently knocked everybody’s socks off with the discussion you spawned about the differences between schizoid and dissociative subjective experiences. I hope you keep engaging like this. It’s a gift to all of us.
This evening is a celebration of the best in you, Philip, and I treasure that you’ve shared your mind and your heart with me. There’s no greater gift than the gift of friendship. There’s no need here for Emily’s “explanation kind” though this truth does indeed dazzle. Marriage is one kind of thing, but if you don’t marry a really great friend, then marriage doesn’t rise to the heights of which it is capable. Don’t get nervous. I haven’t lost my mind and this isn’t a proposal. It is an affirmation of our friendship and me valuing you. It’s also a declaration of my love for you, a love I hold dear, and one that makes our friendship special. Thanks for being my friend, Philip. Love, Rich”