REMINISCENCES OF GERALD J. ARONSON, M.D. (1922-2022) By David James Fisher, Ph.D.
I was neither an analysand nor supervisee of Gerry Aronson. I was a student in his L.A.P.S.I.
Seminar on “Resistance” in the early 1980’s and a friend for the remainder of his life. I found Gerry to be consistently brilliant, with an encyclopedic knowledge spanning Einsteinian theoretical physics, to mathematics, to philosophies of religion, to literature ancient and modern; he possessed an acute, insider view of the history of psychoanalysis. Gerry was endowed with a unique sense of humor; It was a Jewish sense of humor, marked by improvisation, wise cracking and one-liners; he possessed tons of stories, ad-libbed rapidly, and hit hard with his jokes. For my taste, his humor was intelligent and irreverent, puncturing pretense and debunking established pieties. In speaking the unspeakable, there was some aggression and some malice in his jokiness. But mostly, he was hilarious. Let me provide a few examples.
L.A.P.S.I. invited Adolf Grunbaum to conduct an all-day program on his book, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (1984). Grunbaum was temporarily running out of steam by the late afternoon, catching his breathe, saying out loud “What am I thinking? what am I doing?” Gerry bellowed from the auditorium, “A lot of damage.” The audience cracked up, including Grunbaum.
In a seminar on the psychotherapy of schizophrenics, Gerry echoed one of Mao Zedong’s quotations: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” In working with psychotics, Gerry said, “Have a hundred sentences ready.”
Gerry told a funny vignette about a patient who refused to pay him, who was in arrears several months. After trying to bring the issue of payment into the process, and after multiple interpretations, nothing changed. One day Gerry came to the analytic hour wearing ear muffs. The patient got the message. She paid in full the very next session.
As a newcomer to clinical psychoanalysis, I once asked Gerry about his strategies of receptivity to his patient’s free associations, more precisely, about what he listened for. Without batting an eye, he said, “Sex, money, and me.”
When I visited him at his home, I was astonished by his collection of books. There were books galore, bookshelves everywhere, including piles of books on the floor. This was not for show. He knew that I had written a volume on Bruno Bettelheim; he gifted me five hard cover copies from his collection on the series “Studies in Prejudice,” which included the Bettelheim and Janowitz monograph The Dynamics of Prejudice and Adorno’s classic The Authoritarian Personality. Inside the front cover of these volumes, Gerry wrote: “Aronson, May, 1950, Topeka.”
In our walks together, he became intimate, referencing the death of his mother at age three and the death off his elder sister Adele at four. In the face of these devastating traumas and losses, Gerry never played the victim. He was usually upbeat and smiling, an informed and skeptical optimist both in his demeanor and outlook. He told me about his childhood in Brooklyn. Recalling his budding sexuality, he said it began to make sense when he immersed himself in Freud’s writings. He mentioned that he was unsure about the explanatory value of drive theory, but that he himself was “driven.” Knowing that Rudy Ekstein had been my training analyst, he recalled a critical episode in his professional career at the Menninger Clinic, one marked by deep gratitude. Because of his hearing difficulties, several senior members at Menningers thought he was unfit to be an analyst. Ekstein interceded, telling them that Gerry was a gifted clinician and that he himself was hearing impaired. Due to Ekstein’s intervention, Gerry was permitted to begin his analytic training.
At one of our walks in the early Spring, Gerry brought his beloved poodle named Fillipushi. He pointed to a house at the top of the canyon, saying Spielberg lived there. Just at that moment, the gate opened and a Rolls Royce slowly descended the hill. The driver was wearing a baseball cap. He stopped next to us, saying “hi, I’m Steven.” For five minutes it was Steven, Gerry, and Jimmy. Why had he stopped? In the back of his car sat a poodle and he wanted to schmooze about dogs. Though neighbors for years, they had never met.
On this same walk, Gerry recited a memorized passage that touched me deeply. He wondered if I knew the author. Embarrassed, I said I did not. It was an early essay by Albert Camus on springtime in Algeria, a piece of writing that was drenched in lyricism and sensuality. It confirmed Gerry’s love of beauty, how moved he was by gorgeous prose.
I sat next to Gerry for a lecture on Freud. There was a reference to Freud attending a ball in Vienna where one of his former patients, Katherina, whirled past him in a dance. Gerry felt the vignette illustrated Freud’s “humanity.”
Gerry possessed the gift of friendship, rising above the personal and theoretical bickering that often infected the ranks of psychoanalysis, making it toxic and lacking in civility. He had the ability to remain friends with Leo Rangell and Romi Greenson and Milton Wexler, even though they despised one another. Gerry also remained friends with Bernard Brandchaft, despite disagreements on theory and technique. Brandchaft had evolved in his long career from a classical analyst to a Kleinian, self psychologist, and intersubjectivist. His wife Jan and Gerry both told me on my last visit with them that if either of them got into trouble they would consult clinically with Bernie. I saw Gerry attending a special ICP meeting honoring the publication of Bernie’s book, Towards An Emancipatory Psychoanalysis (2010) He sat one row behind him in celebration and solidarity with his old friend.
Gerry came to my wife Karen’s Memorial held at NCP. He barely knew her. I felt he attended to support and comfort me in this moment of pain and mourning. After the presentations, he came up to me. We locked eyes and he shook my hand. He did not say a word. He didn’t have to. This was yet another example of Gerry’s “humanity,” personally resonant for me.
Now we say good-bye to Gerry and mourn his loss. He epitomized the genuine. He sought out authenticity in his clinical approach, which always involved the expression of emotions and clear, fluent communication. He bucked trendiness in the field. He disliked theorists who spoke an obscurantist language, who could not communicate directly and honesty; he was critical of those who spoke abstrusely, gathering disciples around them who did not understand their theories. Though he socialized with Wilfred Bion and had clinical case consultations with him for years, he asserted that “he did not understand a word he said.” Gerry balanced his brilliance, erudition, wit, and irreverence with kindness, care, consideration, a passion for learning, and a vast curiosity. Beneath the irrepressible humor, there was seriousness, substance, knowledge, warmth, and a zest for life. He will be sorely missed.
David James Fisher, Ph.D.
Senior Faculty, NCP
Training and Supervising Analyst, ICP
Talk given at the Gerald Jay Aronson, M.D. Memorial
New Center for Psychoanalysis October 3, 2022
Djamesfisherphd@gmail.com