Practicing Psychoanalyst and Acting Director,

The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School

Alexander Delaware, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics

and Psychology, WPMC

Harvey M. Rosenblatt, M.D.

Practicing Psychoanalyst and Clinical Professor of

Psychiatry

New York University School of Medicine

Headshot photos of all three of us. Katarina de Bosch, thin and brooding; Rosenblatt and I, bearded and professorial.

The rest was a list of scheduled speakers—more photos—and details of registration.

“Good Love/Bad Love.” I remembered it clearly now. Wondered how I could have forgotten.

Nineteen seventy-nine had been my fourth year on staff at Western Peds, a period marked by long days and longer nights on the cancer ward and the genetic disorders unit, holding the hands of dying children and listening to families with unanswerable questions.

In March of that year, the head of psychiatry and the chief psychologist both chose to go on sabbatical. Though they weren't on speaking terms and the chief never returned, their last official cooperative venture was designating me interim chief.

Slapping my back and grinding their teeth around their pipe bits, they worked hard at making it sound like a stepping-stone to something wonderful. What it had amounted to was more administrative chores and just enough of a temporary pay raise to kick me into the next tax bracket, but I'd been too young to know any better.

Back then, Western Peds had been a prestigious place, and I learned quickly that one aspect of my new job was fielding requests from other agencies and institutions wanting to associate with the hospital. Most common were proposals for jointly sponsored conferences, to which the hospital would contribute its good name and its physical premises in return for continuing-education credits for the medical staff and a percentage of the box office. Of the scores of requests received yearly, a good many were psychiatric or psychological in nature. Of those, only two or three were accepted.

Katarina de Bosch's letter had been one of several I received, just weeks after assuming my new post. I scanned it and rejected it.

Not a tough decision—the subject matter didn't interest me or my staff: the front-line battles we were waging on the wards placed the theorizations of classical psychoanalysis low on our want list. And from my readings of his work, Andres de Bosch was a middleweight analyst—a prolific but superficial writer who'd produced little in the way of original thought and had parlayed a year in Vienna as one of Freud's students and membership in the French resistance into an international reputation. I wasn't even sure he was still alive; the letter from his daughter didn't make it clear, and the conference she proposed had a memorial flavor to it.

I wrote her a polite letter.

Two weeks later I was called in to see the medical director, a pediatric surgeon named Henry Bork who favored Hickey-Freeman suits, Jamaican cigars, and sawtooth abstract art, and who hadn't operated in years.