UNFREE ASSOCIATIONS

Acknowledgements

xi Acknowledgements Over the years I have had help and encouragement at various stages for writing this book. Martin Grotjahn was my first editor, and urged me to continue. He wrote the foreword. My second editors were James Laveck and Jennifer Stein who had hopes of becoming publishers. James, especially, felt that publishing this book was his special mission, responding deeply to its contents. He and Jenniferdevotedmuchtime,energyandcreativitytotheprojectincluding a beautiful book cover design and tried to interest several publishers and institutions. Although they did not bring it to completion and went on to other projects in their life, they helped me along, and in the process became good friends who are pleased about its publication. The editor of the book as it is now, Helen Saltman, is a former history and literature professor who lives in Northern California, and was asked bythe publishers to read my original longer version and, if recommending it for publication, to edit it. Her enthusiasm for the book was warming. We spent over a year working together, by mail, e-mail, and telephone. Her careful reading and cogent suggestions made the book much better conceptually and much clearer. My friend and colleague, Dr. Max Hayman, who is no longer well, urged me to finish the book so that I might submit it for an award at one of the international psychoanalytic meetings that he was sponsoring on Holocaust studies. Another psychoanalyst who wrote about his own experiences, Dr. Louis J. Micheels, was also kind enough to read the manuscript and along with his suggestion commented that he thought it was an important book to be printed, which was most encouraging. Another colleague and friend, Dr. Roman Anshin, after reading the manuscript had enough belief in it to send it to a friend on the East Coast who was connected to a large publishing house. There were a few other readers who encouraged me not only by reading the manuscript but also by contacting those they knew in the publishing arena. Annette Baran, after reading a primitive version in the xii early eighties, sent me to Marie Brown, an agent in New York, who sent the manuscript as it was then to many publishing houses. I appreciated her efforts and enjoyed meeting her in New York. My friend and attorney, Donald King, also passed it onto someone he knew in the book business and one of our family, Marvin Zuckerman, a literature professor, writer and editor offered other publisher suggestions. Our favorite bookman in Los Angeles, Doug Dutton, and one of his associates, Diane Leslie, herself a published writer, were also kind enough to go through the reading, as did Sam Eisenstein, a writer whose short story on the subject affected my writing. I want to thank our friend and colleague, Dr. Jane Rubin, for lending me her own paper and other books on the subject of friendship. Without knowing how much they helped me, I want to thank my patients. They have taught me much about the healing of trauma. Some had similar experiences and I hope that my identification with them and my treatment of them helped reduce their suffering. I started this book in 1983. It was difficult. It seemed that it would never be published and for a few years I put it away. But as it has often been in my life, at the eleventh hour comes rescue. My daughter, Ilana, who is an artist, was giving a presentation to a group of people interested in art. She wanted to use the portrait of me that she had painted and commented that probably we would not want to take the painting from our house so she asked for one of the manuscripts that had a copy of the painting as the cover. During that presentation one of her students, Marsha Barron, became intrigued with the portrait and then the contents. She asked if it were published and then asked if we would show it to the publishers that she knew, Kate Gale and Mark E. Cull of Red Hen Press, an interesting small press. I am very pleased that they were interested, and admire the quality of their workmanship. My wife, Roz, worked with me from the very beginning. After I wrote the draft she would read, conceptualizing, clarifying and correcting. Using her literary, poetic and professional expertise we reached this version. GRB Acknowledgements ...