A Conversation between Estelle Shane and Joye Weisel-Barth

Abstract

ABSTRACT Estelle Shane is a distinguished psychoanalyst, who has honored, served, and contributed to the profession. During my training and early years as an analyst, she was my teacher and mentor, and over time she has become my close colleague and friend. I admire and love her balanced temperament, her ever growing mind and heart, her genuine kindness and unique shine, but I’m also occasionally exasperated – as friends are – at some of her patterned foibles. Despite a long and rich life, Estelle still wants so much; she’s greedy for more – more work, writing, ideas, articles, books, movies, theater, and interesting and challenging patients, colleagues and friends. She wants more intense intellectual and emotional experience, more intellectual and emotional understanding – More Life and More Time. And she tries to schedule it all in. Even during Covid sequestration, Estelle is at war with time. Therapy sessions, tea parties and coffee klatches, consultations, private conversations, editor meetings, writing lessons – all these continue online in her familiar pace and race, and Estelle logs in more ZOOM and FACETIME miles than anybody I know. In her pursuit of life and her battle with time, she overcommits herself, is often overwhelmed by her own chosen obligations, and frequently must extricate herself from too many overlapping dates. How many times has Estelle canceled an appointment because she has inadvertently scheduled two other people in my time slot? Exasperating, but by now also inspiring; that is, even though I have to share her, I love how large and curious and hungry for life she is. So now she and I are going to have a conversation about minds: what they are in all their eccentric patterns and shifts, how we understand our own and the other’s, how we use them, and how they function in analytic work. Estelle’s theories are well documented in her writings, and so I want to go beyond her theories to talk about what she actually does with her patients and how she has come to think about analytic practice.