Warmed by the Fires

Allan Frosch, who died on October 28, 2016, at the age of 78, was esteemed as a psychoanalyst, teacher, mentor and writer; he also was treasured as a friend and colleague. The qualities that brought him such high regard were evident: a keen intelligence, integrity, thoughtfulness, careful scholarship; he had a serious demeanor but was kind, warm, engaging and without self-importance. He also had a merry disposition and could be fun to be with.

It was apparent that psychoanalysis was the perfect field for Allan, and that he was deeply involved in and loved the work. I knew him best as a member of a small group in which we met together for nineteen years. Our mission was to read our way through the twenty-three volumes of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud. We sought to question, clarify, explicate and appreciate what we read, and Allan excelled at the task. Our own experiences as clinicians contextualized our understanding, and as we went along we often brought up vignettes from treatments we each were conducting to provide illustrations or pose conundrums. Such instances offered a good sense of what Allan was like as a therapist, and how sens itive and astute an analyst he was. He’d had an early career as an actor, and that proclivity to capture the essence of another was carried forth into his analytic work, where it funded the empathic disposition that so well informed his clinical understanding.