Remembering James Gooch, MD
December 2023
Memorial Celebration, LA, CA
Jeffrey L Eaton
I’m happy to be part of this celebration honoring the life and legacy of James Gooch, MD. Jim was my teacher, supervisor, and mentor. I want to share a few memories and pay tribute to some of the things that Jim taught me about becoming a psychoanalyst.
Jim supervised both my child and adult analytic work. I brought him a child case that was particularly difficult and intimidating. Another child training analyst had told me that the child was too disturbed to be treated. I couldn’t accept this dire judgment. Jim listened to the case history and to a couple sessions and said, “Well Jeff, I don’t know what is possible, but I’m willing to help you try to find out.”
This was an enormously helpful attitude. It is an example of what Bion calls a K-link. A K-link involves a willingness to get to know, to explore, to go forward despite uncertainty. Jim deeply embodied these values. He had genuine compassion and curiosity. He showed me how to learn from experience in ways that made a lasting positive difference to both my patients and myself.
In my work with Jim, I became increasingly impressed by the depth of his empathy for my patients. He often seemed more in touch with their experience than I was. Over the years I came to understand that Jim was paying acute attention to his own experience, not seeking to decode and interpret some hidden meaning. Jim was “listening to himself listening to another.”
For Jim, listening was an exquisitely embodied experience. He emphasized paying attention not only to the content of the patient’s material, but also to the song and dance sound of the voice and to visually reading the rhythms of bodily movements. He would often emphasize expanding awareness of levels of sensation and image. He stressed the importance of apprehending and using all of ones senses when listening to a patient.
I always remember one session where Jim said to me, with great conviction, “Jeff, it is not enough to understand, you have to let yourself feel it in your heart!” Over time I came to appreciate that his openness to being impacted by experience was inspired by two cherished figures: Jim’s paternal grandfather and his analyst, W.R. Bion.
Jim and I talked to each other in supervision. I used to ask him many questions. In response, he told me many stories from his own experience. I felt free to share my doubts, questions, and anxieties. I appreciated Jim's honesty, sincerity, and openness. I remember one day speaking about my uncertainty about the validity of certain kinds of interpretations. Jim was quiet for a bit and said, “You know, we are so far out on the edge of an epistemological limb that if we are honest with ourselves, we have no option but to be humble.”
I felt a real intimacy between us so that I was not just learning about psychoanalysis, I was learning about Jim’s mind, how he felt and thought, and how he used himself as an analyst. This kind of rich multi-dimensional interaction gradually began to give me more freedom to think, to feel , to imagine, and to express myself. The significance of these conversations remains alive in me as a background of creativity in my work.
Now, I want to share a few of things that Jim emphasized. First, Jim demanded respect for the suffering of another person. He made the helpful distinction between three kinds of pain. He talked about pain as a signal of injury, pain as an inevitable aspect of growth, and what he called "gratuitous pain", as a sign of cruelty or sadism. In almost every session he emphasized the need of the patient, or of myself, to grow respect and compassion for the part of self that struggles to learn and face painful reality. Likewise, he emphasized the need to set firm limits to the parts of the self that are derisive, mocking, cruel or contemptuous of such efforts.
As a listener, Jim was constantly tracking the fate of emotion. He was sensitive to the traces of emotion and its transformations as well as to the absence of emotional experience. He focused on forces that block or distort emotion; and he followed the intricate splitting of experience into myriad parts of the self. Clarification came through the description of subtle nuanced processes.
An important part of Jim’s way of working was to notice increments of growth. He felt that such moments required recognition and he advocated their explicit description. Equally important was paying attention to forces that undo learning, rigidly clinging to old patterns with violent moralistic attitudes. He discerned envious attacks on how the striving infantile part of the self seeks to learn from wholesome contact with maternal and paternal qualities.
As many of you will remember, Jim emphasized the qualities of discipline and compassion and their generative union. His important article, “The Primitive Somatopsychic Roots of Gender Formation and Intimacy: Sensuality, Symbolism, and Passion in the Development of the Mind (Alhanati, 2002) is a tour de force in elaborating his model. In this model Jim expands the definition of reverie from a maternal function by positing a complementary paternal function. The creative combination maternal and paternal reverie gives rise, then, to a parental function of reverie. Jim was proposing a more robust form of alpha function whose implications remain to be fully explored.
Another important part of Jim’s thinking came from Bion’s grid. In my supervision with him, we would occasionally play a psychoanalytic game of trying to explore a moment from a session through consulting the grid categories. This was an opportunity to feel, think, muse, and explore. While many people are intimidated by the grid, Jim used the grid as a play space. It was meant to free the mind, not trap it. Movement through the grid is like working with a Zen koan. You cannot reveal hidden complexities when clinging to ordinary conceptually dominated habits of thinking. Through such experiences, I learned an important link between observation and intuition.
In a paper titled, “Bion’s Perspective on Psychoanalytic Technique” Jim writes the following about interpretation:
A psychoanalytic interpretation is a mature, respectful, compassionate, disciplined, educated guess, a hypothesis, a description in words, with the accompanying appropriate music and dance, addressing the analysand’s emotional experience in the moment… Psychic objects are ephemeral, evanescent and only observable by the individual privately. In fashioning the interpretation, the analyst uses his or her own psychoanalytic objects, also ephemeral, evanescent, and only observable by the analyst, evoked and provoked by the analysand’s communication and behavior in the moment.
That is a condensed and intricate way of describing the deep level of sharing and intimacy that can constitute a psychoanalytic process after the impact of Bion’s example. It highlights how much a psychoanalyst learns to use her own experience in a creative, disciplined, and compassionate way.
There are many other things I might narrate when remembering Jim. He had a profoundly constructive influence on the development of my institute, The Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Seattle, WA. He was a tireless contributor to many organizations. Jim and Shirley traveled around the world teaching in many different countries.
I remember Jim as embodying generosity, sincerity, creativity, curiosity, and passion for his own authentic realizations of psychoanalysis that he freely shared. My experience as a candidate and later as a colleague was immeasurably enriched by our contact. Though I miss him he is very alive in my heart, and I continue to learn from his example. I feel gratitude for having been fortunate to get to know him.