Obituary: Dale Boesky (1930–2021)

I want to write condolence notes

not to your friends

but to the ones

who didn’t know you yet.

—Linda Pastan (1985, p. 62)

Before the laughter and the dinners at Dale’s home in Michigan or at meetings in New York and Paris, before the unquenchable punning and ancient Jewish jokes, there were formality and serious thought and differing points of view.

I met Dale when I joined the Editorial Board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, but I did not come to know him personally until he followed Jack Arlow as Editor-in-Chief. What I then learned was that any time we had an interchange about a manuscript, I always felt I had to stretch to keep up with his thinking. Indeed, as a reviewer, Dale read not only the submitted manuscript, but also the papers listed in its bibliography. Whatever Dale did, he was never superficial. (I recall him smiling and paraphrasing a Peter DeVries line, “Superficially, she was deep, but deep down she was superficial.”)

About a year after his assuming the editorship, I approached Dale and offered to resign. With remarkable frequency, his decisions about submitted manuscripts were the opposite of my recommendation as a reviewer. It was not that I resented his contrary review; rather, that I thought a new editor should not be burdened by inheriting a reviewer not of his choice. I felt there was no question but that the primary concern for both of us was protection of the Quarterly, the shared treasure we both loved.

Dale was adamant. He stated his strong need to hear differing views, always. Indeed, conceptual challenges were precisely what he wanted. It felt to me like the moment between Rick and Louis at the end of Casablanca: “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Dale’s mind was restless. It was from him that I learned that an understanding is a place where the mind comes to rest. He always caught his breath and stopped long enough to publish his thinking in a series of cutting-edge papers in psychoanalysis—among others, those on action, acting out, questioning, and enactments, all becoming classics. Nonetheless, once he collected his thinking and published it, he moved on to further challenge himself.

This was true in both the short term and across the span of his life. Four years after presenting a solid study advancing understanding of the déja raconté, Dale published a follow-up paper detailing his disagreements with his own earlier thinking. His avid yet disciplined curiosity was never frozen in place by the vanity that turns positions into postures.

This same trait was also evident across the broad scale of his life. He began with early training shaped by the ego psychology of that era and went forward from that start, never abandoning it yet ever extending its richness to so wide a range of points of view that he ultimately moved to the stunning breadth of his chef d’oeuvre, the book Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context (2007)—a work in which Dale opened an integration of pluralistic points of view by investigating the nature of exploration itself, the formation of evidence.

Dale’s book integrates structuralism with hermeneutics and with phenomenology, making clear that meaning is valid only when an experience is considered in its infinitely varied yet ever unitary experiential context. It is a work described as a breakthrough, integrating pluralism while simultaneously fully respecting diversity, a work reviewed as demonstrating a passion for inquiry shaped by scholarly precision of thought. Dale’s mind was a place where, in Yeats’s (1916) words, passion and precision were one.

Dale’s approach by questioning was not limited to the grove of analytic academe. He engaged with Joyce Carol Oates in an epistolary interchange probing applied analysis. In this written conversation, Dale never intruded interpretations but always opened his partner’s thinking, stimulating and deepening it with new questions, eliciting new ideas. Inside the office or out, Dale always labored to be true to the data, to what could be learned as he helped it emerge from an other.

Dale’s qualities were widely recognized and appreciated, leading to his being appointed a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly from 1979–1984, as well as to his repeated invitations to speak at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Psychoanalytical Association, and at local meetings across the United States and Europe.

As his colleague Aisha Abbasi (2021) so succinctly described him, he was “razor sharp, with a formidable clarity and an incisive way of challenging his own thinking and that of others, ever clear and witty.”

In truth, I would betray Dale’s essential nature if I were to speak entirely of his professional life. He loved that dearly, but that love always had to share first place in his mind with his intense love for and naked pride in his family. At twenty-three, Dale met Elaine, the vibrant and bright undergraduate studying clinical psychology who became his wife, the mother of Sara, Amy, and Julie, three daughters who each and all were Cordelias for a Dale who was wiser than Lear, who not only did not repudiate them but instead could never stop kvelling about them. (Beaming is too tame a word.)

After Elaine’s tragically early death at fifty-nine, Dale, whose mind never rested, reaped the benefit of another soul that never sat still for long. He went on to marry Judy Fisher, a sensitive and wise craft artist, his companion who filled the remaining three decades of his life with love, conversation, and culture. Their home was open to friends as well as relatives, a place of beauty, art, music, flowers, and much laughter, as I had the delight to experience firsthand.

Of our many evenings together, one particularly delicious dinner comes to mind, one shared by Dale, Judy, my wife Janice, and Gina Atkinson, managing editor of this journal and close friend to each and all of us. We were at an annual APsaA meeting in Atlanta, and Dale had found a Michelin-starred restaurant he was determined that we try. It was located shockingly far from the downtown area where we were staying, but Dale was insistent. After a cab ride that I feared would double the cost of the meal, we foodies found ourselves at a restaurant that was beyond what any of us had hoped. Along with gourmet delicacies they offered grits, a food foreign to my Yankee spirit. Dale insisted we each order a side dish to try. It was a glorious evening, with all five benefiting from Dale’s characteristic joyful yet always thorough research.

Dale himself, most sadly, is gone, no matter the way we prefer to speak of his spirit as living on. Our heartbreak over loss cannot be allowed to eclipse the glory of Dale’s intellectual depth, personal warmth, his great love for his family and friends, or theirs for him. Our sorrow shadows but does not dim our appreciation of the power of Dale’s mind and contributions. Our chief recompense is that his written contributions still live, there for all of us, including those of you who didn’t know him yet.