The Silent World of Collaborators from Different Disciplines

Abstract

For ten years, starting in 1958, Jay Katz and I were each other's teachers and each other's students in a teaching and writing collaboration at the Yale Law School. What was the nature of the collaborative relationship that Jay the physician-psychiatrist-psychoanalyst-in-training and I, trained in law and political science, expected to establish? Were we making informed choices when we entered into, carried out and ended our collaboration? Did we recome and acknowledge to ourselves and to each other why we were doing what we did? In accord with Jay's prescriptions in The Silent World of Doctor and Patient—a monumental contribution to our thinking about another collaboration—did we seek to help each other understand the decisions we had reached?A word, first, about the kind of collaboration described in this essay. In a fundamental sense all intellectual and scholarly work—even work in the creative arts—is collaborative. All who engage in these activities build on or respond to the work of others.