Joe Goldstein: 'the past is future'.

• Author: Solnit, Albert J.
• Position: Yale Law School professor

As a longtime friend of Joe and his family--at times an adopted member of the family--I take this opportunity, while mourning, to celebrate Joe's life, his generosity of love for his family and his friends, and in a special way for his students. We can celebrate his vigorous, insistent, at times demanding, integrity in searching for intellectual and social values that are associated with his passionate commitment to his family, to all children, to the law, and to the dissemination of insight into and knowledge about the human condition. From cryptography to the study of economics, trade unionism, the law, and psychoanalysis, Joe was an imaginative, continuing explorer of knowledge and values that could protect and nurture what is healthiest, most fragile, most complex, most subtle, and most humane about individuals and their communities.

On a more personal note, I reflect on my "adventures" with Joe and his family at Yale's Law School and Child Study Center--and in Lincolnville, Maine; Alaska; London; Walberswick; Baltimore (near Skibberean), County Cork; and Jerusalem--on the road to the Least Detrimental Alternative!

Joe was wonderfully playful and clinically sensitive. On several occasions in evaluating custody-visitation conflicts, Joe and I interviewed children in play sessions. The children were between four and ten years of age. Joe was an excellent player. On one occasion, a ten-year-old boy, Tommy, asked Joe if he was a doctor. Joe explained he was a lawyer and a psychoanalyst. A few days later, Tommy called Joe at his office and asked if Joe would be his lawyer and tell his parents to quit fighting. Joe arranged to meet with Tommy and explained that he was consulting about Tommy with his parents. Tommy went on to become a mental health professional who kept in touch with us for the next twenty years. Joe enjoyed, respected, and admired children in ways that his children and grandchildren know so well.

In this vein, I recall a working visit by Joe, Anne Goldstein, and myself to Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham and their cottage in Baltimore, Ireland. As we approached the cottage, there was a gate with a handprinted sign: "Cows may not enter. Yale Professors may."

In 1972, as a psychoanalyst and legal scholar, Joe summed up some of his legacy when he wrote:

[T]he past is future. There is in law, as psychoanalysis teaches that there is in man, a rich residue which each generation preserves from the past, modifies for now, and in...