Introductory Remarks: The Healing Wisdom of Jay Katz

Abstract

I have known Jay Katz for over forty years, and I have been his colleague for nearly twenty. It is my great joy to welcome you all here and especially to thank Bob Levine and Alex Capron, Bo Burt, David Tolley, and Carol Pollard for putting this program together. You all know Jay Katz's story. He was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. He earned his doctorate at Harvard Medical School, which he followed with a medical internship at Mount Sinai. Next is the part of his resume that has always been the most exciting and mysterious to me: his service as Captain Katz of the United States Air Force. (Imagine what that must have been like!) He first came to Yale as an assistant medical resident more than fifty years ago, and then to the Yale Law School as Assistant Professor of Psychology of Law in 1958. In time, Jay became Professor of Law, Science, and Medicine; the John Garver Professor of Law and Psychoanalysis; and the inaugural Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry. He has received numerous honorary degrees and delivered many named lectures. His greatest works, of course, are his books: The Family and the Law, with our beloved colleague, Joe Goldstein; Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Law, with Joe Goldstein and Alan Dershowitz; Experimentation with Human Beings, with Alex Capron and Eleanor Swift Glass; and his landmark work, The Silent World of Doctor and Patient. Reading the introduction to that book, one can see that Jay's special skill lies in his ability to be both an outsider and an insider in the worlds of law and medicine. Upon reflection, the concept of "outsider-insider" is a description not just of Jay as a person, but also of the role that he defined for a doctor vis-à-vis his patient. On the one hand, Jay said, the doctor must be united with his patient in the act of healing and analysis; on the other, he must be sufficiently removed from his patient to retain his own objectivity.