Gray, Paul 1918-2002

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GRAY, Paul 1918-2002

PERSONAL:

Born 1918, in Chicago, IL; died of congestive heart failure July 26, 2002, in Washington, DC; married; wife's name, Virginia (divorced); married; second wife's name, Gerda; children: (first marriage) Lorraine, Steven. Education: University of Chicago, B.A., M.D., 1942; Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, graduated 1951.

CAREER:

Psychoanalyst and educator. Psychoanalyst in private practice, Washington, DC, beginning 1950s; Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, Washington, DC, on staff, 1953-2002, training and supervising analyst, 1956-86, training analyst emeritus, 1986-2002. Affiliated with Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton, NJ. Military service: U.S. Navy, 1944-46..

WRITINGS:

The Ego and Analysis of Defense, Jason Aronson (Northvale, NJ), 1994.

Contributor to medical journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Psychoanalyst Paul Gray was born in Chicago, Illinois but grew up in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He was the son of hardy pioneer stock, and his father rose from working on the railroad to become president of the union. During his lifetime, Gray saw significant changes in his discipline, and his experience caused others in the field to seek his opinion. As a training and supervising analyst, he taught candidates and graduates, as well as social workers and psychiatric residents.

Gray's The Ego and Analysis of Defense is a response to a theory developed by Sigmund Freud and published in 1923, after Freud dismissed hypnosis as a cure. Hartvig Dahl wrote in Contemporary Psychology that "the new theory explicitly recognized that patients' defenses against unconscious wishes are themselves often unconscious and resistant to change." Therefore, treatment was structured to help patients recall not only their unconscious wishes, but also their defenses as a mechanism to changing the latter. Dahl said that in the book, "Gray's thesis is that, in their attempts to overcome the inevitable resistances that arise from unconscious defenses, psychoanalysts have too often lagged behind a central implication of the theory, that is, the need to analyze such defenses."

Mardi J. Horowitz noted in the American Journal of Psychiatry that "Gray's use of examples gives the book clinical utility and freshness. The result is a modern emphasis on collaboration and interaction, not just on neutral, authoritarian, and theory-dictated interpretations. Gray shows how to give the patient new tools for understanding personal fantasies and intentions throughout his or her future life."

Marianne Goldberger, who dedicated her Danger and Defense: The Technique of Close Process Attention to Gray on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, conducted an interview with Gray, the transcript of which is available on the Web site of Gray's publisher, Jason Aronson. Goldberger asked Gray how his ideas about analytic technique evolved.

Gray explained to Goldberger that, "at some point in my analytic training, I became aware of what seemed to me a puzzling discrepancy: In teaching, analysts emphasized the importance of following the events in the patient's mind; but in clinical conferences, continuing case presentations, and supervision, they frequently showed interest in the patient's behavior outside the analytic situation, an interest I had come to associate with psychotherapy.… I believe that focusing attention consistently on what happens 'inside' the analytic hour helps patients become aware of the many unconscious activities they use to resolve conflict at the time they're using them." Gray felt that this demonstrates to patients that their defenses present themselves in many forms, including those of memory.

Until the time of his death, Gray continued to teach and consult at his office at the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Richard Pearson of the Washington Post wrote his obituary, saying that Gray, "who gained a reputation as a creative and gifted teacher, was a master at finding exactly the right word, whether communicating with students or patients."