Paul Mosher: Psychoanalytic Citizen and Visionary edited by Judith S. Schachter

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From the Editor’s Introduction

The announcement of Paul Mosher’s unanticipated death on September 14, 2021, unleashed a torrent of emotionally rich personal memories from grieving friends and colleagues. My role as editor of this memorial volume is to contain and order a selection of spontaneous responses and a few of the wide-ranging substantive contributions that marked his life to allow us to encompass the range of his genius and to appreciate and be thankful for all he gave us.
New to us all is the fragment of autobiography he’d embarked on as his health was failing, meant for his five grandchildren. In it he details that through his physician father he was privy to the corruption of the local police department and predisposed to a clear ethical code and a fine nose for corruption. A cartoon he shared shows businessmen around a table, one stating, “let’s draw a clear ethical line and then see how close we can get to it.” Jeffrey Berman’s description of their work together on “Confidentiality “ and the two books about psychiatric transgressions indicates how central to his identity was his moral core.
His childhood hospitalizations led to a life of scrupulous exercising, as well as careful financial planning after a doctor warned him that he’d be a cripple in his 50’s. While Harvard doesn’t play a large role in the autobiography, he was proud of his frequently still referenced cardiology paper, his licensed stint on the radio station and his home for four years, Dunster House. All remained close to his heart. The transition to psychoanalytic education was not smooth; his formidable aunt by marriage, Henriette Klein, warned him that his relentless questioning made a comfortable career in New York unlikely and he, by then married to Paula, moved  back to Albany, to establish a successful psychoanalytic practice in a charming small private office near the medical center and the state law library. He raised his family in a secluded house on a pond far from the city where he, from Apple II days on, began to create and sell software programs, maintain his many computers and continue to  learn new computer languages.|
The hierarchical rigidities visible at psychoanalytic meetings and the chaos he observed in organizational functioning led him to frequent the law library and research the NY State Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and join with others who were committed to creating change in APsaA governance. Despite  his planned retreat from psychoanalytic battles, he became the intellectual engine of this struggle through his Civics Lessons, published online, that enabled him to reach and inform the membership and undergird organizational change.
Paul’s generous contribution of his self-published Jourlit opened his colleagues to the pleasures of research and prepared the membership for investment in, and the advent of PEP. The Members List as well as private email lists followed. Student members, as Tom Bartlett describes, benefitted worldwide from his mentoring of those who sought the ability to reach outside our isolated consulting rooms to find like minded others. Paul, who had been marginalized as a candidate, surely realized that though he was enabling others to move from that precarious position,  he was again  exposing himself  to   marginalization, demonstrated by the shameful lack of recognition from the Sigourney Trust because of his central role in restoring the Executive Council’s rightful role as the Board of Directors of APsaA.
Collecting the essays for this volume revealed how carefully he’d chosen those he worked with, while impressing me anew with the range of his talents and interests. It has enabled me to remember again the  brilliant, creative man who’d befriended me as an elected officer.  He was kind, loving, often acerbic, and a significant mentor to many less endowed colleagues. A generative partner to many, he enhanced and encompassed us all.