Joseph Goldstein

The silent world of collaborators from different disciplines.

For ten years, starting in 1958, Jay Kaa 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-psychiamst-psychoanalyst-in-making 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 r e c o m e 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 a d 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. In independent pursuit of their own individual interests they rely on-they learn from-the findings, the discoveries and the failures of others. They turn for assistance and inspiration to the sleeping giants whom they can awaken when they walk into a museum to view a master’s work or into a library to take an article or book off the shelf. They turn, of course, to their contemporarics-colleagues, teachers, students and others-for challenge and confirmation. I use “collaboration” to encompass all of the above and more. My usage covers an intensive elbow-to-elbow relationship in which equal partners prepare for class and teach together, write together, live with and think through an idea together-ach as preoccupied with, as committed to, and as responsible for the task as the other, and each as essential to the end product as the other.