Social Security Document Submission: June 1993

[What is psychologically interesting about the following pages, all written at different times, is that each document relates to a father-child relationship or symbolic father figure.]

Page 113 of Social Security Document Submission

Dear Stell,

47 Dead. Northeast paralyzed. And you recall it’s having been a balmy 40 degrees.

A metaphor for your rose-colored recollections (Or maybe The New York Times exaggerates.)

GF

[handwritten note:] 7/13/92

[Refers to my sister’s statement that she recalled January 20, 1961, the day President Kennedy was inaugurated, as being a warm, sunny day in January. The President of the United States is a father figure.]

Page 114 of Social Security Document Submission

Dear Stell,

Back in the mid-sixties, around 1964, 1965, or 1966 (when I would have been 10-12 years old) Dad took me to Independence Hall [in Philadelphia] on July 4th. The then U.S. attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach was the guest speaker. I had brought a camera with me, and breached a barricade to get a picture of Katzenbach. I think someone said, “You can’t go through here.” Someone else said, “Let him go, you never know who he might be when he grows up.” Oddly, I can recall telling [my former treating psychiatrist] Dr. Alikakos [now deceased] about this incident (the incident might still be preserved in his notes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Katzenbach

Well, I’m grown up now, and strange enough, that person’s observation was prescient--but in an all-too-literal sense.

Speaking metaphorically, I live life just outside a barricade separating the nonachievers from the achievers, still taking pictures with a dinky camera and, by this means, creating the illusion of a relationship. Call me paranoid, but sometimes I think some of those achievers are now “taking pictures” of me.

GF

[handwritten note:] 4/20/92

Page 114A of Social Security Document Submission

[Page 265 of Vanity Fair Magazine, dated April 1992. I have circled the following several paragraphs.]

It is often said that Bob Altman was the son Clark Clifford never had. But more than that they appeared to be alter egos. “I think Mr. Clifford saw a lot of himself in Bob,” Bert Lance told me. From the beginning, Altman was dazzled by Clifford. “Robert had never seen such a high concentration of savoir faire,” a friend recalls. The protégé seemed to exhibit his own brand of deformation professionelle. Perhaps unconsciously he even began to imitate Clifford’s gestures and stentorian tones. He affected dark double-breasted suits. One reporter who interviewed him during Lancegate observed, “Altman seemed like he was wearing his father’s suit.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Clifford

As a child, Altman had been a brainy “nerd,” a close family friend remembers. His parents were highly competitive lawyers who lived in the pleasant Washington neighborhood of Cleveland Park. As a law student at George Washington University, Altman worked at Clifford and Warnke and later joined the firm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Altman

Altman led the takeover battle to buy Financial General bank for the group of Arab businessmen who became the nominal owners. They changed the name of the bank to First American, and with Clifford and Altman’s assistance, got government approval to open its doors. Clifford became the chairman of the new bank, and Altman the president. Clifford’s wife, Marny, would later tell a close friend how impressed her husband had been with the perks of the bank job. “One of the things that impressed him the most was the very large office and two huge limousines he received,” she reportedly said. When Clifford resigned as chairman of First American, in the wake of the B.C.C.I. scandal, he was said to have asked Nicholas Katzenbach, the new head of the bank, if he could buy one limousine.

Page 115 of Social Security Document Submission

Dear Stell,

Check this out. A knife is a form of cutlery. “Nothing but a collection of rationalizations.” If that were true, then why would this be [unconsciously] censored for three years?

[I am suggesting that the character "Beckmesser" (baking knife, in German) symbolizes my coworker at Hogan and Hartson, Daniel Cutler.]

[The following is a paragraph from “The Caliban Complex: An Attempt at Self-Analysis.”]

Indeed, the persistence of even a vigorous Oedipus complex in the unconscious may not necessarily vitiate, or preclude the development, of an equally vigorous father identification. The dramatic tensions in Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which owe their syncretic strength in part to an integration of the temporally-opposed psychic forces of Oedipal conflict and father identification suggest the unconscious psychological concerns of the opera’s creator. One can infer, based on analysis of the opera, that in Wagner’s unconscious an intense Oedipal conflict raged against an equally intense father identification. Three of the central male characters, Walther von Stolzing, Sixtus Beckmesser, and Hans Sachs are each in love with Eva Pogner, while Walther and Beckmesser vie for her hand in marriage. The characters’ relations fall into two triangles, one comprising Walther-Beckmesser-Eva, and the other comprising Walther-Sachs-Eva. The relationship between Walther (symbolic son) and Beckmesser (symbolic father) is characterized by bitter rivalry and antagonism. Sachs, on the other hand, acts as a benign and benevolent mentor with whom Walther identifies. The two dramatic characters, Sachs and Beckmesser, are, in a psychoanalytical sense, simply two separate images of a single figure -- the "Father." Beckmesser (a personification of the castrating father imago) represents the son’s image of the father during the Oedipal period (“messer,” i.e., “knife,” suggests castration), while Sachs (a personification of the pre-Oedipal idealized father imago) represents a later, more mature image of the father as mentor. The disparate roles of Sachs and Beckmesser undoubtedly reflect the dual and conflicted image of the father in Wagner’s unconscious. The subject’s longstanding fascination with the opera is revealing.

[handwritten note:] 6/15/92

Page 116 of Social Security Document Submission

FAX NO. 609 235 5569 MEREDITH FINANCIAL SERVICES
transmittal for Mrs. Estelle Jacobson c/o Mr. Edward Jacobson

Dear Stell,

[The legendary pianist] Arthur Rubinstein’s daughter, Dr. Alina Rubinstein, is a psychiatrist in New York City. She is a graduate of the Medical School at Columbia University.

GF

http://www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-md-reports/dr-alina-rubinstein-md-6173a167/office-locations

Page 117 of Social Security Document Submission

Dear Stell,

You asked.

GF

[The reference is not clear.]

[All of these messages suggest the psychological struggle I was experiencing in 1992, following my job termination by Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld -- which at a deep psychological level was experienced as a break with my symbolic father, Bob Strauss. Perhaps my anger with Dennis Race, the attorney who terminated my employment, at an unconscious level, relates to his having destroyed my relationship with Strauss.]