As a community, we’ve been graced with a substantial number of members who have deeply shaped our lives, our institute, and the larger psychoanalytic community. Their contributions are as unique as their personalities, yet they have all contributed significantly in ways that matter. Sadly, we mark their death, but do so by sharing with each other how they moved us and how they changed the world we live in for the better.
Dan Buie was one of these change agents, a long-time leader and guide, a man of quiet depth, who died after a long illness on November 8, 2022, at the age of 92. Dan was someone who conveyed in his presence and teaching a profound attunement to the most basic experiences of being. He was our analyst, our teacher, our supervisor, and to many, a dear friend, but as you will hear from members who loved him, he also brought a profound kind of presence and soul to his encounters with others.
Alan Pollack captures this experience of Dan in a moving reminiscence that conveys Dan’s special way of being:
Dan spoke often of the “felt-experience” of another. The felt-experience of Dan was extraordinary. In my life, he was completely unique. As Dan listened, his focus was so singular that one felt almost physically held - held in his regard while simultaneously penetrated by his probing inquiry and profound understanding. His unwavering, deep, steady engagement made you feel that you mattered. Profound empathic regard and sincerity characterized every one of his relationships. And it was at the core of his work as an analyst, which often focused on understanding and correcting the early developmental distortions that keep people from knowing the truth of who they are, especially the truth of their own value.
Dan was incapable of superficial relating. He wanted always to know others truly, and he honed in with unerring accuracy on the depths. When he and I met for lunch, his opening greeting might be something like, “Have you yet come to recognize yourself to be the fine person whom others know you truly to be?”
Over the past year, Randy Paulsen and I have kept touch with Dan’s patients and a group of his colleagues, keeping them informed of Dan’s condition. They shared with us some of what Dan has meant to them. A consistent portrait emerges. One person wrote, “I’m alive, literally because of Dan. How does one acknowledge the love and gratitude owed this man who was a gift to all of us blessed to know and benefit from him?” Another wrote, “I think he connects so well to people because he finds something in himself that matches something inside the person he is dealing with -- that and his kindness. He wasn't afraid to be real.” And yet another said simply what everyone felt, "He made me feel that I mattered."
This experience of “being known and seen” is echoed by Bob Waldinger in his experience of Dan:
Despite all of our research and theory, much about human connection remains a mystery. Dan was a master at it, and I’ve never fully understood his gift. Thinking back on the many hours I spent with him, my strongest impression is that I felt known and seen as never before in my life. I eventually understood that Dan was deeply immersed in expanding psychoanalytic theory to encompass new realms of human experience, but that passion for greater understanding never got in the way of his fearless emotional presence. His welcoming stance and active engagement with whatever arose made it safe to touch tender and hitherto untouchable places – to find possibility where life had seemed forever closed off. If there is truly such a thing as a healing presence, Dan had it. And generations of us are wiser, healthier, and of more use to others because Dan was in the world.
Dan was a long-time Training & Supervising Analyst at BPSI, participating in numerous committees, and was Chair of the Education Committee from 1987 through 1990. He was active nationally and internationally with the American and the IPA and had long dedicated himself to teaching. He followed Gerry Adler as Chief Resident at Massachusetts Mental Health Center and continued with Gerry as part of Paul Myerson’s Department of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center, where he was Director of Training from 1980 to 1984.
Jody Schindelheim describes Dan’s influence in his Tufts days:
For the many of us who were part of Paul Myerson's Department of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center, Dan Buie was a central figure. He was a most caring clinician, one of our best teachers, a most helpful mentor and admired role model. I find myself thinking of him often when with patients, students and residents, and I think of him often when with my own thoughts. His gentle touch was always able to find the person inside the patient, always able to find and nurture the therapist inside the trainee. While he has now passed away, many of us will be forever deeply indebted to him and will carry his presence in our memories and in our ways.
Dan was gifted at integrating his special presence described above with his life’s work in practice and scholarship. Dan centered his work on meeting, recognizing, and understanding patients who struggled with sustaining a stable sense of self in relation to others. Both Dan and Gerry were central in challenging a long-held psychoanalytic perspective of early psychopathology that left lived experience for mechanistic explanations and interpretations. In 1979, Dan and Gerry published an article on the experience of intense and painful aloneness that challenged the received wisdom on work with patients struggling with borderline difficulties. Dan and Gerry led a groundswell of new thinking that encouraged deep attention to the nuance and depth of pain lived by patients, a parallel to the dawning recognition in this country (with the help of Arnie Modell) of Winnicott’s work on the important roles on holding and potential space.
Dan Mollod describes his experience in supervision with Dan that characterizes Dan’s importance, his kind of teaching and presence:
Dan was a life changing supervisor of mine for many years. He had such a resonant, deep empathy for patients, such an intuitive vision for why they were hurting and what they needed. His very presence was steadying in his trademark humble Midwestern way. In response to an exhausting interaction with a difficult case, in which I felt self-doubt for becoming strident with the patient, I can still hear Dan’s reassuring voice saying, “you know, we all face these knife's edge moments, trying to show our patients that we understand what they have been missing all this time. No one could have handled this any better.” Yet despite his gentleness, Dan could countenance the passions and sharpness of life: he once told me that psychoanalyzing a patient whose life was on the edge of sorrow was much more intense than his former training as a flight surgeon(!). We owe a debt of gratitude to Dan (and his Tufts Department of Psychiatry/BPSI partners) for re-envisioning how we understand and approach more regressed patients. They had previously been thought of as having excess aggression and orality which had to be challenged. Instead, we now know to think about the terrible burden of aloneness and difficulties with introjects and evocative memory that yield to holding, constancy, and steady acknowledgment of their pain. Dan was an absolute lion of psychoanalysis. His profound presence is sorely missed already.
Of course, this kind of presence helped transform many people’s lives. Richard Frank describes his experience of Dan as an analyst:
Dan was my analyst when I was a BPSI candidate, and we continued talking intermittently over the years. He was a gentle soul, a deep thinker, and a model of empathy and compassion.
I learned so much from him in so many ways. I am grateful for the time we had together. Dan used to say, "We keep growing till the day we die." His embodiment of this ideal has been an inspiration to me. If there is some sort of afterlife, I'm sure he's still growing there.
I needed another analysis many years later to keep growing myself. With his usual generosity, humility, and desire to keep learning, he was interested in my new "feeling experience" (an expression of his) with a different analyst rather than being jealous or defensive.
One lovely memory: How much he appreciated a gift I gave him, a children's picture book called “Climbing Kansas Mountains,” about a boy who is puzzled when his father invites him to climb a mountain together (in Kansas?!). His father takes him up in a grain elevator, where he has a wondrous view of the surrounding farm country. Dan grew up in Kansas. I always found it fascinating that he transformed himself into an analyst in a big East coast city. What an odd pair we were, as I grew up in Queens, NYC. And yet not. Like that boy's father, he took me up to a place where we could share a larger and deeper experience of life that opened me up and changed me forever.
As noted by Richard, Dan was born and raised on a farm in Kansas. Alan Pollack described to me how Dan “never lost the sense of being a farm boy out of place in the big city. Although to all of us he seemed so impressive, elegant, a professor of medicine who inhabited his authority with grace and confidence, inside himself, he never completely lost the feeling that he was a hayseed over his head in intellectual Boston. It didn't help that people like Tony Kris were his classmates at the Mass Mental and BPSI. He wanted to be accepted as an equal. He very much succeeded, but he never fully overcame his disbelief.”
Dan attended the University of Kansas from his undergraduate days through medical school. It was there that he met his wife, Anne Lambert, who studied as an art student and became a successful artist. Both Alan and Randy Paulsen spoke to me about the depth of this relationship. They married and had two kids, John and Gail. Anne died three years before Dan, and as he grieved, he often spoke of death as a part of life in a way that reminded me of Winnicott’s own reflections on having a “good death,” imagining what his “death day” will be like.
After medical school, Dan interned at the United States Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Oakland, CA and became a flight surgeon. He was assigned to a unit of test pilots and was very proud of his work with them. He learned how to fly fighter jets himself and appreciated the respect he earned from these pilots. Dan told one of his supervisees, Marcia Zuckerman, that “he was planning on a career in surgery and decided on psychiatry when he realized how many accidents, including the deaths of two pilots, were caused in part by psychological factors. He loved to talk about flying and maintained that he only got into Harvard’s Mass Mental residency as a "hayseed" from Kansas because Jack Ewald loved driving sports cars, and they spent the interview talking about "pulling G’s" while speeding through the world.”
So many offered reflections on their experience of Dan, and I want to include two colleagues who knew Dan from his early days at Tufts through their time over the years at BPSI.
Steve Bernstein:
Dan Buie was always there for me and for many others as a calm and containing figure. He modeled a certain intelligent steadiness, dedication and acceptance toward his patients and also toward his friends. Dan became my mentor, together with Gerry Adler, when I arrived at Tufts after returning from the NIMH. He was a wonderful supervisor on the inpatient service that I directed. He worked with residents, saw patients, and between therapy and supervision hours, we spoke and spent a part of our days together for about ten years. Dan was always there for me when I needed to talk with him about a difficult treatment. He still seems to be there.
But it wasn’t only those hospital days. Judy and I have wonderful memories of spending time with Dan and his wife, Anne Lambert, going to see the great cabaret singer, Mabel Mercer, perform at the Copley Plaza Hotel whenever she came to Boston. We loved visiting Anne’s art studio when she had an open studio to show her paintings and sculpture, with Dan in the background serving vintage wine. And there were the evenings we spent sampling gourmet food at restaurants or at Dan and Anne’s home, where they would cook for us, and we would talk and laugh late into the night. It is hard to say goodbye.
Randy Paulsen was very close to Dan and along with Alan Pollack, helped guide his patients and friends through the period of his illness and death, and we will bring things near to a close with his reflection:
I have known Dan Buie since 1978. He was my teacher during my residency at Tufts, my 3rd case supervisor at BPSI, and then my colleague, friend, and fellow traveler. Our wives became friends; she was a great artist and my wife is a keen appreciator of art. As I’ve been thinking about my long friendship with Dan and about him as a clinician, two words come together for me: fierce listening.
Dan could listen in a way that became a lifeline for many patients. He helped many people face the fear of changing. He helped them through their fear. For those who couldn’t change or grow enough to leave his nest, he continued to be available. Dan did not want to leave his patients and his practice. As he became more ill, I drafted possible letters for him to send, letters to say goodbye. He appreciated the drafts but wanted to add his own voice, and as that voice faded, the letters were never sent. One line from the last draft was, “I am so grateful for all our years of work together. It has enabled me to both explore and affirm our human capacity for empathy and development.”
The person closest to Dan was his wife, Anne, who died a few years ago. She wrote a poem near her death:
“Go to greet the dark at dusk,
The nightbird says you’ve done your best.
The sand runs out, the sun goes down,
Slip away in peace and rest.”
I think she knew Dan would struggle on. I read those lines as her message to him. There is a great wave of gratitude to Dan from students, friends, family and patients. I know he hears it as he takes his rest. And it would be so important for him to know that we hear his resounding "thank you" to us.
Dan’s daughter Gail offers her thanks to Randy and Alan and to our community:
I look forward to reading these reflections and experiences of him. I feel stunned at how well others really "knew" him. You clearly were close to him just reading your description of him. This is all so meaningful to me and I know he would be humbled and deeply moved at the love genuinely held for him.
I want to conclude by joining Alan Pollack in his “crusade” to share Dan with others, especially with younger colleagues who never got to encounter him. Dan’s teaching is available to us in his writing and in how he has changed those whose lives he touched. But much of Dan’s teaching was embodied in his presence. We are fortunate to have an interview that Dan offered to Alan, recorded by our Library as part of our “Voice of Experience” series, linked here: (https://bpsi.org/the-voice-of-experience-dan-buie-video/). This will offer a small taste of the felt-experience that was Dan.
Dan had a private burial at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Wellesley, MA accompanied by a U.S. Navy Honor Guard. A public Memorial Luncheon will take place at the Wellesley Country Club on Sunday, April 23, 2023, at 2:00. Please RSVP to Dan’s daughter Gail Buie-Yelle (gailyelle@aol.com), if you plan to attend.
