In my junior year, I fell in love with a woman who was from Vienna, Anna Kris. And she made a major, major impact on my life. She introduced me to her parents, Marianne and Ernst Kris. And they were members of the Freud circle. Marianne Kris was Anna Freud’s closest friend. She had been in analysis with Sigmund Freud and Ernst Kris was an analyst. [He became an analyst] after he married Marianne and got interested in analysis, but before that he had been a major art historian. And he was the teacher of Gombrich. And we got to know each other, and I got very close to him, and he said, ‘You want to understand what happened in Austria and Germany, you’re not going to do it through intellectual history. You want to understand motivation, the human mind, how people can act brutally. The only one way to do it is to study the mind, that’s through psychoanalysis.’ So I began to read Freud, and listen some more to him, and I became convinced this is the way to go.

So on short notice, I only had sort of a gut course in the natural sciences, I think as a sophomore, never taken any science courses. I went to summer school between my junior and senior year, at 1588 Mass Avenue, in a phenomenal house. In that house I shared the house with Bob Spitzer who [later became] head of [DSM-III], a major revolution in American psychiatry; Bob Goldberger who became provost of Columbia University; Henry Nunberg who was the son of a very famous analyst. I’m leaving somebody… and Jimmy Schwartz became a very close collaborator and friend of mine. Fabulous people, I learned a great deal from them. And they were all taking summer courses, and I took chemistry, unbelievably boring. And in my senior year I took physics and biology, and then the following summer I took organic chemistry, but I was accepted in medical school on the basis of just one course I’d taken over the summer, because my other record was good. I was accepted to NYU medical school. So I went to medical school with no particular interest in science.