CRITICA

Michael Windholz, a founding member of PINC, died on December 10th in the company of his family, including our colleague, his wife Sandra Salatich, and his daughters Lily and Eleanor. Michael’s passing is a loss to our community, to psychoanalysis and personally to all of us whose lives were enriched by his friendship.

A lifetime San Francisco resident, he graduated from Berkeley and CSPP. Michael was one of the first psychologists approved to train as a psychoanalyst, graduating from SFCP (then SFPI) in 1981.

Michael’s engagement with psychoanalysis is part of a legacy reaching back to Freud. Born to Czechoslovakian émigrés, Emanuel and Lilly, who were part of Freud’s circle, informed the direction of Michael’s professional and personal sensibilities. During our last visit he shared letters between his father and Freud that were part of a panel he submitted to the forthcoming IPA Congress. In that paper, Michael traces the compelled immigration of his parents, and explores “the complexities of assimilation and loss, showing how these adaptations and defensive structures organized creativity, institutional development and personal satisfaction, while incurring certain emotional costs.”

As a PINC graduation honoree, Michael was acknowledged for his many contributions to the PNC community. In addition to his spirited support of PINC, Michael was the original architect and longtime teacher of the Freud series. Though he had a Talmudic relationship with the Standard Edition, he was never doctrinaire. Once, during a study group, the discussion turned to Lacan. Some members were at odds with certain Lacanian ideas and expected Michal to follow suit. Instead, he argued that Lacan expanded and enriched analytic canons. Through the Windholz Lectures, a series in honor of his father, Michael often recruited innovative thinkers including the introduction of Dominic Scarfone to PINC for the first time.

Highly regarded as a clinician, many of his colleagues think of him as an analyst capable of connecting with patients without analytic pretensions. He rarely troubled himself with the question: Is this analysis? mainly because he didn’t think of that question as at the heart of the healing analytic process.

In addition to his persona as a scholar, Michael brooked no dualism—he was as alive to the natural world as that of the mind. He was an avid backpacker, swimmer, and kayaker. At age 75, he organized and served as the rafting guide down the daunting Colorado river with his family and friends.

All of this said, Michael was someone for whom personal relationships were transcendent. He was unabashedly affectionate with his family and friends while accessible to newcomers. He was generous, hilarious, and provocative. It was easy to feel held in the presence of someone so clearly engaged with you.

May Michael’s untimely loss leave room to treasure his gifts to all of us who had the good fortune to know him and to mourn our loss.

Victor Bonfilio & Maureen Murphy