My grandmother, Nanette Goodman Jurist, was born on E. 9th Street, grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and spent the bulk of her life living in Hollis, Queens, until she died at the venerable age of 97 years old. Her early life was sad: her mother died when she was three, her father when she was ten, and, thereafter, she lived in poverty, without adult supervision, along with her two siblings. She loved school but was forced to drop out in order to work. Nevertheless, she was a passionate reader throughout her life, which leads me to why I have elected to begin this column by writing about her.

“Nana,” as I called her, was one of those polymaths whose love of learning was limitless. Like many other German Jews, she loved German literature and had memorized the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, but she also read newer fiction and devoured anything having to do with her beloved socialism. I recall, too, that to my amazement she was able to multiply figures up to 24 x 24 in her head. She instilled in her son and in her grandchildren a deep respect for scientific thinking as well as a love for nature. She felt no need to choose between the allegedly opposed “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences, and she encouraged me not to accept any such arbitrary restrictions in my education.

I find myself thinking about my grandmother as I ponder our program and our field. At no point in its history could our program, which has always had a commitment to psychoanalysis, ever be justly accused of conformism. We find ourselves even less mainstream these days, as we still have the temerity to believe that clinical work is slow, difficult and complicated. Most of us would accept that evidence-based treatments have merit and potential. And, in our clinic, we have moved to become more empirical—taking diagnosis more seriously, following out the course of treatment more closely, and not shying away from evaluating the success and failure of our work. Yet, we have resisted the direction of evidence-based and short-term only psychotherapy. We value and continue to attract students who value the arduous process of learning how to do good clinical work. In contrast, most graduate programs these days promote research without much attention to theory, the result of which is research of a low quality; moreover, they offer less and less actual clinical training.

I find myself wondering: Why has the appreciation of science led to a minimization of the art of clinical training? Why has it become commonplace in clinical psychology to juxtapose enlightened science to profane art? I cannot try to answer these questions in this context. All I wish to do is to inspire you to question such false dichotomies and to hesitate before assuming that a choice must be made between art and science.

Nana is my inspiration for defending the notion that we need not bind ourselves with a single methodology. We ought to be free to utilize different modes of thought, and we ought to be alert to what is being repressed when science is invoked in an exclusionary way. It is my fervent hope that our program will build on its history in order to be able to articulate a principled stance of opposition to the one-sided direction of the field.