I cry often and often enjoy it. I am usually more likely to remember the things that happen to me when I cry because they meant something important to me at the time. A few people can reliably make me cry: Aretha Franklin, Carl Rogers, Lauryn Hill, and Fred (Mr.) Rogers. The only person I know personally who reliably makes me cry is Steve Finn. I think that has to do with the same inner essence – a kind of authenticity that resonates deeply with people – that has made Steve’s work so impactful. People who know him or read his enclosed chapter will know what I mean, even if they don’t cry as easily as I do.

Donna Bender is the foremother of the Levels of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS), which serves as Criterion A of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders. The LPFS not only accounts for the covariation among different PDs but also provides clinicians a vehicle with which to be curious about their patients, including their strengths, capacities, and inner experiences as social beings. Donna has emphasized this latter point in a number of places, including the enclosed chapter. But I want to set the record straight; I didn’t invite her to contribute only because of influential work on the LPFS. I have come away from my handful of encounters with Donna with the sense that she is one of those people whose path I wished to have crossed more often. She enlivens her environment, wherever she goes, by being herself. This quality enabled her to breathe life into the DSM-5, and inspires courage to follow one’s heart.

During my first SPA board meeting, as a graduate student representative, the board learned that a new contract with the publisher of the Journal of Personality Assessment (JPA) had left the society poised for a fairly dramatic revenue increase. The suggestion was raised, at first as a kind of jest that became, briefly, a serious consideration, that we might want to increase our reimbursement for the previous night’s dinner in light of this revelation. Dave Nichols said plainly and sternly that he wouldn’t go along – we had ordered the previous night with a particular arrangement in mind and the right thing to do was to stick to that. Everyone immediately knew that he was right. Even a brief brush with Dave’s work shows that he is kind and sharp and has a way with words, but his serious and abiding concern for the difference between right and wrong as he sees it is the quality that stands out for people who know him.

Reading Ety Berant’s chapter, an idea crystalized that had been in the back of my mind the last few times I have met with one of the students I described above, who feel ashamed about not having yet found their sheep. These students often have the narrow focus of racehorses with cheekpieces that concerns me – they want to be psychotherapists of a particular kind, in a particular setting, and with a particular degree, and don’t want to think about other possibilities. I get the impression that they want to narrow down the type of program to apply to so as to reduce information overload, and they want me to justify this kind of narrowing, help them do it, and give them the formula for how to succeed therein. A wish surges within me to slow the conversation down, and a fear emerges that anything I might say will be taken too seriously. Contrast this constricted feeling with how I felt after reading Ety’s chapter: a kind of calm, warm admiration. Ety strikes me as wise in a way that I would like to be with these students. She has had diverse and multilayered career and life, with a mix of responsibilities related to practice, clinic administration, research, and training. These roles have been synergistically woven together into a coherent gestalt, balanced against her personal priorities. Ety sets an example of how to live a life so as to achieve what many of my students hope for.

Irv Weiner is the only person in this book who has already written an autobiography. But how could I not ask him? At SPA, he is like the patron saint and guardian angel, the keeper of the history and peak of the pile. He has been the person that the people I look up to look up to since I began coming to SPA. When Irv speaks people listen, and that gives him space to speak softly and slowly. As one develops, these pedestaled people tend to come down to earth. But in Irv’s case, the aura persists for me, and in my observation of the social dynamics of SPA, it seems to persist for everyone else, too. Irv documents in this chapter, in his understated way, the impact he has had on mental health research, training, and practice, which has reached well beyond personality assessment and SPA. The winding path of Irv’s illustrious career would be nearly impossible to replicate. But this presence seems tied to something more universal, the essence of a revered person, whose legacy has been to leave the many things they have touched better off than before.

Virginia Brabender uses English real good. You might think, if you read her work but had not heard her speak, that she writes in her decorative way for effect, thesaurus by her side. But in fact, she makes English sound good all the time. Indeed, I have never personally known a North American who can flourish as well as she can. I get a similar experience when Virginia writes or talks as I do from people like Toni Morrison or Christopher Hitchens. There were times when Virginia and I served on the SPA board together, that I thought she could charm us all (well me, at least) into nearly anything with one of her stirring soliloquys. The incredible thing to me was that these were contemporaneous. They seemed written in advance, but in point of fact her linguistic swirls and ribbons are just cuts from the fabric of her lovely personality.

Bob Bornstein is one of the most distinctive and interesting people I know. His application of process dissociation to personality assessment is among the most important ideas in the last few decades in the field of personality assessment. It provides a principled, empirical, and profound vision for how to get us out of the horse-race model of test comparison to a more nuanced and sophisticated way of thinking about psychological assessment. It is embedded not only in his thorough knowledge of psychometrics, certain tests, and constructs like dependency, but also a much deeper theoretical foundation that can be linked, in his capable hands, with the work of Heisenberg, Kandinsky, and Rorschach. He is extraordinarily interesting to talk to, and I have been lucky to have the opportunity to do so fairly regularly over Manhattans at SPA, and more recently over the phone. It is sort of unusual to find an intellectual giant who is also a modest and charming person, with good taste in life partners, music, and cocktails. What more could a person want in a friend and colleague?

Nancy McWilliams is the only author of this book with whom I have not interacted personally, and thus her influence on me has been entirely indirect. But I’m not the only one: she is perhaps the most impactful personality assessment teacher – from the perspective of metrics like book sales – of her generation. I knew from reading her books that Nancy is a good writer, and holy moly, please see below. Her capacity to write elegantly about deeply painful experiences, to express strong feelings or controversial positions with warmth and sensitivity, and to build momentum to highly memorable lines, is breathtaking. Nancy’s chapter exemplifies how to reflect on how one’s own psychology impacts the way one thinks about the psychology of others. I was left wishing I could have gotten to know her better.

Bob Archer was one of the SPA presidents during the time I was on the board. For reasons of confidentiality and tact, I cannot give all of the specific reasons that I admire him. But suffice to say that there was a lot going on while he was president. The thing I admired about Bob was that he kept the ship steadily steered in the right direction – a skill he has presumably mastered while sailing on the actual sea. There were several times I saw him gracefully take lumps that rightfully belonged to others, for the sake of the society. He was always good humored and serious, measured and thoughtful. I thought to myself, if by some great mistake some poorly informed group of people ever entrust me with the responsibility for something as important as SPA, Bob would be my role model for how to conduct myself.

Yossi Ben-Porath was the first person featured in this book whom I met in person. It was in Hawaii, at the American Psychological Association session in which I presented my first poster (on my master’s thesis, having to do with the reliability of scoring the WAIS-IV). He encouraged me to submit the paper to Assessment, where he was an editor, and where the paper was ultimately published. I was naturally awestruck, and shocked that he would find this level of value in my work. I was struck in reading his chapter that he had had an experience similar to mine as a child informally assessing his classmates’ personalities. I suppose our futures seem to have a funny way of revealing themselves, if we listen closely enough. Yossi has been one of the most programmatic and influential scholars in applied personality assessment as researcher, mentor of an impressive number of influential scholars, editor, and workshopper during the last few decades. His career exemplifies the payoff of sticking to a good plan.

Nothing to see here, no big deal, just a world war and rationed shoes, a childhood cross-country trek, a world record in swimming, some trailblazing within some of the pillars of male-only academia. Just the most influential scholar of her generation on defense mechanisms and narrative assessment – in her second career. Phebe’s understated approach to her autobiography belies a career and a life that is so extraordinary that I cannot imagine it being replicated. I admit to feeling some level of intimidation when having interacted with Phebe at SPA but insist that it is because of my great admiration for her work and her life. I am very sorry that, because Phebe passe...