<p>Allan Frosch, who died on October 28, 2016, at the age of 78, was esteemed&nbsp;as a psychoanalyst, teacher, mentor and writer; he also was&nbsp;treasured as a friend and colleague. The qualities that brought him such&nbsp;high regard were evident: a keen intelligence, integrity, thoughtfulness,&nbsp;careful scholarship; he had a serious demeanor but was kind, warm,&nbsp;engaging and without self-importance. He also had a merry disposition&nbsp;and could be fun to be with.<br />
It was apparent that psychoanalysis was the perfect field for Allan,&nbsp;and that he was deeply involved in and loved the work. I knew him best&nbsp;as a member of a small group in which we met together for nineteen&nbsp;years. Our mission was to read our way through the twenty-three volumes&nbsp;of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of<br />
Sigmund Freud. We sought to question, clarify, explicate and appreciate&nbsp;what we read, and Allan excelled at the task. Our own experiences as&nbsp;clinicians contextualized our understanding, and as we went along we&nbsp;often brought up vignettes from treatments we each were conducting to&nbsp;provide illustrations or pose conundrums. Such instances offered a good&nbsp;sense of what Allan was like as a therapist, and how sens itive and astute&nbsp;an analyst he was. He&rsquo;d had an early career as an actor, and that proclivity&nbsp;to capture the essence of another was carried forth into his analytic&nbsp;work, where it funded the empathic disposition that so well informed&nbsp;his clinical understanding.</p>