I started to cry the second this unexpected e-mail arrived from the Psychoanalytic Society of New York.

Dr. Marianne Goldberger, the first person I ever turned to for help, had died months ago. Today, the Psychoanalytic Society invited me to her memorial service with remarks and a video of my memories.

It was a virtual remembrance of one of the most wonderful people I had ever met and one of the most influential people in my life.

Every time I look at this photograph, I cry.

This was the face of the woman who gave me the most remarkable and transformative experience of my life.

I do not believe I will ever meet or know anyone like her in my lifetime.

It seems like another world when I first went to see Dr. Goldberger, and I guess it was. She was very much of another time, and I wonder if there are any longer such people – so brilliant, so graceful, so educated, so warm.

I was the CBS Morning News executive producer and going to pieces. The pressure of that job brought up all of the old demons in my life. My daughter was just born, and I was wracked with fear and pain.

I loved being a reporter but hated being a boss. My life was one continuous panic attack, and that was tearing me up from the inside.

Dr. Goldberger was a  Freudian analyst, trained in Vienna’s classical way, where analysis was invented. Analysis was, for years, the gold standard of mental health treatment.

I first met her in Baltimore when she was training to be an analyst and where I fell apart and had my first silent breakdown. She helped me, then moved to New York soon after I met her.

I moved there later, and we connected again.

The therapy Freud created was meant to release repressed emotions and experiences, make the unconscious conscious, bring about a cathartic (healing) experience so that the patient can be cured of his or her neuroses and helped.

Our world has little time or money to pause life for analysis, which takes years at its best. We are all too distracted and too busy.

The primary idea behind psychoanalysis is that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

At the time I became an analysand, analysis was considered the most profound and most penetrating form of psychotherapy. It required a tremendous commitment of time and determination to get through it, and it was considered life-changing.

It was certainly an elitist’s treatment. Who else had the time or the money?

Analysis barely exists now, except for the very wealthy.

Few health insurance companies will pay for it, and most modern therapy is done in a more focused, limited way: we don’t need to penetrate every detail of the past anymore; we are dynamic and practical, we focus on the problem, not the cause and move on.

Freudian analysis has been overtaken by many different forms and views of therapy.

I will always be grateful I got to experience it for four or five years with a renowned student of the form, Dr. Marianne Goldberger. I saw myself in a new way; it was the beginning of a lifelong process of opening up.

Sometimes I thought she was perhaps too nice to challenge me, but then I just realized she was nice. It was who she was.

In analysis, there is a period where the patient transfers love and feeling onto the analyst. It’s called “transference,” and I felt that for Dr. Goldberger, but that is a phase, and the experience ended up being about much more than that.

She helped me, a lost young man, find the truth about myself or at least start the process of trying. I didn’t know it would take a lifetime, but she did. She told me.

She was an exotic person to me, a purebred European intellectual from another age. I was, I admit, in awe of her intellect and presence.

I was always fascinated by and drawn to psychoanalysis, the deepest and most expensive and transformative kind of therapy. It suited me in every way. I wanted to go deep; I needed to go deep.

I also balked at submitting to her or anyone else.

For most of the first two years of my analysis, I refused to lie on the couch or speak. Dr. Goldberger would sit looking at me, that warm smile never entirely leaving her face, her hair in a bun.

When I mentioned my obstreperousness to her, she shrugged and said, “it’s okay, it’s your time and your money. You are doing what you need to do. When you are ready, we’ll talk about it.”

And so we did. Since she wasn’t going to fight with me, I gave it up.

Dr. Goldberger was a Freudian, of course. She was born in Austria and studied with Anna Fraud, Sigmund Fraud’s daughter. The protocol was demanding, I agreed to see her four days a week for an hour session each time.

I never knew the details of her move to America, she never spoke of it.

I had only met one other woman in my life like Dr. Goldberger. She was also Jewish, a brilliant intellect, and a refugee from the holocaust. That was Hannah Arendt, the famed moral philosopher who turned the world upside down when she went to Israel to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Hers was the only college course I took from beginning to end before I dropped out. She is also no longer alive. How lucky I was to have met both of them.

Arendt was the one who coined the idea of the banality of evil. I always associated the two as somehow being connected. I doubt they even know each other.

I suppose Arendt might have met Dr. Goldberger at some brainiac party in New York, I can’t say, but they were always “the two women” in my mind; they seemed to tower over everyone else in their dignity and intellect.

If they had met, it would have been quite a conversation.

Dr. Goldberger’s office was on the ground floor of a Park Avenue Mansion; I had never seen anything quite like it. I ran into many famous people in her waiting room; I’ve never disclosed their identities to anyone.

No one in my office knew where I went every day at lunchtime; I could never have lunch with anyone. I was a mystery.

The CBS health plan paid for every penny, no matter how long it might take.

And in so doing, I undertook this extraordinary journey of the mind, one which is no longer accessible to people like me but affected my life in so many ways.

The funny thing about Dr. Goldberger was my realization over time that she liked me and admired me, something that never crossed my mind in our sessions. She saw the good in me, something I have never quite been able to see.

She got me to pause in my terror and rage and meet the person behind it.

I liked her from the first. Although she was formidable, nothing was intimidating about her, not even when she called me out on a lie or loss of perspective.

I could always make her laugh, which made her crazy. She would smile and nod her head but couldn’t hide the laughter. But I could never fool her or hide from her.

She guided me through the painful times in my less.

Unlike contemporary therapists, she wanted to hear every detail of my life, often more than once. She diagnosed my free form anxiety and prescribed some valium to help me sleep at night. (I took valium for 30 years before giving up any addictive drugs.)

When I started talking, it was as if we talked for years. My life just poured out of me. It needed to get out.

When I was trashing myself for not living a moral life, I remember her nodding and smiling and saying very softly: “Mr. Katz, I came from Vienna just before World War II. You’re really not that bad, I can assure you.”

I laughed out loud and saw the wisdom in that statement; she was bringing me down to earth. She was showing me that self-hatred is neither noble nor useful.

She told me to ease up on myself and not take myself so seriously.  I learned that day that I just wasn’t as important as I thought I was. Nor as bad. That was liberating.

I saw Dr. Goldberger for about four years, and then I moved to upstate New York. I remember saying goodbye; there was no drama or emotion, just that smile and a nod.

“I’m always here,” she said.

After I moved, she always found a way of reaching out to me and reminding me that she was always there. I’d heard that Freudian and their patients never really said goodbye.

When I broke down before meeting Maria and sought a therapist’s help in Saratoga, I called Dr. Goldberger and asked if she would speak to the therapist, who wanted to talk to her about me.

“Of course,” she said, “but why didn’t you come to me? I know you better than anyone.”

I don’t know why I didn’t go back to her. Perhaps it was because there was no one to pay for analysis anymore, and I didn’t want to ask her for help And I needed someone who lived nearby, not four hours away.

She was already retired by then, but we did talk for a while, and I remember that warm feeling of hope and understanding that she generated. She really did know me better than anyone else, and perhaps better than anyone will ever know me.

My new therapist was a dynamic social worker, far from the slow and agonizing analysis pace. She was remarkable in a different way.  There, we worked quickly, and in two years, I  had healed enough to leave therapy and go on with my life.

My new therapist has helped me get my life back. This was what I needed then.

But there is no longer anything like the grace, leisure, and time of my analysis, of that huge and beautiful office on Park Avenue,  of that brilliant and dignified woman, of my hearing my own voice for the first time.

I was astonished to be invited to Dr. Goldberger’s Memorial Service, to be held online in the Spring. I don’t know and may never know how this came about, how I got on the list of people worthy of coming to her memorial service.

I knew Dr. Goldberger had died last year, but I did not expect to ever hear from her again. She opened up something very deep in me with grace, humor, and yes, I think love.

I often think of her sitting in her Elizabethan Chair in that beautiful room, the hum of Park Avenue outside the window, the beautiful paintings on the wall.

I think of her watching me, smiling at me, listening to me.

Perhaps she was the mother I always wanted to have – honest, nurturing, and accepting.

I cry every time I see that photograph; it perfectly captures her spirit. She had given up her bun, by them, and her sometimes severe gaze. But it was so very much her.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at it without crying.

Perhaps she just wanted to be remembered. Perhaps she just wanted me to feel good about myself by knowing someone as impressive as she was would like me to honor her at her final service.

I know there’s a message for me in there somehow. Eventually, I’ll figure it out.