Warmly yours, Erv: the enduring enchantment of Erving Polster

This paper emerged from the inextricability of pain and pleasure. The private sinking that follows painful news took hold of me, like the gravitational force that grief is, as I found out about Erv Polster’s death earlier this year. Alongside it, slowly, but reliably, its counterpart, pleasure showed up. It arrived in the form of an appetite, impossible to ignore, to pull together some of Erv’s ideas and sentiments. Consequently, I spent the last few months, reading his poetic narration, listening to his voice, discovering and rediscovering his inclusive, unpretentious contributions that Lynne Jacobs once branded ‘sneakily brilliant’ (Jacobs, 2007, 1.18:20). I open by framing his work in a central theme I have come to think of as the essence of Erv’s offering. This will be followed by three lessons I integrated by observing Erv in his therapy demonstrations over the years, and an outline of one of his key theoretical contributions that I find valuable. The final section is a personal substitute for a clinical example, a snapshot of an internal conversation with Erv, capturing some of the themes I touch on in this paper. Keywords Erving Polster, contact, therapeutic technology, tight therapeutic sequences, introjection, integration, humanity, sentimentality