Friday, August 7, 1987.

Freud drew out his watch fob and stared at it unhappily for some
moments, then put it away again.

—Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from

the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

I was thirty three years old and worked at H&H. It was the last
day for summer interns Tom Veatch, a University of Virginia
student, and Brett Rome, a student at Princeton. They were
returning to college in the fall. Veatch said he wanted to become a
doctor and mentioned he had an interest in psychiatry. As a
farewell gift, I gave Tom a copy of David Viscott’s book, The
Making of a Psychiatrist. Craig D. was taking off that afternoon for
a one-week vacation in Miami. I had purchased a book for Craig,
Character and Culture, a collection of non-clinical essays by Freud.
I had read the book when I was eighteen years old, and it whetted
my interest in Sigmund Freud and his creation, psychoanalysis,
which focused—in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes mystery—
on unraveling an individual’s concealed secrets.

At noon, our department’s team went out to lunch with our

supervisor, Miriam to celebrate Brett Rome’s departure. Once we
arrived at the restaurant, I sat down between Craig and a summer
intern named Tom McIsaac, a law student at Catholic University.
McIsaac said to me, “You’re right-handed.” I said, “How do you
know that?” McIsaac said, “Because your watch is on your left
wrist.” I said, “You’re a sleuth.” A few weeks later, at McIsaac’s
sendoff dinner at an Italian restaurant prior to returning to law
school in the fall, McIsaac mentioned the movie, The Seven Percent
Solution, a 1976 Oscar-nominated British-American mystery film
about a fictional encounter between Sherlock Holmes and his
medical doppelgänger, Sigmund Freud. Holmes and Freud, both
sleuthhounds, seemed to fixate on details that initially appear to
be trivial, or to weigh the clues in an entirely different manner
from everyone else, despite having received the same information.
Was Tom McIsaac a fan of Sherlock Holmes and sleuthing?

At lunch on August 7, McIsaac and Craig bantered in what

seemed to be a hyper-masculine exchange. Craig made a snide
comment, calling into question the masculinity of members of
the Princeton football team. Was Craig unintentionally revealing
jealousy of Brett Rome, the Princeton student?

Upon graduation from law school, McIsaac practiced at a large

firm but thereafter embarked on a second highly successful career
in the technology industry. Did McIsaac, even in law school, have
the unconscious sense that he would ultimately abandon the
practice of law? I recollect a conversation the two of us had in
which McIsaac, talking about my work history, specifically, my
having obtained a law license, but later embarking on what he
called—with obvious sarcasm—my “second career” as a paralegal.
Was there a psychological connection between McIsaac’s facetious
comment about my “second career” as a paralegal and his own
later decision to start a second non-legal career?