Remembrances
Rebecca Smith Behrends
February 16, 1952 - September 11, 2010
Link to Memorial Service held September 26, 2011
Elizabeth Young-Breuhl
Announcement of Elizabeth Young-Breuhl's untimely death by Rosemary Balsam and Paul Schwaber:
December 6, 2011
Dear Colleagues,
We would like to write a few words to our community in remembrance of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, whom many of you will know died without medical warning (of a pulmonary embolism, at the age of 65) on December 1st. She was walking home, in Toronto, with her spouse Christine, having just enjoyed a concert. She collapsed and was unable to be resuscitated.
Elizabeth has been a close long term friend and colleague of ours, Paul having first known her at Wesleyan University, when she was appointed in the 1970s. She studied as a candidate in WNE for a few years in the 1980s, until she moved from Chester, Connecticut in the early 1990s to become a University Professor at Haverford College in Phildelphia. Subsequently, she graduated as an analyst from the Psychoanalytic Center of Phildelphia. It was through meeting Anna Freud's close colleagues here at WNE that she was invited to be Anna Freud's biographer. You likely know her powerful biographies of both Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, as well as her studies of philosophy, politics, feminism, prejudice, and biography. Lately she was living in Toronto with Christine Dunbar, also a psychoanalyst, to whom she was married in 2008. Her delight in her family and the next generations was joyous. Together Elizabeth and Christine were publishing intriguing experimental psychoanalytic projects, such as their history of psychoanalysis "Timeline," or the quirky psychoeducational films of Garrick Duckler (see appreciative JAPA reviews of their works by Leon Hoffman, and by the film critic David Sterritt). Elizabeth was an inspiring teacher, a ranging thinker and prolific writer, a tireless and supportive colleague, a passionate presence (who sometimes inspired hostility when she became impatient over matters of intellectual integrity), a deeply loving woman who lived her life with verve and involvement, and she was an endless source of exciting and visionary ideas. She will be hugely missed by those who knew her and those who know her writing. She had just become the editor of the Winnicott papers, and thus our entire field has lost this invaluable work that she would have done for us. We mourn a great friend and a great friend of psychoanalysis.
Link to NY Times Obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/us/elisabeth-young-bruehl-65-dies-probed-roots-of-ideology-and-bias.html