Obituary: In Memoriam: Henry Krystal

Henry Krystal, psychoanalyst and expert on the psychological impact of the Holocaust, died from complications of Parkinson’s disease on October 8, 2015. He was 90 years old. Dr. Krystal had been professor and interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, where he was professor emeritus at the time of his death.

Dr. Krystal’s studies of survivors of Nazi death camps were an outgrowth of his evaluations, conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, of more than one thousand applicants for reparations from the German government for psychological difficulties stemming from their incarceration. Krystal described these evaluations as extremely taxing as they evoked his own memories of captivity. Captured by the Nazis at the age of 14, he had survived incarceration and torture in camps including Starachowice, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bobrek, as well as a death march between Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. He was the only member of his family to survive the war.

Krystal completed college and medical school in Detroit, where he had been taken in by relatives. He was mentored by John Dorsey, MD, a former student of Sigmund Freud and chairman of psychiatry at Wayne State University in Detroit. After completing psychiatric training and then working at Detroit Receiving Hospital, Krystal completed analytical training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and entered private practice.

In the early 1960s, Krystal chaired a landmark series of international symposia on psychological traumatization (later known as PTSD). These conferences produced the materials published in Massive Psychic Trauma, edited by Dr. Krystal and published in 1968. That volume highlighted features common to survivors of the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and other extreme psychological traumas. The volume helped make the case for the existence of a lasting psychological syndrome resulting from psychological traumatization. Krystal’s other books include Drug Addiction: Aspects of Ego Function, Psychic Traumatization, and his magnum opus, Integration and Self-Healing. His writings are distinguished by their deep humanism, informed by his personal experiences, as well as by their broad foundations in psychoanalysis, clinical psychiatry, the arts, philosophy, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

Krystal’s clinical observations suggested that psychological traumatization impaired the individual’s capacity to use emotions to guide self-regulatory and adaptive behavior. He noted that under stress, traumatized and addicted individuals tended to lose the capacity to accurately identify and express their emotional state. Instead, traumatized individuals tended to experience emotions primarily as physical sensations, and to regulate internal emotional distress through action or “freezing.” This tendency left them more likely to use impulsive behavior and addiction as coping strategies.

Over decades, Krystal developed and refined psychotherapeutic techniques that began by enabling people first to tolerate, then label, then explore, and finally embrace their emotional distress, so that they could understand and grow from their traumatic experiences. His theoretical, clinical, and therapeutic writings have informed generations of scholars and clinicians. His work laid a clinical foundation for the links between trauma and dissociative states. It also foreshadowed the development of novel therapeutic approaches to PTSD.

Dr. Krystal’s contributions were recognized with many honors, including the Pioneer Award of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, the Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Tikkun Olam (Healing the World) Award of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

Dr. Krystal is survived by his wife, Esther Krystal, M.Ed., M.S.W. He is also survived by his sons, John and Andrew Krystal, who are professors of psychiatry at Yale and Duke Universities, respectively, their wives Dr. Bonnie Becker and Ellen Harnick, and three grandchildren, Hannah, Samuel, and Hanan.