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  • Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: A Tribute
  • Murray M. Schwartz (bio)

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.

Hamlet, I, iii

With shocking suddenness, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl died on December 1, 2011 at the age of sixty-five. In a sign of our times, within hours her Wikipedia entry recorded the event with brutal finality, even as the news echoed through the networks of relatives, friends, colleagues, and students. “Pulmonary embolism, returning from a concert.” A vibrant and rich life seemed transformed in no time into a stream of personal and public tributes. The summing up began, and it continues, but a sense of unreality attends her stunning and abrupt loss. Words pour into the void.

Elisabeth died in medias res (she would have liked the Latin phrase), as she was preparing to celebrate the publication of her latest book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (2012). During the previous months the entries in her blog, Who’s Afraid of Social Democracy?, had been arriving on the internet with characteristic regularity and she was immersed in her latest massive project, a multi-volume definitive edition of the works of D.W. Winnicott. Also yet to come was a book about dreams that symbolize the self and its development, which she had alluded to periodically; and, no doubt, we could have expected the regular gifts of essays and reviews. Her disciplined production of important work was astonishing. Where others would be depleted by the labor of writing, she was like the Biblical burning bush, energized by her own creativity and calling. Her work fills a shelf in my study.

Elizabeth’s prolific energies were matched by the enormous generosity that animated her family, friends, and professional relationships of all kinds. “Everyone should know that they [End Page 135] always will have a bed to sleep in; I must be a true child of the 60s,” she once said, as she offered me keys to her East Village apartment when she was traveling. Even the analytic couch was available for a nap before catching an after-meeting train. She would e-mail drafts of papers for advice and was always making herself available to others. “In haste” was a common sign-off, but the attentiveness was not hasty. She loved to create mutuality, and often invited collaboration. For Elisabeth, “social democracy” was a way of life, not an ideological label. The tributes to her are replete with references to her insightful maternal presence, and her humor. In “The Biographer’s Empathy With Her Subject” (in Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives, 1999), she wrote, “Empathizing involves . . . putting another person in yourself, becoming another person’s habitat.” “But this,” she added, “depends upon your ability to tell the difference between the subject and yourself” (p. 22). Winnicott’s concept of “concern” comes to mind.

Elizabeth’s famous biographies of Hannah Arendt (1982) and Anna Freud (1988) would have been enough to secure her legacy, but she played many other roles with equal devotion. Their biographer was also their student, and as these women became part of her, she extended their examples in her own style of empathic interpretation. As a master teacher herself, Elisabeth combined Hannah Arendt’s deep erudition with Anna Freud’s clinical touch, bringing the best of the intellectual life into alignment with exquisite analytic sensitivity to the nuances of character and developmental histories. The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996), another monumental achievement, is intellectual history, sociology, literary criticism, anthropology, and psychoanalysis all at once. Few writers in the entire history of psychoanalysis—perhaps only Freud himself—could match her range of reading from the Greeks to the present. She brought our understanding of prejudices of all kinds to an unprecedented level of sophistication. Where others promoted univocal or reductive ideas—as sometimes Freud himself did in his overgeneralizations and changing dualities—Elisabeth found precise and appropriate complexities—obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic styles of pre-judging, each with different sources, aims, and relational consequences. Sexism, [End Page 136] racism, homophobia, and now childism, became plural actions, individual strategies that fed as they were enabled by group styles of diminishing human...

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