a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

I happened upon Elisabeth’s obituary in the NY Times quite by accident this afternoon while bored at work. I had not seen her in many years but immediately felt an awful bloom of acid in the pit of my stomach. How terrible. EYB was a professor of mine in the 90s at Haverford College. In such a bland, PC atmosphere, Elisabeth and everything about her–her demeanor, her cowboy boots, her wild gray hair, her ideas–struck a dissonant and refreshing chord on campus. Not everyone was as taken as me, but I enrolled in every class she offered. And anyone who recognized and appreciated her specialness was OK in my book from then on. When I was a senior, I had urgent need for counseling and Elisabeth was there, pointing me in help’s direction. Years later, we reconnected in New York, and she helped me again, magnanimous as always. I felt better knowing she was out there, a force for truth and compassion. I will never forget her. Even her relatively small presence in my life was enough to leave a lasting impression. I cannot conceive of the loss of Ms. Dunbar. It is overwhelming for even an outsider to consider. But perhaps the tremendous and sorrowful love I feel tonight can somehow make some tiny bit of difference. I hope it is so.

Dear Elisabeth:

Wherever you are you will be deeply missed. I feel blessed I had the chance to meet you.

Marco

Elisabeth was truly a controlled life force, embracing life in both its tragic and comic dimensions. She was a serious and dedicated scholar, clinician and citizen. Her passion for justice matched her commitment to scholarship and clinical work. We were always edified and buoyed by our meetings with her and Christine. We were hoping to deepen this budding friendship in the near future. We are grieving the loss.

To all who were moved by Elizabeth’s life and work I offer my profound condolences. The sorrow from a life that has effected so many is great but is also proof of a life well lived.

Oscar Grossman

I had the pleasure to chair a NYFS scientific program in Washington, DC, at which Elisabeth Young-Breuhl was the presenter and I recall that experience with much fondness. I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to her loved ones.

Judy Setton

I am deeply grieved by Elizabeth’s sudden passing. She was one of the most remarkable intellects I ever had the fortune of encountering. Elizabeth’s incisive intelligence was matched by a heart full of benevolence and love towards her fellow human beings. Although I only met her very recently, her books and publications have accompanied me throughout my professional life. I have no words to express the gratitude I feel towards Elizabeth – her wisdom, generosity and warmth. May the heavens be clement and welcoming to this unique and fine woman.

I only had the chance to meet Elizabeth in her home in Toronto last spring, and was inspired by the character of her life, her warmth and her intellectual presence. I had planned to arrange an event in her honor and now this will have to take place en absentia.

Gregg Lambert

As I struggled with the question of how to move forward with my life yet keep the memory of my husband alive, Elisabeth said simple, “You will keep him in your heart, always”. And as I struggled with the advent of termination of our long-term therapy relationship, she said, “You will keep me in your mind”.
Only time will tell if I have consolidated her words and wisdom for living fully, richly and authentically in my mind, but I know for sure it will be effortless to keep her in my heart, always.

Dear Elisabeth:
I am not ready to let you go.
I will never forget the risk you took for me. I am grateful to you for the courage you showed by trusting that it was right–even if it was wrong. The phone call you made STOPPING me in my tracks that changed the course of my life in a single moment. Did I ever thank you for that? Did I ever thank you for giving me your trust?
I am not ready to let you go. I have so much more to learn from you!
I am not ready to let you go. You have been my rudder–gently sharing your guidance and helping me to stay in motion–especially in the storms.
I am not ready to let you go. Dear Elisabeth, how can I recover from the loss of you? You never taught me that!
I am not ready to let you go.
Love, Betsy

Ah, the fun of conversation and laughter and thinking with Elisabeth! We first met many years ago, but the keenness of the current loss is also the feeling that we were just now embarking on a real friendship. I know this is in the bucket of what no one is in charge of, but right now I want to shout that “It’s not fair!” And Elisabeth cared so much about the things that are not fair in life, but could and should be. I will carry with me the fervor of her activism and the echo of her wonderful laugh.

Elisabeth and I go back to our graduate school days at The New School. I have always felt that she was one of the most creative scholars of our generation as well as an absolute mensch. I had the privilege of publishing her when I edited The Psychoanalytic Review, where her contributions always needed so little editing. Getting together at parties and dinners was always a delight,her insights, whether on psychoanalysis or politics were on target and thought provoking. I saw Elisabeth not just as a friend of Ricki’s and mine but as a comrade in the struggle to create a better world for the next generations. I will truly miss her smile, comments, and sense of humor. Her death really shows how life is not fair, a fairness she cared so much about.

Elisabeth and I go back to our graduate school days at The New School. I have always felt that she was one of the most creative scholars of our generation as well as an absolute mensch. I had the privilege of publishing her when I edited The Psychoanalytic Review, where her contributions always needed so little editing. Getting together at parties and dinners was always a delight;her insights, whether on psychoanalysis or politics were on target and thought provoking. I saw Elisabeth not just as a friend of Ricki’s and mine but as a comrade in the struggle to create a better world for the next generations. I will truly miss her smile, comments, and sense of humor. Her death really shows how life is not fair, a fairness she cared so much about.

I have only spent some hours with Elisabeth, when I met her in New York during my work on an art project. She was then for me a famous author of the best biography of Hannah Arendt… I left New York having a new communication partner, she became my inner “another”, with whom I checked thoughts and acts. There is no end for such a talk.

I had begun reading Elisabeth’s blog several months ago and found it smart and sensitive. As a therapist and analyst, I found her psychodynamic perspective on politics and society were very engaging.

Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, my analytic alma mater, hosted Elisabeth only days before her death. That I was unable to attend that colloquium turned out to be especially stinging for me.

With respect and sadness,

Philip Claus

Elisabeth and my father, Peter Neubauer, were close colleagues and friends–and I will never forgot her generosity and insight when she spoke at his memorial in 2008, nor will I forget how she stayed in contact with my family since his death. It is more than sad to lose her now, and so soon, and I know my father, were he still alive, would want to sing her praises as a psychoanalyst, a brilliant writer, a friend.

I knew Elisabeth only through her writing and occasional correspondence. Such clarity, learning and intellectual energy: the world is now poorer.

I would like to pay tribute to a great lady and fine psychoanalyst whom I
never met, but whose wide ranging work in applied psychoanalysis, and compassionate humanism inspired me. Her life and work was and is a blessing to us all.

Brian Muir member APS & BPS

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s_For Love of the World_ has stayed with me hauntingly, not only as an way to ethically ground critical inquiry but also as a demonstration of how to self-reflectively engage the work of others we admire. I am glad to have learned from her but sad to have never met. Tanya Titchkosky

There was nothing that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl said, about anything, that did not wake me up, in the deepest sense teach me.

I have a million questions I want to ask her.

i wish she would have gotten more time to write, to express, to enjoy her life.

I wish I could have one more conversation or email exchange.

Rebecca Barber

I knew Dr Young-Breuhl as one of her analysands, having begun that relationship the fall of 1998 while I was in training at the Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University. She was a training analyst in Philadelphia, and faculty member at Haverford College. The intimacy of analysis came somewhat abruptly to a close June, 1991 when Dr. Young-Bruehl relocated to New York. Since then I continued my training with other analyists-psychotherapists-mentors and with that training, the essential self-examination. Not intended to detract from those others’ expertise who had that charge since the ending of the overt relationship as Dr. Young-Bruehl’s analysand, but her ability to plumb and mine the nature of the psychological apparatus, and enter into its boundless use of tropes was nothing less than a marvel to me. Her gift as recondite analyst and synthesizer, she gifted us as researcher, scholar, lecturer, and author. That I was her analysand, I live within her gifts perpetually. I once despaired as I contemplated her passing. I return again to her generous mothering. I only regret deeply having not told her the extent to which I cherished her.

from the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy:

We would like to add our condolences following Elisabeth’s death. She was deeply appreciated in this country, not only in the psychoanalytic community but in other psychotherapy circles and in universities.

Professor Andrew Samuels, Chair

Thank you for your work and your encouragement.

Sadly I did not have the opportunity to get to know Elisabeth. I have known Christine for many years and her relationship with Elisabeth was clearly a mutually pleasurable and beneficial one. My sincere condolences go to Christine and to all those who had the privelege to have known and loved Elisabeth

My last communication with Elisabeth followed my October Toronto visit and revolved around a discussion of the deeply moving eulogy she had written for her mother who had just passed away.

How shocking then to hear of Elisabeth’s death and to read her obituary.

I will always remember Elisabeth for her great warmth, her depth, her generosity of spirit, and her beautiful smile.

A great loss to our community and of course an immeasurable loss to Christine.

S/He who writes about cherishing, about being cherished and about the sanguine effects of both, ought rightly be cherished.

My condolences on the passing if Dr. Young-Bruehl. Wanted and needed to hear more from her- a very important voice and a great loss.

I met Elisabeth in 1983 when she interviewed me for a position at Wesleyan’s College of Letters. She was forthright, frank, probing, and encouraging. Indeed, I was her “replacement” for the year, something I could not possibly do or be, and yet we did become friends and colleagues, despite some strong disagreements and what sometimes felt to be a clash of personal style and political commitment. She made a strong and lasting impression on me, and my history would not be what it is without her. I am but one of many lives that were transformed by her.
Her biography of Arendt remains the definitive book on Arendt’s life, and it has spawned a new generation of scholars who seek to understand Arendt’s relation to Jewishness, to Israel, to the second World War, and to politics more generally. From Arendt, Elisabeth found a strong and consistent way not only to defend the importance of the public sphere, however shifting its definitions might be, but to insist as well that we have an obligation to struggle to formulate a “we” – a sense of an internally differentiated plural actor – guided by a commitment to equality and to judgment.
It was interesting that Elisabeth took a departure from Arendt as she turned increasingly to psychoanalysis as an interest, then a practice, and then a vocation. As a biographer, she wanted to understand a life, and to understand as well what one needs to know about oneself as one seeks to understand a life. There was a dual movement in both biography and in psychoanalysis: attending to the self who attends to the other in order, finally, to attend to the other well. I believe that this remained a struggle for her, a task, and a vocational imperative.
It was not surprising that even as an accomplished and internationally recognized analyst and author, she continued to write about social democracy. It was a term that meant more in Europe than in the United States, and yet it seemed that she wanted to find a way for it to mean more here. She was less a democratic socialist (than some of us) than a social democrat, and that meant that she was committed to rethinking “the social” in a way that Arendt never quite could (although she did in some ways point to the places she herself would not go). Social democracy was for Elisabeth a way to think about our fundamental obligations to one another, not just the ones I have to you, or you have to me, but the ones that make us into the unwieldy and conflicted “we” that we are. No one person speaks in the name of the we, and yet every person must think the world from the perspective of social equality and justice.
In her view, understanding the uniqueness of a life was not incompatible with a practice of remaking the world through judgments and practices that enact the justice by which they are guided. She moved between self and other, and movement defined her life and her vocation. A voice such as hers will not be replicated.

I had my first correspondence with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in August, 2001. I sent her an email after reading “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.” I told her I enjoyed the book and that I had read it because I wanted to learn more about this lady with my same last name of “Arendt.” She graciously responded, and there were more books read and more emails exchanged. She eventually asked me to read an article she had written on Hannah Arendt, pre-publication, and I was honored by her request. Then she asked me to read the manuscript of her book “Why Arendt Matters”, and when she included my name in the acknowledgments section of the book, I was both honored and humbled. I’ve read most of her books, the topics of which are so varied – biography, psychology, philosophy, politics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and now childism. She was a great lady with a brilliant mind. I will miss Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, and I will miss her email in my Inbox.

My condolences to her family in the USA and her family in Toronto.

I felt shocked and dismayed to hear of Elizabeth’s passing.It’s hard to grasp. Her great apartment in the East Village was the scene of so many pleasuable memories for me. And her dedicated work with homeless kids in the Lower East Side was remarkable for its kindness, intelligence and deep intention.

There really is NOBODY like her – period.

Elisabeth is sorely missed by Christine and all her community in Toronto. Elisabeth was immensely generous in sharing her knowledge with our study group last year.

I am so saddened at the loss of such a deeply dedicated and caring human being. I first met Elisabeth when I was running scientific programs for IPTAR and she presented many times for us. She always spoke out for people that were overlooked and damaged by society. I was overwhelmed by her speech at the Otherness conference when she spoke about homosexuality through the ages. It wasn’t just that she tried to educate people about their deep prejudice about so many issues but her breathe of knowledge of psychoanalysis, culture, history, politics, etc. was incredible. I have been following her blog for years and have been so happy for her that she had found such happiness with Christine and their grandchild and all the pleasure she was getting from reading Winnicott and putting together his work. What a terrible loss for all of us. My deepest condolences to Christine and all her dear friends. Truly an incredible person. There are few people that reach out and touch so many people in so many ways. It is shocking and very sad that she should have such an early death.

Elisabeth was a role model as a scholar, social activist, prolific writer, and analyst. I will always remember the interesting conversation we had over lunch after we both gave presentations at the conference for Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists in NYC. She was warm, open, and engaging. Her blog is fascinating reading. What a loss to our community! My heartfelt condolences to her wife, family, and close friends.

Ronnie Lesser

I am grateful to have heard Elisabeth speak. I was so moved and impressed by her that I immediately bought her book and have been a fan ever since. It is as though an important light in a sea of darkness has suddenly gone out. My deepest condolences to her family and friends. She was one in a million.

Elizabeth was a dear, if trans-Atlantic, friend of several decades. Like many others I am sure, I am still in shock. I saw and spent time with her in London just before her death and was stunned (as usual)by the depth and ‘mastery’ she had already attained of the Winnicott project. It is almost impossible to imagine as yet that one of the most alive peoople I know, is dead. In the gap opened up, I can only see and feel for Christine and their so warm, creative and energetic love.

Brillian, warm, candid, Elisabeth gave us so much when she visited Ottawa to speak and to teach. We are very saddened at her loss.
Our thoughts are with Christine and all others who mourn her.

From her colleagues at the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society

While I have admired Elisabeth’s mind for decades, beginning with my exposure to her writings on Hannah Arendt, Anna Freud, and the problem of prejudice, what stays with me is her passion. It is hard to believe that someone so alive can be gone. I will miss talking with Elisabeth about ideas, laughing with her about human foibles, lamenting with her the conceits and crimes of our era and culture. I will miss the pleasure of witnessing her relationship with Christine, whom she found later in life, and whose love sustained her in ways too deep to describe. She was a generous soul, completely unimpressed with her own remarkable qualities, curious about everything, always looking to understand and to help. The world seems much poorer without Elisabeth in it.

I was was in therapy with Elisabeth for nearly a decade and she carried my story with extraordinary wit, intelligence and grace. She encouraged me to speak things that were anathema in utterance, to the ears of others and sometimes my own. Her eye was clear and hawk sharp for seeing reality as is, but she communicated its gross indecencies with much compassion.

Elisabeth was a miraculous listener. Yes, she could hear great and small things in silence and beneath spoken words. She helped me negotiate a very difficult history and tilt it in creative directions. Her intellectual force and courage to speak out as a woman, a psychoanalyst, social activist and political philosopher was, and still is, stunning to me.

The last time we talked a few weeks ago she said how the role of the child who protests is a very lonely one. This recognition brought me comfort and inner peace, and also a feeling of not being quite so alone in her understanding of me. I learned from Elisabeth that this protest is essential within the dysfunctional family and also in the wider world of social injustice. Her incandescence will endure. But I find myself grappling with the question of an ending, which is, I know, the ending of our story together and how much I will miss her.

After a few weeks it is still very difficult to accept Elisabeth’s sudden death. Although I only have known her for just over a year, she made a great impression on me as a wise, witty and wonderful woman who was open to the life of others and the beauty of the world. Her generous conversations last summer in her and Christine’s great schoolhouse near Toronto meant a lot to me and helped me make some unexpected life changes. But there was also so much fun and laughter! In mourning her, I sing along with Johann Sebastian Bach’s moving and comforting closing choir of the John’s Passion, ‘Ruht Wohl’ – rest in peace, dear Elisabeth.

Elisabeth, your generosity of spirit remains with us, as does your own love of the world. By instinct, your rare and formidable intellect never prevented you from engaging with others as equals. Over the years you have shared with many of us your gifts of head and heart: the power to see clearly and speak directly, the energy to cherish and support those who need help, the courage to stand against injustice. But when you and Christine asked us to be the witnesses to your union, you gave us the most precious gift of all, a living image of the creative and mutually animating love that marriage aspires to. You will always be with us.

I am writing as Chair of the Winnicott Trust but also on my own behalf to add our condolences in this public forum to Christine and indeed to the psychoanalytic community generally where Elisabeth;s breadth of knowledge and humanity will be much missed.
Elisabeth inspired us all, initially leaving us slightly reeling at her capacity for sustained work of a uniformly exciting and scholarly kind. In the period she worked on the Collected Writings she achieved a massive amount and we intend to take the project forward on that basis.
She gave both inspiration and hope to the Trust from our first official contacts with her to our signing her to edit the Collected Writings. She was a powerhouse of energy and scholarship as she immersed herself in Winnicott and built on the deep knowledge of a specific period of British psychoanalysis that she had already gained from her impressive work on Anna Freud. We were all anticipating a future of lively debate as she brought this project to fruition!
But in addition to the intellectual challenges and dedication there was also the warmth and enthusiasm of the woman. Together with the deep love between her and Christine it all felt it had become, in so short a time, a confirming part of of our present and future.

I took a course with Professor Young-Breuhl (or EYB, as we called her) at Wesleyan in the early 80s. I was not enrolled in the College of Letters (I was a curious science major) and felt somewhat like a fish out of water in that environment. She noticed my reticence and went out of her way to be warmly encouraging while simultaneously challenging me to stretch my mind both in class and in private assessments of my work. She became one of my favorite teachers. I feel fortunate to have known her, however briefly, and am saddened by her untimely death.

Elisabeth was the truest of friends and an ideal colleague and co-author. I will miss her terribly and send my heartfelt condolences to Christine. My tribute to her will appear in American Imago, along with the paper we wrote together, “Why psychoanalysis Has No History.” The title is Elisabeth’s: a bit provocative, certainly playful, and serious. She was a great teacher.

The Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, where Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was a Scholar in Residence in 2011, misses her presence very much. Her last public appearance was on 28 November 2011, sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute and The Health Arts and Humanities Program, when she gave a public lecture titled “D.W. Winnicott Revises Psychoanalysis, 1945-1971.”

This talk was recorded, and can be viewed here:
http://www.humanities.utoronto.ca/elisabethYoungBruehl

I am deeply saddened that I will never get the chance, now, to get to know Elisabeth better. We just met this year and had begun what I had hoped was going to be a long friendship. I’m grateful that we have her books, her articles and her blog, but she was more than the sum of her words, however brilliant and graceful they are. With great sadness, then, I send my condolences to Christine who has lost a vibrant, loving partner in life.

@Kim Yates
Thank you for this precious gift of Elisabeth’s last lecture…words escape me.

Long before we met her, Elizabeth’s extraordinary scholarship was well known to us through her superb works on Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt. But these did not prepare us for the vibrant woman we met and got to know over the past six years. The force of her intellect and her magnetic personailty created a richness of experience to every encounter. She was a generous and caring woman, and a loving and devoted partner to Christine. She adored Christine’s daughter Zoe, and her family. We deeply miss her and send our love and condolences to Christine and her family.

I have learned from many teachers, lecturers and supervisors who were edifying but Elisabeth was electrifying. I attended every presentation of hers that I possibly could and always came away feeling as if I had been somewhat transformed. Her passionate commitment to the subject matter at hand accounted for some of this, it was as if it mattered deeply to her that she do justice both to the material being conveyed and to the people attending to the material. The breadth of her perspective and the force of her intellect shed important new light on many aspects of psychoanalysis, which was bracing and energizing for me. I will always be grateful for the opportunity I had to know her and learn from her.

Dec. 10, 2011

Dear Christine,

I first met Elisabeth in January 1971 as a high school junior who had stumbled into a course that she was teaching on Saturday mornings at the New School called “Philosophical Problems in Literature.” The syllabus included readings of Beckett, Camus, Kafka, Benjamin, Freud, Dostoyevsky and Weil, and if that was not sufficient to eliminate the dungeon walls of an adolescent’s mind, there was Elisabeth herself, appearing each Saturday morning as if she had not slept the night before, coffee cup in hand, setting herself down, fumbling in her bag for tobacco and rolling papers. She was young enough to be an older sibling, but already presented an authority of someone older, wiser. At once cool and impassioned, affectionate and brusque, decisive and sensitive, her assurance and her delight in us worked as an intoxicant that exhilarated all of us in the class. There were anecdotes of her most absently poet husband, of a student protest that they had recently had at the New School, of Arendt and her émigré circle. To put it as simply as I know: the experience of that class opened a door onto a path along which I still walk.
Over the next decade, Elisabeth became a guide, a mentor, a friend, encouraged me to explore what mattered most to me and how I might incorporate these passions into whatever life course I might choose. Our paths crossed again fifteen years ago over my interest in publishing some of Arendt’s work. The presence of Elisabeth in my life again over the last decade has been a tremendous joy. Her insistence on attending to what she cared about, her clarity, her passionate mindfulness became more admirable, more inspiring. She was irrepressible, possessed of a unique blend of idealism and practicality that refused to accept something was impossible. That she is no longer here simply defies everything she stood for.
I hope that the devastating loss is offset by the knowledge of how much you gave her, how much pleasure—that you, and only you, allowed her to be exactly the person she wanted to be.

Fondly,
Dan

In October 2010, Elisabeth and Christine visited the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands), invited by Soeterbeeck Programma. Elisabeth delivered an impressive Hannah Arendt Lecture, and we were very happy to meet her and Christine. We were impressed by Elisabeth’s warm, inviting and intelligent personality – it was a great pleasure to be in her and Christine’s company during some days.
We, the colleagues from the Soeterbeeck Programma, Radboud University, were shocked to hear about Elisabeth’s sudden death. We want to express our sympathy and to send our sincere condolences to Christine and her family.