Sidney Tarachow 1908–1965

The untimely death of Sidney Tarachow has deprived the psychiatric and the psychoanalytic community of one of its most distinguished members. There have been and will be many tributes to his personality and to his many human and professional merits. Here we wish to stress only certain points which have a special bearing on our Journal in whose development he took a personal and active interest from its very beginning.

Sidney Tarachow was a dedicated psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a great teacher, and as such held many important positions, clinical, administrative, editorial and didactic. His rare intellectual qualities endowed him eminently for excellence in all these endeavors.

In addition to being an exacting scientist with an excellent neuropsychiatrie background, he was a true humanist. In our time and age of far reaching specialization, he could truly say of himself: Homo sum, et nihil humani a me alienum esse puto.

This deep humanistic interest, grafted on the stem of genuine talent for sympathy and understanding, led to his special interest in applied psychoanalysis. He presented us with the rare blend of a first class clinician and an explorer of the unconscious mainsprings of culture.

Himself an accomplished artist, he loved the arts and wrote “On certain examples of late medieval ecclesiastic art,” on “Psychoanalytic Observations on the Medium and the Telephone, by Gian Carlo Menotti” and a profound study of the theater “Circuses and Clowns.”

With a good background of Jewish scholarship, supplemented by the study of the beginnings of Christianity, he gave us two important psychoanalytic studies of religion: “St. Paul and early Christianity” and “Judas, the Beloved Executioner.”

All these studies revealed profound and thorough scholarship and, like his psychoanalytic and psychiatric publications, were characterized by originality and impeccable lucidity.