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Our meeting place is uniquely appropriate for paying homage to Helene Deutsch's life. To begin with, she was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, as are her son, Martin, and her long-time friend, Professor Victor Weisskopf, who suggested this beautiful site. Dr. Deutsch had a distaste for the conventional memorial services of her colleagues, always secular and scientific, but often held in ecclesiastical surroundings. Moreover, this building is itself fitting for Dr. Deutsch's place in the European intellectual and humanistic migration of the 1930's and 1940's. Built by an American and hailed as a brilliant example of “post-modernism,” G. M. Kallman's work harks back to the Bauhaus and Professor Gropius' teaching at Harvard, a product of the general interest in the new architecture that was introduced by the great Europeans fleeing from Nazi Germany. This intellectual migration included architects, psychoanalysts and physicists so distinguished that they seemed to create “new” professions. At least these three professions seemed especially prominent in Boston among the artists, scientists and scholars from many fields who transformed the cultural climate of this country within our own memory. Dr. Deutsch was an exemplary figure in this migration. She was among the first to come here and the longest-lived. Thus, her death at 97 is a landmark in the passing of an era.
Before I review the main events of her life, I will introduce our three principal speakers: Dr. Bernard Bandler, an analyst and Chief of Psychiatry (emeritus) at Boston University Medical School, knew her during the early, exhilarating days at MGH on Dr. Stanley Cobb's service. Dr. Gregory