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Donald Martin Kaplan was born on May 8, 1927 in the borough of the Bronx in the city of New York. He died at one o'clock on a sunny Tuesday afternoon on September 20, 1994 in Greenwich Village, across the street from his home, and office, and family. Each was deeply invested with his great passion of mind and heart.
Donald was a lyricist and dramatist. His psychoanalytic mind was sparked by the great dramas of human existence. He loved Shakespeare; and so it is a good place in which to begin to remember him:
And when he shall dieTake him, and cut him out in little stars.And he will make the face of heaven so fine,That all the world will be in love with night,And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Donald was a great light. He was a wonderful friend. He was a prince. The prince spreads his light upon his world. He brings youth, optimism, generosity of spirit and the promise of the reclamation of the kingdom from agedness and narrowed purpose. The double shock of Donald's death comes from his unfailing youthfulness.
Freud's ideas and ethical quest were Donald's passion and his love—never his fetish. Like Freud, Donald understood the difference between Krafft-Eing and Sophocles. Donald's understanding of human motivation was deeply informed by the drama of those great, overarching structures of the mind— ideals and morality, Eros and Thanatos.
The dynamics of the Freudian landscape—the Oedipus Complex, family romance, transference and the unconscious— were the stuff of everyday life for Donald, suffused with realness, continuously alive, and amazingly immune to dilution and repression. He could entrance students with a heart-leaping