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When Samuel Lipton died on July 13 our Society and the psychoanalytic community lost a unique and irreplaceable member.
Sam was born in Detroit on October 30, 1915. Thus, he would have been 69 one week from today. His father was a physician; he lost his mother in his boyhood. I believe these two circumstances played a decisive role in his choice of profession and in the development of a deep idealizing devotion which underlay an often deceptively cryptic exterior. Always an outstanding student, Sam received an A.B. at the University of Michigan in 1936 and an M.D. in 1939, close to the top of his class. Following internships at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Staten Island and the Detroit Receiving Hospital, he was a psychiatric resident at the Cincinnati General Hospital 1941–1942. Like so many residents of Maurice Levine, he was inspired to pursue the study of psychoanalysis, an interest that was further fueled by his subsequent experience with analysts in the army. Also during this year, he undertook the treatment of a woman with a classical case of dissociated personality. He saw her one hour a day from July to May, then wrote a paper which was published in the Psychiatric Quarterly in 1943. The article was promptly included by Fenichel in his discussion of the syndrome in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. This was awesome to us who began our training when Sam was still a candidate. Rereading this article recently, I was struck by the thoroughness and maturity of style of a first–year psychiatric resident. Sam always radiated maturity and competence. He never seemed like a student.
Cincinnati was followed by three war years in the army in neuropsychiatric installations, where he attained his captaincy. He served overseas eighteen months in the South Pacific in Bora Bora and Guadalcanal. In