You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Our friend and colleague, Dr. Clarence P. Oberndorf, was born on February 16, 1882, and died on May 30, 1954.
In recent months our older friends and members and predecessors on the psychoanalytic scene have been passing from our midst in such swift succession that the feeling of loss becomes a pervading mood. For many of us they have been the objects of warm attachments, of heated but happily transient battles, and of growing appreciation, as we have moved through our own scientific adolescence. Among these "Obey, " as everyone thought of him and as many of us called him, held a unique position. It is a truism that man and his work are often one; and certainly to a unique degree the key to an understanding of Obey is through his life work. This is inscribed in the successive phases of his recurring interests, as manifested in his 120 scientific articles, and in his three books. In them one can observe the evolution of the widely diversified interests to which he devoted himself through many creative years.
He graduated from college in 1904, and from medical school in 1906; and from the time of his first immersion in Bellevue he turned toward neurology, then psychiatry, and finally psychoanalysis. Thus, he was an active participant and astute observer of this scene for fifty years; and the record of his adult years is the story of the last fifty years of American psychiatry. We have felt his presence as a watchful, friendly, often challenging, sometimes teasing, friend and critic. One of his papers was written in 1932, at the half-way mark in his productive life. It is called "Kidding, as a Form of Humor"; and it is pleasant to think of the kindly fun that Obey himself must have had in the writing of it. Characteristically in his own biography he teases himself as he starts to tell his story by quoting someone (I suspect that