John Frosch, Founding Editor

John Frosch, founding editor of JAPA, died February 2, 1999, at the age of eighty-nine. Jack leaves behind his devoted wife of sixty-five years, Annette; his sons Thomas, Professor of English Literature at Queens College, and James, a psychoanalyst in Boston; his daughter Gillian, a librarian in Maryland; and seven grandchildren. He also leaves behind his psychoanalyst nephew, William Frosch. Jack was a scholar, a teacher, and a friend—certainly an avuncular mentor to me, though we lacked the familial ties that he and Bill shared.

During my own tenure as editor of JAPA, Jack wrote a brilliant account of its founding and early years (1987), from which I will quote liberally. He foresaw, during his struggles to establish the journal, the difficulties that would plague us in time to come. Take for example a passage quoted from a report to the Executive Council in April 1972: “The anti-intellectual climate which prevails today finds as one of its earliest expressions an anti-analytic attitude existing in many areas. It is especially at a time like this that the wringing of hands by psychoanalysts and the bemoaning of the low state to which psychoanalysis has fallen are uncalled for. … It is the feeling of the Editor and Editorial Board that we have great reservoirs of strength, not the least in the excellence of some of our younger colleagues” (p. 335).

I choose this excerpt because it says so much about Jack, about psychoanalysis and its enduring place in the generation of new and sometimes unwelcome ideas, and about the periodic resurgence of antagonism toward our field. It also tells us about the man we memorialize. Devoted to the practice and study of psychoanalysis, he was a fierce defender of our cultural contributions and our scholarly and clinical relevance. Never cowed by criticism, he viewed controversy in terms of its potential for progress and believed optimistically in psychoanalytic education as a means of securing our future. Given our current plaints, the