In Memoriam

On November 13, 1950, Louis S. Weiss died suddenly from a heart attack in his home in New York City. With his death, psychoanalysis in America lost a staunch friend. For nearly twenty years Louis Weiss had freely and generously donated his services as counsel, first to the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and then to the American Psychoanalytic Association. As in everything, he gave of himself with wisdom, imagination, strength, and humor.

Louis Weiss was born on February 7, 1894, in New York City, where his father was an eminent lawyer and his mother a botanist of considerable skill. In his childhood, the family lived on a farm at 168th Street, overlooking the Hudson River, approximately where the Columbia University Medical Center now stands. In summer they lived in Maine; and throughout his life Louis Weiss retained his love of the country, of woods, and of lakes and streams well stocked with trout and salmon. He attended the Horace Mann School, Yale (1915), and Columbia Law School (1920), where he was Editor of the Law Review. Every step in his academic career was marked by kindly, humorous leadership among his contemporaries, and at the same time by brilliant scholarship. Whether it was Greek or History or Literature or the Law, he was always asked to remain in the academic world to teach that particular field. He never yielded to the strong lure of the scholar's life, however, and went on to a professional career which was immediately successful, both in a worldly sense and in the many social, political, educational, philanthropic, and communal causes which turned to him for help. At the time of his death, he was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the New School for Social Research, Director of the American Council on Race Relations, Trustee of the National Opinion Research Center, head of the Legal Division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Director and Vice President of the United States Committee for