In Memoriam: Bruce Ruddick (1913-1992)

Bruce Ruddick, a founding member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, died in White Plains, N.Y., on 4 December 1992 at the age of 77. He is survived by his wife Dorothy, a well known painter, and by his three daughters, a granddaughter, and a brother and sister.

Born in Montreal into a distinguished medical family, Bruce Ruddick received his undergraduate and medical education at McGill University and his analytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. From 1952 to 1957 — those very critical years for the establishment of a psychoanalytic nucleus in Canada — Ruddick, who was practising psychoanalysis in Montreal, was instrumental in many of the initiatives which led to the formation of the Canadian Society (CPS). Although he moved to New York in 1957, he maintained his ties with the CPS and for a number of years commuted to Montreal as a training analyst, teaching at both English and French sections of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis.

In New York, besides his active psychoanalytic practice, Ruddick was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Medical School and adjoint professor of psychology at Columbia University (1957-1983). He has contributed several articles to the analytic literature, and was a member of the editorial board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly from 1960 to 1975.

Bruce Ruddick was a writer and a poet, the founder of Preview, the Canadian literary journal published between 1942 and 1946. His poetry has appeared in the Toronto literary quarterly Exile, and a book of collected poems has been published in the United States.

I first met Bruce at McGill when I was an undergraduate and he was a medical student, and we soon discovered that we shared a strong interest in psychoanalysis Our paths crossed again in New York during training; as well as our passionate discussions of analysis we