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DAVID DIED SUDDENLY and unexpectedly, leaving us in a state of shock and deep sadness. As his friend the poet Robert Zend said when talking about death, “This is what things are like when a period is placed in the middle of a sentence.”
David's mother was descended from United Empire Loyalists and came from Saint John, New Brunswick. His father emigrated from Scotland as a young man. David was a child prodigy and at the age of fifteen came to McGill to study English literature. He continued at the University of Toronto with a master's thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses. It seemed that one of his life quests was to ponder the meaning of life through literature.
David felt that it was by a stroke of luck that he landed a position at the CBC in his early twenties, and became a producer for the radio program Ideas. Among his many programs was one about Carl Jung. Reportedly, it was through doing this program that he decided to enter medical school to learn more about life and the human soul.
His postgraduate training in psychiatry took place at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center. A rich clinical experience at Bellevue led to an interest in crisis intervention. He ran the Emergency Psychiatric Services at the Montreal General Hospital for a number of years while pursuing his psychoanalytic training and working as a psychoanalyst.