Max Schur: Freud's Doctor and My Supervisor

One evening in October 1969, I took the train from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and walked to the El Dorado at 300 Central Park West for my weekly analytic supervisory session with Max Schur. I was feeling cheated because he had cancelled my session the week before for the first time in the almost two years that he had been my supervisor. Helen, his wife, met me at the door of their apartment, her face expressing the sadness that was then conveyed in words: “Marvin, Max is dead.” That was how I learned that I had lost my teacher, my supervisor, and my friend.

I had met Helen before knowing Max. She was a child psychiatrist during my years of psychiatric residency training at Kings County Hospital, and in 1959 we had coauthored a paper published in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. I had been a friend and colleague of Helen's for years, and of course I was aware (and in awe) of Max's reputation as Freud's physician, but I did not meet him until perhaps five years later when our class of psychoanalytic candidates began attending Friday evening seminars in his home/office. Later, the psychoanalytic training program assigned him to be my individual supervisor.

I recall that it did not take long before his personal warmth melted away any anxiety I felt on meeting this famous man. While the anxiety disappeared, the awe remained and was constantly refreshed by his erudition, which was not limited to psychoanalysis. There is one example of this that remains fixed in my memory after 50 years. My analysand, a young man whose narcissm was not matched by his education, regularly attempted to impress me with his intellectual attainments. On one occasion he did this rather ostentatiously by quoting the phrase, “Many are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man,” which he attributed to Aeschylus. I had not the vaguest idea of the author of the phrase, and presented it to Max simply as an example of what was occurring in the transference. However, Ma