A Man for All Seasons

Dr. Richard Lasky died on April 10, 2023, a short time after his 80th birthday, following a long illness. He was a charismatic, brilliant psychologist and psychoanalyst who made major contributions to psychoanalytic institutes and to psychoanalytic thinking. Richie, as everyone called him, was a big man, a natty dresser, a force of nature. He was easy to talk to, knew much about many subjects, and spoke about them all with insight, clarity, well-earned authority, and respect for his listeners. A close friend recalls that, “I always enjoyed and was inspired by Richie's way of listening, his wisdom, his humor. Our discussions would go from clinical matters to politics, and then to travel destinations”. Richie was a dominant intellectual presence in any group. He was a generous, loving mensch, a wonderful and loyal friend, a wise colleague and a beloved husband, brother, and uncle.

Richie often told the story of how, when he was in the army, if you weren't busy, they would find something for you to do. To avoid that, he spent his time in the library, which was not the hub of military life. He read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and became hooked on psychoanalysis. Richie went to college at LIU after completing his military service. He was hungry to learn as much as he could, so he kept asking his instructors for a chance to do research. They put him touch with Dr. Frederick Baekland, a leading sleep and dream 2 researcher, with whom he worked for several years. This resulted in four joint research publications, and he began graduate school as a published author, (Richie published thirty papers, reviews, and presentations along with two books and one edited book, over his long career).

Richie married Judy, his life-long partner, a week before both started graduate school in 1968. They celebrated with a brief city honeymoon, then took two and a half months after their first year of school to tour Europe. J