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Lisby Mayer, a beloved member of our psychoanalytic community, died in her sleep on January 2, 2005, at her parents’ home in Hanover, New Hampshire. Lisby's verve, her intellect, her enormous generosity, her commitment to healing, and her passion for psychoanalysis and its broader implications for the study of the mind will be sorely missed.
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was born in 1947 and spent her childhood in Holland, Vienna, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. She attended boarding school at St. Mary's on the Hudson River while pursuing her study of piano at the Mannes College of Music in New York City. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1969, she came to Stanford to pursue a doctorate in economics. As she humorously described it, she quickly became disillusioned with the “theory of the rational actor” on which the study of economics was based, and she made brief forays into the study of law and divinity before she settled on psychology. Her lifelong interest in the irrational aspects of the human mind is discernible in her 1974 doctoral thesis, “On the Psychological Nature of Resistances to Meditation Which Arise During the Meditation Process.”
Lisby pursued pre- and post-doctoral psychology training at Mt. Zion Hospital, where she was a member of the Mt. Zion Psychotherapy Research Group. She entered SFPI&S in 1976, graduated in 1984, and became a training and supervising analyst in 1991 - the first non M.D. in recent SFPI&S history to do so. In addition to her active role as teacher and supervisor at SFPI&S, Lisby supervised clinical psychology interns at U.C. Berkeley and psychiatric residents at UCSF. A natural and engaging teacher, she had a powerful theoretical, clinical, and personal influence on many of her students and supervisees. Indeed, many whom Lisby touched credit her with shaping some important aspect of their life trajectory. She also taught at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley and the CPMC Institute for Health and Healing, and was a