Gerard Chrzanowski 1913-2000

I met my most generous friend Gerard Chrzanowski more than half a century ago. All his life he was known to be an outstanding clinician, but in the late fifties he was also the best presenter of Sullivan's “theory of interpersonal relations” at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. As a foreign student at the White Institute I was very impressed by his fluency and the ease in which he taught in English with only a trace of accent that betrayed his European upbringing. I had recently graduated in psychiatry in my country, and was just beginning to develop some interest in psychoanalysis, mainly by the influence of my personal analyst, Clara Thompson. At that time it was not easy for a psychiatrist educated in the reductive thinking of the dominant medical model to give credit to the psychological understanding of the dynamics of psychic life; even less so for a psychiatrist as I was, well instructed in the phenomenological psychopathology of Karl Jasper. I came to accept more and more another way of approaching the motivational intricacies of mind and behavior through the influence of this teacher of mine, who was also educated in the best tradition of European psychiatry. Although not rejecting the symbolic debt to his teachers, he overcame his intellectual European heritage, in the sense of being able to give value to other means of obtaining data, i.e. from his very intense clinical work.

He had the sensitivity to realize that psychoanalytical thought can only advance by the critical evaluation of our singular and very difficult practice. In his book Interpersonal Approach to Psychoanalysis, his critical evaluation of Sullivan's basic postulates give credit to a critical approach to theory, defines a very original approach to the problem of articulating theory and practice without losing the perspective that the “Weltanshauung above and beyond clinical, empirical observations must be dealt with”. It was his conviction that psychiatry, psychoanalysis