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It is my immensely sad duty to inform our readers of the death of Eric Nuetzel, whom we lost on May 12, an unusually cold and dreary gray day in the Spring of the year when, after a brief and acute bout of illness, he died at home in St. Louis of complications from lung cancer at the age of 63.
In his dying, the profession of psychoanalysis has been deprived of a dedicated and skilled clinician, as well as an exemplary teacher, supervisor, scholar/researcher and organizational leader. As a consequence, the gap he leaves behind is significant and is, itself, part of the process of mourning that we, his colleagues and friends, are continuing to experience as we grieve this profoundly able, talented, and multi-faceted man.
Eric James Nuetzel, M.D. was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, one of six children of Sally Bowman Nuetzel and John Nuetzel, M.D. who had also been a prominent, loved, and respected physician in the St. Louis community.
Eric earned a degree in anthropology in 1972 from the University of Missouri in Columbia, and met and married Susan Miller, who was to become his lifetime partner, while she was a student at Washington University School of Law and he was a medical student at St. Louis University School of Medicine. Eric and Susan married in 1976, soon after Eric graduated from medical school. After training in medicine, Eric completed his residency in psychiatry at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, in 1980, returning to St. Louis in the same year and very soon started his training in psychoanalysis at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, which he completed in 1988. It was during these years of the early 80's that Eric and Susan's children were born-son, Arlie and daughter, Leah. In the meantime, he established himself as a clinician of repute and worked a full clinical schedule until 10 days before he died.
At the time of his death, Eric had reached the pinnacle of his career as a Training and Supervising Analyst at the St