Robert Stoller (1925–1991)

Robert J. Stoller died on 6 September 1991, at the age of 66, when the car in which he and his wife, Sybil, were driving was smashed by another vehicle speeding down Sunset Boulevard. While Bob suffered fatal injuries, mercifully Sybil, sitting next to him, was essentially unharmed. Bob was a man who lived by ideas, ideals and convictions, a person of unusual integrity, a man who was all of a piece. His friends are left only with the memory of a man who was admirable just by virtue of this very consistency, along with an existential acceptance of life's vicissitudes and its inexorable tragedy.

Robert Stoller was born and raised in Bronxville, New York. In 1941 he began his undergraduate education at Columbia University, interrupting his matriculation there after one year to volunteer for the service. Shunted from active duty to premedical studies at Stanford University, Bob completed his medical school at U.C. San Francisco, and after a psychiatric residency, he re-enlisted in the Air Force, serving as head of psychiatry at Travis Air Force Base from 1951–1953.

Bob remained profoundly affected, however, by World War II, in which many of his friends and classmates had perished. Consistent with his proclivity and capacity for intellectual mastery of what deeply troubled and preoccupied him, he became an expert in all matters concerning that war. He remained throughout his life passionately concerned with issues of world peace in particular, and humanitarian affairs in general, giving of himself and of his financial resources in support what he believed.

His most passionate concern, however, apart from his family, was his lifelong involvement with psychoanalysis. Beginning his academic career in 1954 with a faculty appointment in psychiatry at UCLA, he remained at UCLA, rapidly rising to the rank of full professor. Anyone who, during that period, attended medical school at the University, or served as a resident there, has learned psychiatry in one way or another