Obituary

DONALD M. KAPLAN (1927-1994)

On 20 September 1994, Dr Donald Kaplan died at the age of 67, several days after surgery for a dissecting aortic aneurysm. His death was sudden, unexpected; and for his family, friends, colleagues and students it was hard to believe that a mind so keen and a voice so distinct could be stilled. His individual mark was on everything he did. In his public presentations, in his papers, in his private conversations there were echoes of the Bronx, extravagant epigrammatic elegance, jokes that were sometimes mischievous and sometimes gave resonant illumination to his ideas and formulations, but at the core a seriousness of discourse that came from his long and intense devotion to the psychoanalytic precincts of the life of the mind. It was the address where he most truly resided.

He had first hoped to become a writer and, after his graduation from City College and his marriage to Louise Miller, they lived for the better part of a year in Majorca with Donald working on a novel and Louise painting. It was a pleasure and interest he never abandoned. Many happy hours over the years were devoted to his journals, correspondence and poetry. A book he wrote after the Cuban missile crisis with Armand Schwerner and Louise, The Domesday Dictionary (1963) is an impossible-to-describe, analytically-informed ironic inventory of the cultural detritus tumbling from a civilisation playing with nuclear annihilation. In recent years, he was still collecting material for an offbeat screenplay about complications following a caper using silk stockings to extract gold from the ocean bed off Coney Island.

After returning to this country, he had a brief flirtation with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, but his intellectual passions increasingly centred around Freud and psychoanalysis, and he simultaneously pursued his doctorate in clinical psychology at NYU and his psychoanalytic training at the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis under Theodore Reik, co