Obituary: Mark Kanzer 1908 - 1998

At the age of 89 years, Dr Mark Kanzer died of congestive heart failure in Rye Brook, New York on 14 April 1998. He received his BSc from Yale University, an MA in psychology from Harvard University and a medical degree from the University of Berlin. His analytic training was at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, from which he graduated in 1943. During World War II, in the US Army, he was Assistant Director of the School of Military Neuropsychiatry in San Antonio, Texas. He was married to Viva Schatia, (d. 1971), a psychiatrist, and the couple had two sons, Paul (d. 1974) and Alan, an attorney in New York city.

A prolific author and esteemed psychoanalytic educator, Dr Kanzer was a founding member in 1950 of the Division of Psychoanalytic Education of the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York (now the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute) of which he served as director from 1962 to 1965. In addition, he was a founder of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. He was a delegate to the Executive Council and the Board of Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association for seventeen years and participated in many panel discussions at the scientific meetings of that organisation. Among more than 150 articles written by Dr Kanzer, many focused on clinical and technical subjects (‘The past and present in the transference’, ‘The communicative function of the dream’, ‘Visual communication in the analytic situation’), literary subjects (‘Dostoyevsky's matricidal impulses’, ‘The passing of the Oedipus complex in Greek drama’) and studies of Freud's history and works (‘The transference neurosis of the Rat Man’, ‘Sigmund and Alexander Freud on the Acropolis’, ‘Freud's uses of the terms “autoerotism” and “narcissism”’). In addition, Dr Kanzer was the editor of one book, The Unconscious Today (1970) and the co-editor of two others with Dr Jules Glenn, Freud and his Self-Analysis (1979) and Freud and his Patients (1980).

Dr Kanzer was