John Frosch (1909-1999)

John Frosch, the founding Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, died on 2 February, 1999, six weeks after his eighty-ninth birthday.

Jack, as he was known to all, was born and brought up on Orchard Street in the teeming and turbulent Lower East Side of New York. His parents, along with his older siblings, had left their European shtetl for the promise of the new world: this proved to be a crowded walk-up tenement flat and a pushcart from which his irascible, scholarly talmudist father sold the butter and eggs he stored in the basement. Encouraged and supported by his eldest brother who had already become a physician, Jack went on to City College and to medical school, briefly in Berlin, where he witnessed the early impact of Hitler, and then moving to and graduating from the University of Bern in 1934. His doctoral thesis on ‘The experimental production of dreams in hypnosis’ was the basis of his first paper, which appeared in Nervenarzt the following year, 1935 (9: 170-82).

Jack interned at the Morrisania City Hospital (1934–36) in New York, where his eldest brother (my father) was studying medicine, and spent a year in Neurology at the Montefiore Hospital (1936–37), which then specialised in the care of patients with neurological illnesses. He trained in psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (1937–38) and at Bellevue Hospital (1938–40), and in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (graduating in 1944). With the exception of a two-year stint as Professor and Executive Officer of the nascent Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1954–55), he remained at Bellevue and the New York University Medical School for more than twenty-five years, where he became Professor and directed the residency training programme in psychiatry. He then moved to the Downstate Medical Center of SUNY (State University of New York) in 1965, and served as Director of the Department of Psychiatry of the