Roy Grinker, Sr.—In Memoriam

Although I had known for some time that Roy Grinker Sr. was seriously ill, nevertheless, it was a shock to learn of his recent death. We are all diminished when a cherished person departs the scene, but it is a special kind of loss when one of the intellectual giants who has greatly enriched and enlarged our scientific purview passes on. Roy was such a giant.

Because my own professional life throughout the 1930s and most of the 1940s was spent entirely in New York with the exception of 2 years at St. Elizabeth's in the 30s, I did not have the good fortune as did John Spiegel and many others to work under Roy's tutelage during the years of his outstanding stewardship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. I became one of his admirers almost 60 years ago, however, in 1935, when I was still a resident in neurology and read his excellent and lucid, newly published, Textbook of Neurology. When I began my psychoanalytic training 2 years later I was delighted to find out that Roy had also undergone psychoanalytic training and had followed the same path that I and a number of my contemporaries like Irving Bieber and Alexander Wolf were pursuing in those years, namely getting a sound foundation in neurology and neuropathology before we went into dynamic psychiatry.

In 1943 while in military service I was strongly impressed by the book that he and Spiegel co-authored entitled War Neuroses in North Africa in which they described their technique of using sodium pentothal to liberate critical repressed affects and memories in treating the traumatic neuroses of soldiers in the North African Theatre. It was not merely their therapeutic technique but also the brilliance with which they described the psychodynamic mechanisms involved that had a great impact on me. Later that same year when I was assigned to a naval base in St. Petersburg, Florida, I discovered to my great delight that only a few miles away, in the coastal area of Pas-a-Grille, the Army Air Corps had