Obituary Notice

DR M. ESTHER HARDING's death in the first week of May last year marks the end of an era of pioneering work in analytical psychology in New York which she accomplished in association with two colleagues, with whom she worked closely for many years, Drs Christine Mann and Eleanor Bertine.

Three years ago, on her eightieth birthday, she was still vigorous and fully responsive to the special celebration her friends and colleagues planned for her. This was the Second Bailey Island Conference, the first of which was led by Professor Jung in 1937. This occasion so fittingly seemed to round out Dr Harding's active career that one assumed she might thenceforth live in retirement in her Connecticut house. After three days of lectures by colleagues from Europe and the United States her fine paper, given as the last of the series might therefore have been considered her swan song. This impression seemed to be confirmed by the fatigue which followed and a minor heart attack which cut short her attendance at the International Congress at Zürich later in that summer.

But this by no means marked the end of her activity. By the autumn of that year she was again beginning to see a few patients and was continuing her active committee work for the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York. Before long, other seminars were announced on the symbolism of the cross and on the subject of depression, and these had a success of the kind which had marked previous seminars. Was it ten years ago, or longer, that she said to me after one of these seminars, on Pilgrim's progress, in San Francisco, that she thought this would be her last? And was it another ten years before that during one of those delightful dinners she and Eleanor Bertine used to give in their New York apartment that she told the story, as a humorous comment on her own indefatigable energy, how Jung had once said: ‘After a certain age women become practically immortal.’

In using this energy, Esther Harding was never repetitive and one alway