Obituary Notice

Professor Paul Seligman died on the 2nd of March 1985, after some months of painful illness, at the age of 81. He had been a distinguished honorary member of the Society of Analytical Psychology since 1964, and he was also Honorary President of the C. G. Jung Society of Ontario.

Paul was born in Germany and had already had many years in business and in the arts there before coming as a refugee to England in 1937. At the age of forty-four he undertook a London University B.A. in philosophy and decided to move into the academic world. He took his doctorate some years later in 1957, and he became a much respected teacher of philosophy in London. He and his wife, Eva, a training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, had two sons, David and Benjamin. He continued his university career in Canada at the University of Waterloo from 1963 onwards, and was Professor of Philosophy there from 1968 to 1975, when a symposium on ‘The Power and the Limits of Reason’ was given in his honour. He was made Professor Emeritus and continued working on a part-time basis until his death.

The steady stream of papers and lectures, and the three books, produced during his years in Canada give us some idea of his remarkable intellectual energy, the breadth of his interests and the depth of his classical scholarship, as well as of his capacity to forge fascinating links between philosophy, psychology, science, art, religion and aesthetics. His understanding of analytical psychology was wide, deep and scholarly, and he offered numerous students the benefits of his devotion to the liberal arts.

Readers of this Journal may be reminded of his 1965 paper, ‘Some notes on the collective significance of circumcision and allied practices’, and his 1968 review of Aurora Consurgens. In 1968, during one of his periodic visits to England, when many of us were able to appreciate his scholarly charm, he addressed the London Analytical Psychology Club on ‘Concern with death and eternity’. Other publicat