Obituary

MILDRED (MEL) MARSHAK

9 December 1926-23 October 2010

Dr. Mel Marshak died in her home in Thousand Palms, California on Saturday October 23^rd, 2010 after a long battle with cancer. Dr. Marshak grew up in California, completing her undergraduate studies in psychology at San Francisco State University in 1951. Shortly thereafter she moved to London where she completed a PhD in clinical psychology in 1956 and medical school in 1965, both at the University of London. She completed her analytic training with the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in 1960 and residency training in neurology in 1966. Mel was active in the SAP as a training analyst and instructor from 1961 to 1981 as well as in professional activities with the British Association of Psychotherapists from 1979 to 1981. During that time she also held consulting positions with a number of London hospitals and clinics, including the Hounslow Child Guidance Centre, Woodberry Down Child Guidance Centre, Hampstead Child Guidance Centre (now the Anna Freud Centre), and the Tavistock Clinic. She was a founding member of the Jung/Freud Clinical Group in London and later, in the USA, formed the Independent Society of Analytical Psychology, a non-affiliated inter-disciplinary psychoanalytic study group.

Upon returning to California in 1982 she became active in a number of Jungian and psychoanalytic programmes in the USA, including the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, the C.G. Jung Institutes of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the C.G. Jung Institute of Pittsburgh, and was on the faculty of the Memphis Jungian Seminar (a training affiliate of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts) for over a decade.

Mel possessed a keen sense of humour, an ability to play within the analytic material, and she often provided an embodied sense of how the analyst's love could impact the analytic situation. Although Dr. Marshak published over thirty articles during the course of her career, her greatest strength was