Obituary: Thomas B. Kirsch, M.D.

From the moment of his conception in his mother womb, Tom Kirsch was surrounded by Jungians. Jungian psychology was, as it were, written into his DNA. The title of his autobiographical memoire, A Jungian Life (Kirsch 2014), says it well.

Thomas Basil Mordechai Kirsch1 was born on 14 June, 1936 in London where his father, James Kirsch, had recently set up a Jungian analytical practice. James and Hilde Kirsch had migrated there from Tel Aviv where they had lived for three years after leaving Berlin following Hitler’s rise to power. Jewishness would define their lives to a great extent, although they were not religious in a traditional sense. Tom’s sense of identity was deeply rooted in this feeling of belonging to the Jewish people, its history and its present reality in the contemporary world. His first years were shadowed by the threat of annihilation, and much later in life he would speak of his recurrent memories of the bombing of London by Nazi aircraft. In 1940, the Kirsch family, fearing a Nazi takeover of England, fled to the United States, where they eventually settled in Los Angeles. (In London, incidentally, Michael Fordham, wishing to receive Jungian analysis and training, entered into analysis with Tom’s mother at Jung’s recommendation. He was her first analytical case!)

Once settled on the West Coast of America and out of reach of the threat of Germany, both parents set up analytic practices and began working with patients in the New World. (Hilde was by now becoming an accomplished Jungian analyst.) As Jungian pioneers in California, both parents became well known for their teaching and hospitality to visiting Jungians and other immigrants, and eventually they formed a group of followers that would become the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. Both parents were significant figures in the growing presence of Jungians on the West Coast in the 1940s and 1950s. Growing up in this home of dedicated Jungians, Tom was more or less destined to become one too. He