Charles Davison—1891-1965

Dr. Charles Davison, who died in Paris on September 7, 1965, was a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society for twenty-five years. He enjoyed the unusual distinction of having achieved professional eminence in another, related medical speciality before he entered the New York Psychoanalytic Institute as a candidate. Like Freud, he began as a neurologist and neuropathologist and by 1940 had contributed nearly one hundred articles to the neurologic literature. Indeed, in 1932 he was president of the Association of Neuropathologists, and he was a member of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, the American Neurological Association, and the New York Neurological Society long before he began his formal training as a psychoanalyst.

He served as neuropathologist and attending neurologist to Montefiore Hospital from 1932 to 1953, and remained a consultant to the hospital in those specialties until his death. However, by 1945, when I first met him at Montefiore, his major interest was in psychoanalysis, though his working day was still divided between analysis and neurology. As time went on he devoted most of his time to psychoanalysis although he served as a neurological consultant in difficult cases for many of his analytic colleagues throughout his professional career.

Born in Rumania, he came to this country as a child and was educated here. He was graduated from the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and practiced neuropsychiatry in Pennsylvania until 1927, when he came to New York as a fellow in neurology at Montefiore Hospital. Later he received a teaching appointment at Columbia and was also an attending neurologist at Beth Israel Hospital.

It was chiefly as a clinician that Dr. Davison won recognition in the field of analysis. Two of his papers—Intrapsychic Factors in the Choice of a Sexual Object and Psychological and Psychodynamic Aspects of Disturbances in the Sleep Mechanism—as well as many book reviews were published in This