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Dr. Robert Knight, medical director of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and a dominant figure in the world of psychoanalysis, died on April 30, 1966, after an eighteen-month struggle with lung cancer.
A giant in physical stature, unhurried of movement, calm spoken, and dryly humorous, for thirty years Dr. Knight as therapist, educator, researcher, and administrator exerted a major influence on the development of psychoanalytic and psychiatric practice in the United States; the premise of his lifework was the constructive application of psychoanalytic principles to individual and milieu treatment and research. First as chief of staff of the Menninger Clinic and from 1947 as director of Austen Riggs, he led teams of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers and served in innumerable senior offices of psychoanalytic bodies, the last having been as Chairman of the Program Committee of the twenty-fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Amsterdam in 1965.
Apart from his own contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, a wide-ranging bibliography of sixty items, he steadily made possible the leisure which enabled many others to make their own contributions. He always treasured and fostered creativity, as a matter of course; some of the most important contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis resulted from his quiet, undemanding support.
One of the penalties of our sophistication as psychoanalysts is that we are deprived of the comforting luxury of the routine, innocent ritual eulogy which, celebrating pure virtue and proclaiming life eternal, muffles our grief, our guilt, and our openmouthed disbelief in the face of death. But we are not deprived of all comfort, and I have decided to gain some by sharing with you a little of what Bob talked about during the two weeks before he died.