René A. Spitz, M.D—1887-1974

René Spitz died quietly in his sleep on September 14, 1974, leaving on his desk notes of things to be done and manuscripts on which he was working. Despite increasing sickness in his final weeks, he had maintained to a remarkable degree his active curiosity and productivity.

During his eighty-seven years, Spitz had lived, studied, and worked in Vienna, Lausanne, Berlin, Budapest, Trieste, Paris, New York, Geneva, and Denver. In a way, he was a late bloomer. (His father had despaired of his ever amounting to anything since he declined to go into the family business.) In his late forties, he began the four decades of research into the earliest psychic development of infants and young children for which he became famous. He was a pioneer in the direct observation and photography of infants and their interactions with their mothers. At age seventy, he moved to Denver where in addition to his teaching and research, he helped organize the Denver Psychoanalytic Society and was its first President. He was also instrumental in developing the Denver Psychoanalytic Institute and became its first training analyst.

For many of us René Spitz was a direct link to the whole history of psychoanalysis. He was fond of telling that he was born January 29, 1887, in an apartment house owned by his grandfather, near the City Hall in Vienna, and that in this building at 7 Rathausstrasse on April 25, 1886, Sigmund Freud had opened his first office for the practice of medicine. In 1910, carrying a letter of introduction from Sandor Ferenczi with whom he had been working in Budapest, Spitz went to Vienna, met Professor Freud, and began analysis with him. He thought of himself as being the first training analysand since a chief motive, in addition to his personal reasons for seeking analysis, was to learn how to be a psychoanalyst. Although never a member of the inner circle of psychoanalytic pioneers, Spitz knew most of them, and he had many further contacts with Sigmund Freud and in