Martin Silverman, M.D. 1935-2019

“That reminds me of a case I had.” Those of us who were fortunate enough to hear this from Martin Silverman, M.D., who died this August, would know they would both learn something clinically interesting and would witness some of the personal qualities Marty brought to his patients and colleagues.

Marty was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, a training and supervising analyst and supervising child analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine, and a training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey. For more than 45 years, Marty had an active private practice and contributed through his teaching and writing to the psychoanalytic and psychiatric community, with over one hundred published psychiatric and psychoanalytic papers, chapters, and book reviews. He was Associate Editor at The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and the long time editor of its Book Review. He was able to be productive, involved, and contributing until shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer.

Revisiting his prodigious output reveals just how both deep and broad his interests were. In his own papers, he focused in his early work on Piaget and issues related to child development. His interests gradually broadened even as his identity as a child analyst remained near and dear to his heart and his stories were perhaps most moving when he related interventions and developments in the course of a child analysis. He contributed a trove of written clinical material to our literature, particularly important now as clinical writing, particularly in his ego psychological context, is rarer. One had a sense of how Marty worked with his patients, and of his active, enq

uiring, patient presence. And his relation to theory was a lively one: he was grounded in a generally ego psychological approach while being quite open to and curious about recent developments so that his case discussions, and hi