Lewis Aron (1952-2019)

With the untimely death on 28 February 2019 of Lewis (“Lew”) Aron, the psychoanalytic world and especially the relational community lost a great luminosity. Even as he struggled with cancer for over five years, his brilliance and productivity hardly ever lagged despite dealing with the smaller deaths that preceded his final weeks of dying. He never seemed to waiver. He never showed any self-pity. Lew was a visionary, a leader, a colleague, a family man, and my “brother-in-life.”

Lew was one of the founders of this journal, a frequent contributor, and one of the invisible editorial hands behind the scenes of many of the wonderful dialogues published here. His 39-year career included 28 academic and visiting faculty appointments and 32 editorial and administrative positions both at home and abroad. His extraordinary scholarly record includes 14 books and 112 articles and book chapters. Several of them, notably A Meeting of the Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis, A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis (with Karen Starr), and Dramatic Dialogues: Contemporary Clinical Practice (with Galit Atlas) became instant classics. Lew was writing about the nature of interpretation, the analyst’s subjectivity, mutuality, the dialectical, vulnerability, pluralism, enactment, and critical skepticism just to name a few areas of his particular interests. He founded and was the senior editor of the Relational Book Series Perspectives (with Adrienne Harris) with over 115 books in this series. Lew co-founded and co-chaired (with Adrienne Harris and Jeremy Safran) the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School. He also published scholarly works on psychoanalysis and Jewish studies, an area of intense personal interest to him.

Starting in 1998, Lew was the director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (NYU Postdoc). He steered NYU Postdoc and its large faculty and candidate body with an expert hand for 21 years. His e