Philip Bromberg (1931– 2020)

It is with great sadness we mark the passing of one of our most profound and generous thinkers and clinicians. Philip Bromberg left us on May 18, 2020. He died of natural causes. In his passing, he left a huge void spanning the globe.

Philip made his mark in multiple and abiding ways. He was one of the founding editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, which has been privileged to showcase his unique and influential thinking in numerous articles. He was a longtime, esteemed member of the faculties of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the William Alanson White Institute and a beloved teacher, supervisor, analyst, friend, and mentor to so many in our community and beyond.

An outpouring of grief and recognition from across the globe reflects how deeply he impacted so many. He has influenced generations of clinicians through his teaching and publications especially in the areas of dissociation in normal and less adaptive mental functioning, multiplicity, enactment, trauma, and the process of healing and growth via human relatedness. His insights, evident in his extensive clinical work, were extraordinary, and his ability to transform these rich clinical moments into such profound, often poetic, writing was a talent that rendered his work simultaneously accessible and poignant.

In his remarkable credo published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2012, Philip wrote,

If I were asked to reduce my “Credo” to two sentences they might be the following: I believe that what we call the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is a self/other negotiation that takes place between and within analyst and patient at the interface of dissociation and the capacity to hold internal conflict. It is a nonlinear process that endows both their relationship and their individual self-states with an ever-evolving experience of wholeness that is the primary source of healing and growth. (p. 273)

How succinctly he captures the essence of his groundbreaking work. Philip’s physica