Biographical Note on John E. Gedo: A Peculiar Conservative

To write a modest, informative, and cogent biography of an esteemed colleague in psychoanalysis one must necessarily address certain questions: Which aspects of his scholarly contributions are both significant and distinctive? Which life experience is truly meaningful in explicating a particular scholarly contribution? Assuming the readers share the biographer's convictions as to the etiological significance of specific experiences, just how is the relevant past in this particular psychoanalyst's life experience not only recreated but transformed in his scholarly productivity?

Gedo's family of origin was for several generations composed of free-thinking professionals and merchants in small towns on the border of Slovakia and Hungary. The world of his parents' youth, turn-of-the-century, provincial Hapsburg Europe, was a mixture of Victorian conservatism, passionate revolutionary talk, classic Greco-Roman education, and a welter of divergent, but deeply traditional ethnic cultures. From this background there arose one of the crucial pillars of Gedo's lifelong orientation: the valuing of ideas and culture, not just as playthings to be contemplated for pleasure, but as vital, moving forces to be experienced, to be guided by, and to be acted