Lloyd Silverman (1929-1986)

Lloyd Silverman was born on December 20, 1929 and was raised in the Bronx. He went to the local elementary school and then to De Witt Clinton High School. He graduated with a BA from New York University (1951) where he majored in psychology. In 1952, Lloyd enrolled in the clinical doctoral psychology program at New York University. He did his Ph.D. dissertation on the validity of evaluations made from projective techniques and received his degree in 1958. During his graduate training, Lloyd interned in various Veterans Administration hospitals and worked with Dr. Fred Brown at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.

Lloyd worked for many years as a Research Psychologist for the Veterans Administration and was also a part-time faculty member at New York University where he taught a number of graduate courses and supervised many Ph.D. dissertations. He also carried on a part-time psychoanalytically oriented private practice and was on the faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Recently, he joined the graduate faculty at Long Island University.

In 1958, Lloyd and Doris (nee Klein) married and had four children: Ilena, Mara, Gillian, and Stefan.

These are some bare facts that tell very little about Lloyd. Throughout his adult and professional life, Lloyd was always a highly productive researcher and theorist. But this statement too captures little of Lloyd's qualities. He was devoted to psychoanalysis, and his life's work was dedicated to taking psychoanalytic ideas seriously and testing them out empirically. For Lloyd, ideas were not merely things to think about and play with; they were to be approached with utter seriousness, pushed as far as possible, and used for meaningful pragmatic purposes (e.g., to effect therapeutic change). It was impossible to know Lloyd and not experience his intensity and seriousness of purpose and his dedication to productive, empirical in