Obituary

On May twenty-seventh, 1943, the members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society were saddened by the news of the death from coronary thrombosis of their founder and president, Dr. Isador H. Coriat. He had been reëlected president only the evening before.

As one of the pioneer American psychoanalysts, and one who had made his way alone in this new field without benefit of training in Vienna, the occasion of a notice of his death would be an appropriate one in which to cast a retrospective eye back over the early days of his lonely struggle. Of the subjective aspect of those days, we know very little except by inference, for Dr. Coriat was not given to speaking about them. But it is possible to bring together some of the objective and historical facts.

Freud lectured at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society was founded in 1930 by Dr. Coriat. What lies in the intervening twenty-one years? How did it come about that the interest stirred up in the new doctrines did not eventuate more speedily in an organization devoted to their study and investigation? What was the nature of and the reason for this latency periods? One has only to look at the photograph of the group gathered at Clark University to hear Freud, and to recall something of the future activities of these men, to have some inkling of the answer to this question as it pertained to New England and especially to Boston. When it was asked of the present writer, as the only remaining individual who had known even briefly any of these individuals, to prepare some sort of notice of Dr. Coriat's rôle in the early history of psychoanalysis in Boston, and he came back to ask himself these questions, he was surprised to discovered how little he really knew. But perhaps it is the nature of latency periods that apparently nothing much is going on. But of the several men who showed an interest in the strange new doctrines from Vienna, Coriat alone maintained and deepened it. And