Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. 1903-1976

The vanishing species of renaissance men in the field of psychiatry has been further depleted with the passing of Joost Meerloo—psychoanalyst, writer, loyal contributor and member of the Board of Consultants to this Review for many years.

Dr. Meerloo was a man of outstanding accomplishments. Author of 43 books and monographs and over 1,000 essays, he won worldwide

renown as an authority on psychological warfare, especially on the techniques of brainwashing explored in his representative work, The Rape of the Mind (). From the early Thirties, his wide ranging interests blazed a trail in writings on the psychology of drug addiction, correlatives between cancer and emotional illness, the phenomenology of time, problems of death and aging, art and dance symbolism, interpersonal communication, parapsychology and a host of other topics. All bear the stamp of broad erudition, but their author remained first and foremost a scientist, deriving his central formulations from keen clinical observation and sound psychoanalytic grounding.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States () Joost became my first analytic supervisor and during several years following we co-authored a number of papers and a volume, Transference and Trial Adaptation. His benign influence sensitized supervisees to the wide spectrum of realities encountered in practice, taught them to navigate with a sense of certainty between the Scylla of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of theoretical nihilism and, above all, enabled them to hear the voice of the child in the tongue of the adult.

Jooost Meerloo's amiable and unpretentious demeanor belied his exceptional intellect and strength of character. A member of the Dutch underground during the Nazi occupation, he once escaped from a prisoner convoy bound for a German death camp by unobtrusively alighting from the train at a station, crossing the platform and boarding a passenger train bound in the opposite direction. He later escaped to England, where he held t