Ruth Easser, M.D.

Ruth Easser was a Canadian psychoanalyst who made a significant but insufficiently recognized contribution to psychoanalysis in both the United States and Canada. Relatively little has been written about the quiet but important influence of that generation of North American women who became analysts after World War Two. As teachers and role models, many of them helped to shape a particular way of thinking among the next generation of psychoanalysts. The story of these analysts cannot be easily told. Some are still alive and because their legacies are incomplete one cannot evaluate their full significance. For most of those who have died, there is little in the way of a readily available record of their beginnings, development, work and lives as analysts. Yet they live on in the minds of their students and patients. Dr. Ruth Easser was such a person. The story of her work and life as a psychoanalyst was recorded only with considerable effort.1 Her legacy emerged in her seminal papers, in the words of her colleagues and students, many of whom are today's leaders in the field and in the authors' direct experiences with her.

Ruth Easser's life as an analyst began in 1946 just as psychoanalysis was entering the second half of its first century. On several fronts, she was a psychoanalytic pioneer: she was among the first graduates of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research in New York; one of the three early women graduates to be on Columbia's staff and faculty, the first to be appointed supervising and training analyst and the first graduate to be invited to present the prestigious Sandor Rado lecture. She was also a pioneer as a Canadian, being only the second woman to leave Canada to become a psychoanalyst elsewhere. She was the first to return to make a contribution in her home country