Ruth Stein, 1947–2010

Ruth Stein died tragically and prematurely, yet the drama of her death was deeply consistent with her character: she had just received the 2010 JAPA Prize for her essay, “The Otherness of Sexuality: Excess” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2008), and had returned to her seat after having given one of her fascinating comments, when she was taken by a cerebral hemorrhage. She died brilliant, charismatic, complex, and always interesting, as she had lived.

She was born into an orthodox Jewish family profoundly scarred by the Holocaust. Her father was a brilliant Talmudic scholar who had lost his first family in the Holocaust and survived three years in Auschwitz. Ruth married early to a deeply religious man and gave birth to three children, when she realized that she had lost her religious belief. She left what had been a passionate marriage and began her journey of rebuilding her life.

Ruth Stein grew up in Israel, but her aesthetic, intellectual, and existential sensibilities were fundamentally European even as they were informed by her religious upbringing; she loved dense texts and had a Talmudic sharpness combined with an endless fascination for the mysterious, unfathomable aspects of human experience. She majored in French literature before focusing on psychology and she was fascinated by French intellectual culture: its love for the rich text that not only analyzes but also expresses what it tries to understand by the style of writing no less than through its content.

She embarked on the journey that would become her vocation: she gained her doctorate with Joseph Sandler while doing her psychoanalytic training in Jerusalem. Fittingly, she wrote her dissertation on psychoanalytic theories of affect. Later published as Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect (Praeger, 1991), this book foreshadowed her intellectual and professional trajectory: always interested in the unruly aspects of life, she was also intent on imposing discipline on them through under