Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, 1946–2011

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's untimely death at age 65 was a devastating shock. On December 1, 2011, walking home from a concert with her wife, Christine Dunbar, Elisabeth was stricken with a pulmonary embolus. There was no medical warning. She was gone. We are left to grieve her passing and to reflect on her vibrancy and rich heritage.

Elisabeth was a Consulting Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her life spanned many communities geographically, educationally, academically, and psychoanalytically. It is likely true to say that whoever has met her will never forget her. Elisabeth's many achievements have been hailed in an outpouring of well-documented obituaries in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Yale University Press, and many other prestigious news sources. Her friends and colleagues have lovingly shared their admiration for her person, her mind, and her magnificent contributions to biography, philosophy, political theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and social psychology. She is widely celebrated “as [an] extraordinarily influential person, a great figure in psychoanalysis and philosophy” and as “a psychoanalyst … [who] is renowned for her pioneering work investigating the psychological roots of ideology and contemporary society's prejudicial attitudes towards children” (Yale Books Blog, Yale University Press, December 6, 2011).

My husband, Paul Schwaber, a Professor of Letters in the College of Letters in Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, met Elisabeth long before I did. He was party to her being appointed to the Wesleyan faculty in the early 1970s. Elisabeth was to become one of his most admired colleagues and friends. Paul recalls that Hannah Arendt responded to a search committee inquiry, saying that she had a “sweet Southern girl” to recommend! And so the brilliant willowy Elisabeth arrived in a broad-brimmed hat and high heels. She was a shoo-in. But I doubt that there were many in those days of feminist and social turmoil, other than Hann