Obituary for Jeremy Safran

Jeremy Safran was killed in his home in Brooklyn on May 7^th at the age of 66 years. He will be missed as a very creative psychotherapy researcher and theorist.

Jeremy was born in Calgary in Canada in an orthodox Jewish family. All his life, he retained an interest in spiritual and humanistic issues. He was well known for his knowledge about Buddhism and he published a book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis in 2003. One of his most recent publications was about authenticity in the American culture (publicseminar.org).

He started his professional career in Toronto as cognitive therapist. Soon he became interested in the interpersonal and emotional aspects of psychotherapy processes and started a collaboration with Les Greenberg. After moving to New York in 1990, he started training to become a psychoanalyst. He became part of the movement toward relational psychoanalysis and served during some years as president for the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). He was also member of the faculty of the training program in psychoanalysis at New York University. At the New School for Social Studies, where he was professor of psychology, he initiated the creation of the Sandor Ferenczi Center.

In opposite to many other health treatment areas, there has for decades been a tension between individuals who develop psychotherapy methods, and individuals who do systematic research on these methods. There is indeed valid ground for arguing that psychotherapy, particularly when it focuses on the unique relationship between therapist and patient, cannot be reduced to nomothetic analyses. On the other hand, the need for systematic knowledge requires that findings from individual therapies can be generalized. Jeremy Safran was keenly aware of this dilemma. During his whole career, he tried to encompass and combine the richness in the individual meeting with the patient with attempts to detect common p