Dr. Bertram D. Lewin, an eminent psychoanalyst and a former President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, died on January 8, 1971, at his home in Pipersville, Pennsylvania. He was seventy-four years old.
Born in Texas, Dr. Lewin received his medical school training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, and subsequently trained in psychiatry at the Phipps Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Here he became interested in the study of psychoanalysis and went to Berlin to undertake psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Institute. Returning to New York in 1927, he joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society and took up the practice of analysis. When the New York Psychoanalytic Institute was organized in 1931, he became active in its affairs and served as its President from 1934 to 1937. He was also President of the Society from 1936 to 1939, and was long a member of the Faculty of the Institute.
In the 1930's, as Chairman of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration, he helped many European analysts to escape the Nazis and come to the U. S.
In 1932 Dr. Lewin, along with three colleagues, founded the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and continued on its staff to the end of his life. He served as Editor-in-Chief from 1960 to 1967.
From 1956 to 1959 he took up the newly created position of Director of Education in the APsaA. Along with Miss Helen Ross he undertook a wide-ranging survey of psychoanalytic education, a project which resulted in the publication in 1960 of a book, “Psychoanalytic Education in the United States,” now a source book for information about all aspects of training in psychoanalysis.
In addition to his activities as teacher, editor, and administrator, Dr. Lewin was a prolific contributor to the literature of psychoanalysis. Two important areas of his interest had to do with affective states and with sleep and dreams. In the former field he published, in 1956, a monograph, “The Psychoanalysis of Elation,” which is perhaps one of his best known works.
He left New York in the early 1960's following the completion of his work on psychoanalytic education, and settled at a home that he had had for many years in Pipersville, Pa. In 1962 he became the first Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, a position which he held until his death.
Among his colleagues and students Dr. Lewin was known for his penetrating intuition and his mobile and wide-ranging imagination, qualities which were combined with a ready wit and an infectious kind of good humor. He was known also as a lover of music and poetry, and as a man whose verbal talents included the mastery of a number of foreign languages.
He is survived by a son, Professor David B. Lewin of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a composer and music theorist; by a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Schwartz of Coral Gables, Florida, and five grandchildren.