Dr. Moses Ralph Kaufman (Mo) died after a prolonged illness on May 20, 1977. He had been a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society for almost 30 years, had been a founding member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and an honorary member from 1945, and a Life Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which he served as President from 1950 to 1952.
Dr. Kaufman was born in Bessarabia, Russia, October 5, 1900 and emigrated to Montreal, Canada at the age of 5. Educated in Montreal schools, his medical education was at the McGill University School of Medicine, from which he received the degree of M.D., C.M. in 1925.
Dr. Kaufman then moved to Boston, working at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital under the directorship of Dr. C. MacFie Campbell. Under the aegis of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he commenced his analytic training. He was a Commonwealth Fund Research Fellow for 3 years, spending some of the Fellowship in Vienna, where he began analytic training, first with Dr. Paul Schilder and concluding with Dr. Wilhelm Reich. By 1931, when Mo returned to Boston, he became Clinical Director of the McLean Hospital and joined other colleagues in the formation and development of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Following the formation of the Society and Institute, he became a training analyst and actively engaged in psychoanalytic educational activities there.
Following his discharge from the military in World War II, he came to New York as the first full-time Director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Hospital. It was at that time that he became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Association, a membership retained until recently. At the Mount Sinai Hospital, he gathered together a distinguished group of psychoanalytically-trained psychiatrists interested in the development of psychiatry in a general hospital and particularly in the evolution of the concepts of psychosomatic medicine. Many members of the New York Psychoanalytic Association have either worked on the staff of the Mount Sinai Hospital Department of Psychiatry under Mo Kaufman or received their basic psychiatric training there under his tutelage.
He took an active role in the American Psychoanalytic Association, opposing the decision of the International Psychoanalytic Association that lay analysis be encouraged, insuring that the Association would remain a medically oriented group. He served as Chairman of the Committee on Institutes of the Board of Professional Standards, giving it much of the shape and direction it has followed in the past 25 years. He served as President-Elect and President of the American Psychoanalytic Association from 1948 to 1952. After his presidency he retained his active interest in the American and frequently attended its meetings until his final illness.
He was the author of over 80 different papers and editor or author of several books. In the early days of his professional and academic career, his writings touched upon the use of organic therapies in the treatment of psychosis, to studies of autistic children (in collaboration with Leo Kanner), to papers dealing with various psychoanalytic topics derived from clinical work, to the psychoanalysis of elderly patients, to papers in the field of psychosomatic disorders and of psychoanalytic education. Later in his professional career, his papers dealt with a wide range of topics including the application of psychoanalytic principles to general psychiatry and to papers dealing with the importance of the medical model in psychiatry.
He is survived by his wife Betty, his children, Paul and Tina, and three grandchildren.
Edward D. Joseph, M.D.