Shortly before the December meeting, a terse memo from the central office to the Societies of the American announced that Greenson was dead. After a long battle with heart disease, he succumbed at the age of 68, on November 24, 1979, at his home in Santa Monica, California.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Greenson did his undergraduate work at Columbia University, earned his medical degree at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and had his psychiatric residency in Vienna. While in Vienna, he had nine months with Wilhelm Stekel, who, as Greenson recalled recently, used to tell him reassuringly: “You remind me of myself.” Back in the States, he established himself as a psychoanalyst in California, where Otto Fenichel helped him to become a “Freudian psychoanalyst.” During World War II, he served as Chief of the Combat Fatigue Section of the Air Force Rehabilitation Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado.
A member of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 1942, Greenson was one of the founders of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and a training analyst since 1947. He was clinical professor at UCLA Medical School since 1951. Besides being in private practice in psychoanalysis, he was active as clinician and lecturer at the Reiss-David Child Guidance Clinic, the Center for Early Education and, in more recent years, the California Chapter of the Anna Freud Foundation, of which he was honorary president.
Greenson contributed to the psychoanalytic literature many important articles, a selection of which he published in 1978 as a volume under the title Explorations in Psychoanalysis. His other book, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, published in 1967, became a standard reading reference in psychoanalytic institutes and other academic centers around the world. It was translated in five languages.
In his death, psychoanalysis has lost a colorful, gifted, eloquent spokesman. Preferring to describe himself as a clinician and teacher, Greenson through his prolific writing also contributed a solid theoretical base for psychoanalytic practice. His wit and humor never disguised his profundity nor did his candor obscure the tenderness and compassion that he brought to his patients and his students. Those closest to him will miss him most sharply; all of us are diminished by his absence.