On the morning of July 30, 1993, shortly before his eighty-ninth birthday, Dr. William Guglielmo Niederland died peacefully at home in Englewood, New Jersey. A gifted clinician and researcher, a wonderful lecturer and teacher, and a man of vast erudition and literary artistry, Dr. Niederland was the author of numerous books and articles, contributions of unique importance to psychoanalysis, psychiatry, medicine, history, linguistics, anthropology, and art.
His pioneering studies, begun in the 1950s, on the diagnosis and treatment of Nazi concentration camp survivors taught us that in such cases we are dealing with victims of traumatization of such severity and duration as to have produced a new and recognizable clinical entity he called “the survivor syndrome.” Although the West German Republic was attempting at the time, through its compensation laws, to indemnify survivors of Nazi persecution, compensation was often denied, or at least inadequately awarded, because the medical experts called in had very little experience with such patients; perhaps not so surprisingly, they avoided concentrating on the atrocities suffered by the claimants. Dr. Niederland, one of a group of consulting psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, tirelessly reviewed case after case in which compensation was denied and, armed with a fierce determination for psychological truth, presented compelling evidence to educate the experts and overturn decisions made without insight. Past danger felt as present danger, chronic depression, character changes, and the survivor triad of insomnia, nightmares, and headaches (or other somatic equivalents) began to be understood and accepted as the outcome of severe traumatization.
In 1951, taking Freud at his word, Dr. Niederland picked up the threads of the groundbreaking study of Schreber's psychosis and began filling in the “gaps.” In a brilliant series of articles collected into a book in 1974, he methodically uncovered more and more complex psychoanalytic issues regarding Schreber's illness, family constellation (especially the father's psychological makeup and destructive influence on his son), crucial childhood experiences, and the cultural, political, and historical milieu in which Schreber lived and worked. In another series of brilliant papers, also begun in the 1950s, Dr. Niederland established psychogeography as an important and evolving field of study. These early papers, on river symbolism, were followed by “An Analytic Inquiry into the Life and Work of Heinrich Schliemann,” “The History and Meaning of California,” “The Naming of America,” and “The Pre-Renaissance Image of the World and the Discovery of America.”
In a set of papers begun in the 1960s, he began to throw new light on the mystery of creativity. From successfully completed analyses, supervised analyses, and psychobiographical research into world-renowned persons of great talent or genius, including Goya, Rousseau, Byron, and Poe, he came to the conclusion that creativity is born out of a lifelong struggle with feelings of actual or fantasied bodily imperfections, object losses, or feelings of frailty, weakness, and being in mortal danger. In gifted individuals, he believed, reparative strivings, operative as unconscious ego functions from early life, tend to take pathways leading to artistic activity. This unifying dynamic principle of psychic function he called “the loss-restoration principle.” He noted also that if trauma is too great it inhibits, paralyzes, or even destroys the re-creative powers.
In the area of clinical analysis also, Dr. Niederland made outstanding contributions. Narcissism, affects and moods, transference, body image, symbolism, and psychopathology all received his discerning attention. Throughout his career he carried a full analytic case load, and he was intensely devoted to his patients.
In light of those many accomplishments, it is little wonder that a colleague once introduced him before a meeting of The American by asking, almost in awe, How many Bill Niederlands are there?
The one and only William Niederland was born and raised in a close-knit Jewish family in Schippenbeil, East Prussia (now Sepopol, Poland), the son of an orthodox rabbi. Young William, having completed his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Würzburg, was director of a psychiatric clinic and well on his way to a most promising career when the approaching Nazi menace was clearly perceived. He fled Germany in 1934. When some friends had advised staying, predicting that the difficult times were only temporary and would soon pass, he responded that if that proved to be the case he would be most happy to return and admit his error. Although he wanted to come to the United States, it took six years and 80,000 miles before that wish could be realized. Upon leaving Germany, he settled first in Italy. There he struggled to learn the language, and because he lacked the proper documents was required to earn a second M.D. degree. At great personal risk, he returned to Germany to rescue his family and assist them in leaving the country. Eventually, he opened the first private practice of psychiatry in Milan and was once again well on his way to a rewarding career. However, when in 1939 the Axis power was extending itself into Italy, he knew again that it was time to flee. Managing to get himself to England, he became a ship's doctor on the S.S. Dardanus, an English freighter sailing out of Singapore. He circled the globe twice, and at each port of call faced bravely the danger of possible arrest as an enemy alien. Finally, in Manila a sympathetic dean of the medical school made it possible for him to join the faculty of the University of the Philippines. Soon after departing Manila without him, the Dardanus was torpedoed and went down in the South China Sea with but a single survivor.
In 1940 Dr. Niederland finally landed in San Francisco, after a law had been passed granting asylum to refugees from Nazi oppression. In 1947 he was accepted for training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Although earlier in his professional career he had written several papers and monographs, he always felt that the full flowering of his creativity was an outcome of his training analysis.
In 1952 he married Jacqueline Rosenberg, who gave up a promising career at the United Nations to become his wife and the devoted mother of their children. Jackie also took on the role of executive secretary, research librarian, typist, and the not-too-secret sharer of his creative work. Dr. Niederland felt that “everydayness” was the true enemy of creativity, and Jackie was most effective in freeing her husband from this interference. He acknowledged her in the Schreber volume “for her constant encouragement, valuable counsel, and active as well as tireless cooperation, as editor, in preparing this book.”
The final analytic issue he wished to explore was that of creativity and the aging process. The research was begun several years before his death but unfortunately could not be fully developed. His own aging process and the illness of his wife dampened the lifelong ebullience, the tireless energy, and the brilliant flashes of insight. Jackie was hospitalized for a difficult respiratory illness and died in October 1992. He took the death bravely, with stoic acceptance of the human condition, having remained at her side throughout the illness. A few months later he followed her.