On May 10, 1993, Herbert S. Gaskill died at the age of 84. He chaired the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine from 1953 to 1973, was vice-president of the American Psychiatric Association from 1970 to 1971, was director of the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1972 to 1975 and again from 1981 to 1984, and was president of The American from 1976 to 1977. But the man who held these impressive public positions was an intensely private person whose bedrock honesty, integrity, and genuine humility were an inspiration to everyone who ever knew him. I had that privilege, especially from 1981 to 1984, when I served as his associate director at the Denver Institute. As chair of the Department of Psychiatry, he had poured his energies and resources into establishing the Institute. Then, at the age of 72, he accepted a second term as director to lead us out of an organizational impasse created by an illusory search for perfection in our candidates, coupled with an equally relentless denial of our own imperfections as a faculty. Herb's favorite quotation was from Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.” Aim for the best or the perfect in the future, and you disregard the good in the present. You also discard the humility necessary to grow and learn from your students, your patients, and your colleagues. How many institute directors have attended a class not as a co-teacher, but as a student? How many supervising analysts have welcomed an evaluation from their supervisees, even when that feedback was at times critical and painful? How many training analysts are still open to new technical approaches and new theoretical concepts at the age of 84? How many legendary leaders of American medicine and psychiatry have had the vision to recognize the importance of providing analytic training within The American to qualified nonmedical mental health clinicians?
By the end of his long life, Herb Gaskill had achieved wisdom—not easily, not quickly, not through dazzling precocity or virtuosity, but slowly, painfully, and at times despairingly. Aeschylus captured the process in these profound words: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our despair—against our will—comes wisdom—through the awful grace of God.” What Herb Gaskill taught all of us is that this is probably the only way that wisdom can ever be attained—through grief and heartache and loss—especially the loss of our idealizations and our illusions of. perfectibility.