Albert J. Solnit, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center and a former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, died as a result of an automobile accident on June 21, 2002. He was eighty-two.
Solnit was a visionary child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who applied developmental psychoanalytic principles beyond the consulting room to child care, school reform, family law, pediatrics, foster care, and mental health administration.
Having obtained his B.A., M.A., and M.D. from the University of California, he entered the military in 1945. His experiences with traumatized airmen and soldiers led him to psychiatric training. He came to Yale in 1948, working with Milton Senn and later Ernst Kris on their seminal longitudinal study of child development. He commuted to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for training and became a leader in the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.
Solnit was active in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis on all levels, national and international. He was president of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, and the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He was also a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science and a trustee of the Anna Freud Centre.
As director of the Yale Child Study Center from 1966 to 1983, Solnit helped shape the center's excellence in child psychiatry and applied psychoanalysis. Together with Anna Freud and Joseph Goldstein, a Yale law professor and psychoanalyst, he wrote Beyond the Best Merest of the Child and two other related volumes. These landmark works' developmental approach emphasized the primacy of the child's attachment needs (rather than parental rights) and had a profound influence on child custody and placement law.
For twenty years, Solnit served as managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, continuing its tradition as the pre-eminent child psychoanalytic journal in the United States.
Following his 1990 mandatory retirement (a term without meaning for him) from the university, he served as Connecticut's Commissioner of Mental Health and Addiction Services for almost a decade. He would see his analytic patients early in the morning, then commute to Hartford for the day before returning to New Haven to see more patients and write.
Beyond these many institutional accomplishments, Solnit was the wisest of supervisors and a mentor, colleague, and friend. His innumerable colleagues, students, and patients — and the world's children — are the poorer for his loss.
He is survived by his wife Martha, his sister June Solnit Sale, his children Aaron, Ben, David, and Ruth, and seven grandchildren. The family has requested that memorial contributions be made to the Donald J. Cohen Professorship Fund of the Yale Child Study Center.