Paul Gray, a revered colleague and member of the APsaA, died in Washington, D.C., on July 26 as a result of congestive heart failure.
Paul Gray, a certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was a training and supervising psychoanalyst with the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He joined the institute's faculty in 1953, became a training and supervising analyst in 1956, and continued to teach and consult at the institute until shortly before his death. He had maintained a private practice in psychoanalysis in Washington since the early 1950s.
He received an American Psychoanalytic Association award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalytic Education and a Mary S. Sigourney Trust award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Psychoanalysis. He was a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and served two terms as an APsaA councilor-at-large.
Gray was a pioneer. His ideas, published in seminal journal articles over the past forty years and in a 1994 book, The Ego and Analysis of Defense, have had a profound effect on the psychoanalytic world, stirring up enormous interest and controversy about the central, most necessary part of technique: how the psychoanalyst listens. A new edition of his book, to include papers written since it first appeared, is to be published early next in 2003.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Gray stressed that to improve patients' capacities for eventual self-analysis, analysts must diminish as much as possible the use of suggestion and persuasion. Arnold Richards, editor of JAPA, wrote, “Paul Gray challenged analysts to get rid of the last vestiges of their authoritarian roots, and refined a technique that emphasizes the collaborative analytic effort to understand the patient's mind at work.” Roy Schafer said that Gray “steadily used and developed the patient's own powers of observation.”
Gray had a reputation as a creative and gifted teacher and was highly sought after for supervision by psychoanalytic students as well as by colleagues. His students are now among the leaders in psychoanalytic teaching and research throughout this country and abroad.
Gray is survived by Gerda Gray of Washington, his wife of thirty-six years; two children from his first marriage (a daughter, Lorraine, of Los Angeles, and a son, Steven, of Washington); and three granddaughters. Paul Gray's vital and gentle presence as mentor, teacher, and consultant will be sorely missed. He leaves a space that cannot be filled.