Kenneth T. Calder, who served as APsaA's president in the late 1970's, died on April 23 at the age of 85. Before he became aware of early signs of Alzheimer's disease a few years ago, he had been enthusiastically engaged in analytic practice and teaching, and deeply involved in the work of several local, national, and international psychoanalytical organizations, often as a leader. Typically, Calder bore the sufferings that life imposed stoically, with an outwardly unemotional acceptance, speaking of them as factual. He was rather allergic to pleas for sympathy, to demands for help—for himself.
His realization that he needed to retire from active professional work was the second great blow Calder had endured in recent years. The first was the long illness and death of his wife. Abby Knowlton Calder Knowlton, a much honored physician, was the mainstay of his life. Their love for each other and the regard each felt for the other's qualities of heart and mind, their significant accomplishments and contributions, were evident to all who knew them. The differences in their origins, temperaments, social and conversational ease enriched them both. Each sparkled with pride and pleasure when speaking of the other.
Calder was born in northern Michigan into a working class family. He achieved his education largely by his own efforts; these included caddying on golf courses as a boy. He developed into an expert, but unusually unboastful, golfer He had his first psychiatric training in Cincinnati in its psychoanalytic heyday. Coming to New York after two years as an Army psychiatrist, he completed psychoanalytic training at the Columbia Center, and subsequently repeated the academic program at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1954. He was a training and supervising analyst at New York and later also at Downstate, now the N.Y.U. Psychoanalytic Institute. He was chairman of the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education of the American Psychoanalytic Association from 1969 to 75, and was president of APsaA from 1976 to 77. He was also treasurer and a vice president of IPA.
Among the great pleasures and rewards of his life, one thinks of his love for and pride in his children, Mary and Tom, his cottage in the countryside of West Virginia, long evenings spent in conversation with friends in his home, accompanied by his wife's superb dinners and wines he selected, often with an eye to their worth, a residue, perhaps, of the financially straitened boyhood he never forgot. He glowed on seeing the pleasure he could give others.
Although his manner tended to be reserved, he could be fiercely critical of those whom he believed failed to live up to the high standards of character he set for himself—of honesty, modesty, and authenticity. In his stirring address to the American Psychoanalytic Association upon his retirement as president, he told his colleagues about his own approach to self-analysis, including revealing glimpses of what he regarded as weakness, moral imperfections, remarks he regretted making, actions he wished he could take back. He told a dream and showed, again with extraordinary candor, how the image of his former analyst and a continuing transference relationship were represented in it. It is a classic psychoanalytic paper, memorably portraying Kenneth Calder at his best—intellectually ambitious, truthful, courageous.
—Shelley Orgel