Remembering Morton Reiser

On June 21 of 2007 Morton Reiser died at the age of 87, and at his death the field of psychoanalysis lost an irreplaceable treasure.

Mort was a truly unique individual, a man who was not only a distinguished neuroscientist, researcher, and educator, but a superb psychoanalyst who made enormous contributions to our field.

I first got to know Mort some 40 years ago when we both were in the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I was a beginning resident and Mort, who had come to Einstein via the Department of Psychiatry in Cincinnati, was director of research.

Einstein was a tumultuous place in those days, filled with strong creative personalities with equally strong wills who often clashed on issues of educational policy and other matters. As the storm of passions—and words to match—swirled around him, Mort would remain an island of calm, a voice of reason, an anchor for all of us. Mort had the capacity to zero in on the essence of a problem, to see the central issue with great clarity, and to offer solutions that were based on an in-depth understanding of the fundamental issues. To this quality was added Mort's great store of knowledge and his broad experience as researcher, educator, and clinician.

Throughout his career, Mort joined his long-standing interest in medicine and neuroscience with an equally strong interest in workings of the mind. Well known was Mort's early work in the field of psychosomatic medicine and his later studies of brain physiology. He had an international reputation as a pioneering researcher in both areas. Less well known was Mort's expertise as a psychoanalyst and his contributions to the psychoanalytic literature.

Like Otto Isakower, whom he much admired, Mort had a strong interest in dreams, memories, and the psychology of dreaming. Linking this interest with neurophysiological studies of the brain, he made a number of important discoveries that were clinical as well as theoretically groundbreaking. One of these was the fact that the analyst's memories of his own childhood and images that he has formed of the patient's childhood are stored in the same way in the brain. This suggests that if he is listening well, the analyst's memories and images of his own childhood experiences that may arise as he listens to the patient's associations, in all likelihood, will be meaningfully linked to related psychological experiences of the patient. In this way, Mort provided neurophysiologic support for Isakower's idea of the analytic instrument, a concept that intrigued him and that he utilized extensively in his own work.

In his interests, his capacity for integration, and his originality, Mort had much in common with Freud. He shared Freud's keen interest in neurophysiology and, like Freud, was forever seeking to discover its relationship to the mind and to psychological experiences.

What Mort shared with Freud, too, was the gift of creativity, a quality that infused not only his pioneering research, but his multi-faceted career.

Mort was born and raised in Cincinnati, went to medical school there, and as an expert in psychosomatic medicine, remained a central figure in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine.

After military service, Mort joined Milton Rosenbaum, another Cincinnati alumnus and newly-appointed chairman of psychiatry at Albert Einstein, as chief of research in that department. From that point on, Mort's rise was meteoric. Within a few years he became, first, chief of psychiatry at Montefiore, and then chairman of the department at Yale. Shortly after joining the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute, he was appointed training and supervising analyst.

In 1982 Mort was elected president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and, after completing his term in office, served as chairman of the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE) for a number of years. He remained an active contributor to the American Psychoanalytic Association until his death, serving on a number of committees and co-chairing a discussion group with Elise Snyder on neurophysiological research and its relation to clinical issues.

Mort's publications include four important books focusing on the interaction of mind and body and scores of articles on a variety of topics ranging from dream studies to an essay on the operas of Richard Wagner. For the past several years, Mort had been working on a major study of Wagner's works from a combined neurophysiological-psychologic point of view. He was also the recipient of many honors and awards in this country and abroad.

Mort's achievements, however remarkable as they were, do not speak to the essence of the man, to the qualities that endeared him to all those who had the privilege of knowing him well.

Throughout his career, Mort remained a scholar and scientist, a seeker after truth. Although power and influence came to him, he was not a seeker after power. On the contrary, throughout his life Mort remained modest, unassuming, natural; a warm and caring person, deeply devoted to family and friends. He disliked partisanship and chauvinism and deplored the narrow-mindedness that prevented analysts of the varying schools from understanding one another and seeking creative integrations of their competing theories.

For above all, Mort was an integrator, a man who, throughout his professional life, sought to forge links between different disciplines, different perspectives, different ideas. In this endeavor he was remarkably successful, being the foremost analyst of our time in building bridges between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, neuroscience and the science of the mind.

If the term Renaissance man can be meaningfully applied to one of our colleagues, Mort Reiser was certainly that man. Scholar, educator, researcher, author, master clinician, Mort was a valued mentor to many of us and in his lifelong devotion to learning, his unrelenting search for the truth, a model for us all.

We shall not soon see his like again.