Stuart T. Hauser

With Stuart Hauser's death on August 5, 2008, from complications of treatments for esophageal cancer, many members of APsaA lost a close friend and long-standing colleague. Psychoanalysis lost one of its most realistic, determined, and effective ambassadors; many young psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic researchers lost an inspiring mentor who took great pleasure in his students' careers. Stuart served APsaA in many ways. He chaired and reviewed grant proposals for the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research for many years, and chaired the Committee on Research Education. He began the annual research poster session at the winter meetings of the Association and served on its organizing committee. With his close colleague, Robert Waldinger, Stuart organized a yearly psychoanalytic research Discussion Group that is one of the best attended at the winter meetings. As certification became controversial, his combined clinical/research capacities led to Stuart's being asked by the Committee on Institutes to study the process of evaluation. Most recently, he chaired a special task force to review the place of research in APsaA.

Stuart grew up in the Bronx and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. His career path reflected his broad interests and his capacity to bridge different worlds. He graduated from Antioch College in 1960, and received an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1965. In 1966, he earned his M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine. He completed residency training in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center from 1967 to 1970. In 1977, he received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology and personality from Harvard University, and completed his training in psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute the following year. He always maintained the many identities reflected in his training—psychoanalyst, physician, investigator, teacher, and a scholar devoted to examining some of the deepest questions of human development and attachment.

Following his graduate training, Stuart joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School with which he was affiliated with pride for nearly 25 years. Fostering adaptive development across the lifespan was one of his deepest commitments in both his mentoring and his research. He directed two major longitudinal studies of adolescent development. The first focused on psychosocial determinants and consequences of adolescent onset insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus; the second addresses family aspects of adolescent ego development in high school students and psychiatric patients. This study, first published as Adolescents and Their Families (The Free Press), extended into the young adult and mid-life adult years and has evolved into a three-generation study of development that includes the parents, spouses, and children of the original adolescent subjects. Characteristically Stuart asked questions in this study that bridged psychoanalytic and developmental psychology perspectives on attachment and the major tasks of adolescence and young adulthood, including the forming of close and romantic peer relationships, attachments with family of origin, beginning new families, parenting, and work relationships.

In the last year of his life, he took another bold step in his research, bringing genetic perspectives to his study of ego function and resilience in young adults. His most recent book, Out of the Woods: Tales of Resilient Teens (Harvard University Press with Joseph Allen and Eve Golden) describes the stories of individuals he had followed for many years and gives special attention to those traits and adaptations that helped them weather considerable adversity

In 1993, Stuart became director of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston. He served as director and then president until 2004. During his tenure at Judge Baker, he nurtured the center's clinical research training program. This training program had just received renewed funding shortly before Stuart's death, a renewal especially remarkable in a current climate of reduction in NIH funding for training young scholars.

Indeed Stuart's commitment to mentor-ship of young scholars was evident in so many ways beyond his professorial roles and his success in sustaining NIH supported training efforts. For years, he gave much time and thought to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was equally devoted

to the “research summer school” supported by the International Psychoanalytic Association held every summer in London in August and then to a later version of the same program in New Haven held in the spring. There could not be a more fitting setting for Stuart's devotion to mentoring and to building bridges. Despite long training days, Stuart was energized by the training experience and eager to hear how the participants fared when they returned home. So beloved was he as a mentor in this setting that on his death for days e-mails arrived on the psychoanalytic research listserv describing the impact Stuart's consultation had had on so many young scholars around the world. He brought the same care for mentoring and developing young scholars to every paper and grant he reviewed.

Stuart's energy often seemed bound-less—and he spoke of how work was his greatest satisfaction and the core of his identity. Many of his colleagues stood in awe of his ability to maintain psychoanalytic clinical work with his research, writing, and constant attention to his students. He also seemed always ready to make himself available as a consultant, and had in the last four years started an active collaboration with colleagues in Norway on resilience. And despite his devotion to his work, his curiosity was boundless and led him to many challenges that often surprised his friends—learning to ski, to sail, to play the piano, to be fluent in Norwegian, only samples from a long list.

While his work and his curiosity were the manifest starting place of his energy, the deeper source came from his capacity for lasting friendships and his love of his family, Barbara, his wife of 44 years, and his sons Josh and Ethan as well as his two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren. Stuart's family was the home base of his ability to give to all of us and to hold so many people in mind. Much as we miss him, he left a part of himself in all of us, in his letters and projects that brought us together, his gentle urgings that we join him in a mentoring effort or a task for psychoanalysis, and in his ever resilient attitude to living. We wish he were still here to help us carry on all that he started and fully intended to continue. But if that is not possible, he conveyed his faith and friendship in such abundance that we feel his presence, see his smile, hear his laugh, and carry forward his work so that he will remain with us.