Samuel Ritvo, former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, passed away on December 3, 2008, at the age of 91. He was an active contributor to the field of psychoanalysis, in particular child psychoanalysis, whose illustrious career spanned 60 years.
Sam first learned of psychoanalysis from articles about Freud he happened upon while delivering newspapers to pay for his education at Harvard during the Depression. In medical school at Yale in the late 1930s, he participated in a discussion group in the Department of Pediatrics led by Edith Jackson, an analysand of Sigmund Freud and co-worker of Anna Freud. The Freuds' ideas about psychological development, fantasies, and unconscious conflict struck a chord in Sam, who had faced a slew of challenges as a child with a congenital clubfoot. His medical school thesis, written under the guidance of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Helen Richter Gilmore, applied Erikson's epigenetic theory to a child with an eating disorder. Unlike pediatrics, the Yale Department of Psychiatry in the early 1940s was hostile to psychoanalysis. On his psychiatry rotation, Sam would hide his Freud volumes by turning the covers inside out. Thus Sam began his residency training in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis rather than in psychiatry.
Homesickness and the desire to undertake a personal analysis motivated Sam to leave Minnesota, after his internship year, for New York, where he did a further year in pediatrics at Babies Hospital, an affiliate of Columbia University Medical School. He continued at Columbia with a three-year residency in psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute. His residency directors supported his leaving the hospital each day for his analysis with Marianne Kris. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute was not so supportive, rejecting his application for training because he was “too anxious.” Determined to pursue an analytic career, he made an appointment with the chair of the Education Committee, Sally Bonnett. He told her he had been further analyzed and was no longer so anxious. To his amazement she scrawled a note in response: “Admit Dr. Ritvo to classes!” For the rest of his life he was an ally, always quietly and discreetly, of the many individuals—as well as non-medical mental health professionals as a group—whose psychoanalytic careers were being sidetracked, stalled, or thwarted by what he saw to be, all too often, hasty and biased dismissal by powerful analysts.
In 1950, Milton Senn invited Sam to join the Yale faculty and participate in the transformation of the Gesell Institute into the Yale Child Study Center (CSC). Sam had research and teaching responsibilities. He set up the child psychiatry training program, one of the first in the nation. His first trainee, Al Solnit, became president of APsaA two years after Sam. He remained training director until 1963 and a member of the faculty until last year.
Sam's research assignment was to assist Ernst Kris with The Yale Longitudinal Study of Child Development. A prospective, observational study of families enrolled during the mother's first pregnancy, The Longitudinal Study employed a multidisciplinary team of psychoanalytically oriented pediatricians, psychologists, early childhood educators, and psychiatrists to document the development of the children and the family. When indicated, psychoanalysis was provided. A second research project, The Family Study, arose out of the Longitudinal Study. Under the guidance of Marianne Kris, the Family Study took advantage of a rare opportunity that arose when all four
The authors are the children of Samuel Ritvo, M.D.
Rachel Z. Ritvo, M.D., is clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University; a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Kensington, Md.; and a member of the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.
David Z. Ritvo, M.D., is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Walnut Creek, Calif.; a member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis; and a delegate to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Jonathan I. Ritvo, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine; medical director, Center for Dependency, Addiction and Rehabilitation Program, University of Colorado Hospital; and practices psychiatry and addiction psychiatry in Denver.
members of one family were in psychoanalysis simultaneously. The process of these analyses in conjunction with observations from nursery school and pediatric visits of the two children provided a treasure trove of data for articles published primarily in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Yale Press will publish a volume on the Longitudinal Study in the coming year. Three weeks before his death, Sam completed a chapter for that volume which includes a follow-up interview, conducted in 2005, with “Evelyn,” whom he had analyzed as a child 50 years earlier.
The Child Study Center and the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (WNEIP) were Sam's two professional homes throughout his long career. At CSC he had a unique position as a clinical faculty member with an office on site where he could see private patients as well as teach and supervise. In 1965 he was the first clinical faculty member ever to be made a full professor. He taught generations of child psychiatrists, who visited New Haven's many ethnic grocery stores during their peripatetic supervisions with Sam. Curiously enough, walks to collect food also stood out in Evelyn's recollection of her analysis some 50 years after the fact.
Sam was a founding member of the Western New England. He served as a training and supervising analyst from 1957 to mandatory retirement age, director of the clinic from 1962 to 1970, and chair of the Education Committee from 1974 to 1983. With Sy Lustman, Sally Provence, and Al Solnit, he founded the child analytic program at WNEIP in 1962. Sam always brought bagels and lox to Saturday morning meetings.
Although Sam did not enjoy administrative tasks, he valued active participation in professional organizations. He was a founding member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and was one of the five signatories to the articles of incorporation that created the Association for Child Psychoanalysis in 1963, later serving as president of the association. Active in the American Psychoanalytic Association, he served on many committees and as president in 1968.
Sam was a sophisticated analytic thinker whose writings were based on keen clinical observations and the organizing influence of ego psychology. His early writings were on child analytic process and the development of the ego and superego. Because he analyzed so many Yale students, late-adolescent development and the transition to adulthood became a focus of his writing. When Yale became coed in the 1970s, eating disorders and mother-daughter conflicts drew his attention. Conflicts of aggression interested him late in his career as he came to value the contributions of Paul Gray.
Sam was a long-time, loyal participant in the Princeton Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies groups organized by Sam Guttman. Enjoying the twice-yearly opportunity for deepening psychoanalytic dialogue, Sam cherished the opportunity to engage with Paul Gray, who elaborated a technique for listening closely to the interplay of drive and defense in the moment-to-moment utterances of the analysand. Testing out this technique with his own patients and teaching it to colleagues at WNEIP kept Sam excited about psychoanalysis to the day he died.
Sam will be remembered not just for the contributions he made to the field but also for his remarkable personal qualities. People were drawn to Sam—to his warmth, his lack of pretense, and his humor. He conveyed his sense that each human life is to be embraced and celebrated in all its diversity of strengths and frailties. But he didn't stop there: He also sincerely believed in the power of the ego—that people could face and master the challenges their psyches presented to them. He leaves behind untold patients, students and colleagues, family and friends who are grateful to him for the support he gave to their personal strivings.