death wish (noun) : in Freudian psychology, the desire for self-annihilation
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Two doctors' deaths are noted in the New York Times this weekend - Dr Death himself, Jack Kevorkian, who believed that people had the right to be helped to commit suicide if they were terminally ill, and Dr Leo Rangell, a noted Freudian psychoanalyst.
While neither really seemed to have a death wish per se (they died at age 83 and 97, repsectively), that seemed a more interesting opening than "obituary". Dr Rangell's obituary (which provides his and our friend Dr Freud's belief that talk therapy and not medication is the cure for most emotional issues) is worth the reprint here (from the New York Times):
'Dr. Leo Rangell, a leading psychoanalyst during the heyday of classical Freudian talk therapy in the 1960s and ’70s, and a relentless advocate for the slow approach to treating emotional distress even as antidepressants and managed care made short-term treatment the norm, died on May 28 in Los Angeles. He was 97.
His family said the cause was complications of a surgical procedure the day before at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center.
Dr. Rangell, a practicing psychoanalyst and emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at the Los Angeles and San Francisco campuses of the University of California, remained active until the end of his life — teaching, writing for scholarly journals, seeing patients until a few days before he died and contributing articles about public affairs to The Huffington Post.
His stamina as a writer and teacher, and as a major player in the often contentious political world of the psychoanalytic profession, was legendary. He published 450 academic papers during his lifetime and nine books, the last at the age of 94. Dr. Rangell’s prominence in his field coincided with a sea change in American attitudes about psychological treatment during the late 1960s. The emerging availability of psychoactive prescription drugs, as well as competition from psychologists, social workers and even New Age practitioners, began to diminish the appeal of classic psychoanalytic treatment, with its arduous exploration of unconscious feelings in sessions two or three times a week that could span years.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1968, Dr. Rangell acknowledged the changes in the air but attributed them to a kind of cultural misunderstanding. In the can-do, post-World II American imagination, he said, psychoanalysis had become wrongly perceived as a cure-all. “The hopes of the general public exceeded all reasonable expectation,” he said. “There were hopes that a generation of children could be brought up free of problems, that psychoanalytic insight would rid the world of crime, divorce and learning problems. Now there’s a big letdown.”
Throughout the subsequent decades, as new forms of therapy continued to multiply — and managed care insurance limited mental health coverage for many people — Dr. Rangell remained an advocate for the fundamental insights laid down by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century. “There are always fashions and fads and pendulum swings,” Dr. Rangell said, “but no explanatory system of human behavior has as yet supplanted the psychoanalytic one.”
Peter Loewenberg, a psychoanalyst and professor of the history of psychoanalysis at U.C.L.A., described Dr. Rangell as one of the profession’s “leading statesmen” and a voice for humanistic values in an age of quick-fix therapy. “Everyone today is led to believe that they will feel better if they take a pill, and that is sometimes true,” Dr. Loewenberg said. “What Leo Rangell promoted was the analytical tradition of understanding the self.”'
