Dr. Stanley A. Leavy, clinical professor of psychiatry in the Medical School and Life Member of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute, died on October 31, 2016, at the age of 101. He was an internationally recognized scholar and a beloved mentor, teacher, and therapist within our community.
Dr. Leavy graduated from Yale College in 1935, spent a year in graduate school at the University of Chicago, and then attended the University of Rochester Medical School. After medical internships in Syracuse and Rochester, he served as a general practitioner in the Cumberland region of Tennessee. After being raised in a Jewish family, he joined the Society of Friends as a young man. During World War II, his religious beliefs led him to work as a physician in psychiatric institutions, the Connecticut and Fairfield State Hospitals, as an alternative to military service. Following this experience, he completed psychiatry residency at Yale and psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He was a faculty member in our Department, a lecturer in Saybrook College, a psychiatrist at University Health Services (1960-1973), a member of the Yale-New Haven Psychiatry Staff, and from 1965-1985, he was a supervising and training analyst at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. From 1968-1970, he served as president of this Psychoanalytic Institute. There, he was an advocate for broadening the eligibility criteria to enable homosexual candidates and people without medical degrees to pursue psychoanalytic training.
Dr. Leavy was distinguished by his modesty, spirituality, as well as the remarkable breadth and depth of his erudition. For example, when interviewed* about how he came to the field of psychoanalysis, he said, “From early childhood I was concerned about origins, and just about every range of my later interests has its stimulus in the same question, - taking shape in my career as a psychoanalyst, in my religious faith, and … in my study of languages, ancient and modern, and of history and natural history, - the last expressed most steadily in gardening… I suspected before my analysis that I would discover through it something I needed to know about myself…lost memories…but the real discovery was of feelings that had been banished.”
As an internationally recognized psychoanalytic scholar, Dr. Leavy was skeptical of aspects of early Freudian thought. For example, in an interview* in which he was asked about structural theory, he noted, “I have almost no use for it.” Instead, he seems to have been profoundly influenced by the objects relations theorists. He also was powerfully influenced by pioneers of existential philosophy including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty; psychoanalysts who incorporated aspects of existential philosophy into psychoanalysis, such as Lacan and his mentor and Yale colleague, Hans Loewald; and philosophers attempting to link psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and religion, such as Ricoeur. His teaching was distinguished by his deep humanism and his ability to convey insights into the conceptual and clinical challenges at the interface of philosophy, literature, religion, ethics, and psychoanalysis. His numerous papers and three books, The Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1987), In the Image of God: A Psychoanalyst’s View (1997), and Questioning Authority: Essays in Psychoanalysis (2005) illustrate these themes.
Dr. Leavy was married for 67 years Margaret H. Russell of New Haven, who predeceased him by 9 years. He is survived by his daughters Elizabeth Stroman of Sausalito, CA (husband Robert), and Jane Leavy of Newton, MA (husband Frederick Sperounis), six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. His son, Jonathan Leavy of Newton, MA (wife Virginia Read Leavy), died in June, 2016.
*White, R: An interview with Dr. Stanley Leavy, June 30, 2005