In Memoriam: Benjamin Brody
By Paul H. Elovitz
Ramapo College and Clio’s Psyche
Ben Brody died on June 17, 2007 after a year of declining health and a diagnosis several weeks earlier of abdominal cancer. His body was cremated and on June 30 a memorial service was held at the Penn Club in Manhattan. Dr. Brody was a New York City psychoanalyst and psychologist who had been a member of the Psychohistory Forum for about seventeen years. In 1991 he suggested the formation of the Forum’s Communism: The Dream That Failed Research Group, which after almost a decade was transformed into the Psychoanalytic Autobiography and Biography Reading and Research Group, which continues to meet at the West 86th Street home of Lee and the late Connie Shneidman.
Benjamin Brody’s life started in Cleveland, Ohio where he was born on April 13, 1920 as the eldest of two sons to Jewish-immigrant parents from Lithuania. The family was impoverished during the Great Depression, with his mother working in a garment factory and his printer father often unemployed. Ben was educated in the public schools, after which he put himself through Ohio State University by working and on scholarships, graduating magna cum laude in 1942, before enlisting in the army. He served four years stateside as a psychologist, attaining the rank of captain.
In 1944 in Cleveland he married Mary Manning and would have two sons, David, now a psychiatrist in California, and Samuel, a concert pianist in Washington State. After the completion of his four years of military service, Ben earned his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago toward which he felt enormous respect and loyalty because of the academic and financial support it gave him. He also had the benefit of the G.I. Bill in pursuing his higher education. After his discharge from the army, he practiced from 1946 to 1951 in Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinics in Cleveland, Chicago, Newark, and New York City.
Dr. Brody moved to New York City in 1949 where he trained from 1951-1955 at the William
Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute with Erich Fromm and Janet Rioch, among others, prior to receiving a Certificate in Applied Psychoanalysis in 1956. He served as President of the Harry Stack Sullivan Society in 1953 and 1957, and in 1960 Ben was made an Associate of the Institute in recognition of his contribution to it. In 1961 he joined the faculty and received referrals for the remainder of his career. Though he taught at Adelphi and City universities, as well as at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, he devoted his career to the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy which he continued until less than a month before his death. He lived and practiced in the Greenwich Village area.
Ben Brody wrote a “Between Sessions” column for the White Institute Newsletter and a variety of psychoanalytic papers including “Freud’s Case Load,” published in Psychotherapy and featured in Time Magazine in 1970. In it he was able to identify 145 separate cases and draw a number of insightful conclusions, which the Time’s reporter considered provocative. The former editor of The Review of Existential Psychology found his paper on Freud in America to be outstanding, telling me that Joyce Carol Oates said it was the best thing she read on the subject. Some of his additional writings are “Community Mental Health,” “The Denial of the Unconscious,” “The Present State of Psychoanalysis,” “Freud’s Analysis of American Culture,” and “Notes on Violence and the Intellectuals.”
Brody had a strong interest in popular culture and for a while in the 1970s did film reviews for Psychology Today. He loved jazz and had a wonderful memory for the lyrics of popular songs of the 1930s and 1940s, but his real passion was for poetry, especially that of John Keats and Emily Dickinson. He published some light humorous verse, and delighted in calling himself an “authentic poetaster.”
Ben was admired for his lively intelligence, depth of knowledge, and excellent memory. The records at White indicate that the word “brilliant” was used in reference to him by a number of his mentors. He was also a bit of a curmudgeon who enjoyed getting colleagues to look at the subject from a different vantage point, while putting a smile on their faces.
Mary Brody died in early 2003 eight years after suffering a devastating stroke. In 2005 Ben married Georgia Adams. I want to thank Georgia, Leo Kovar, and Sondra Wick for providing additional information for this memorial article. We at the Forum wish to express our condolences to his wife, his brother Albert, his sons David and Samuel, his two grandchildren, and all of his friends and patients.
Paul Elovitz, PhD, is Editor of this publication and may be reached at pelovitz@aol.com
Remembering Ben Brody
David Felix
CUNY–Graduate School
Benjamin Brody, a long-serving psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, died on June 17 of this year. He was eighty-seven years old, and a resident of the West Village for many years as well as a member of the Psychohistory Forum. My relationship with him began with psychotherapy and became a long, easy friendship.
Ben was content to concentrate on the practice of therapy, and I can best memorialize him through his professional effect on me. We agreed, I believe, on the philosophical bases of his science and my own discipline of history. I base much of my thinking in history on Freudian insights and Ben tolerated my evaluation, surely more conservative than his, of the objective elements of political history and events.
During therapy Ben maintained his professional ascendancy, but on our relaxed lunches he was as ready to grant me authority in my area of competence. He had provided the rationale to affect me professionally and, inevitably, personally. I had been a newspaperman and editor, but “Midway this way of life…. I woke to find myself in a dark wood where the right road was wholly lost and gone” (Dante, Divine Comedy).With counsel drawn from Ben's sense of reality, I soon discovered I was an academic by nature and expressed it in the research for my first book, then in process. I thereby became a historian in the formal sense. Established at the City University of New York, I went on to complete that first book and write five more historical studies.
Ben had a fine sense of how far to go. He never intruded into a patient's area of competence, but could relate it to real circumstances which that person might not have seen. When, for example, he read my account of Karl Marx's efforts to establish himself as a leader of the First International, he remarked that he could not see any mature development in my subject. Of course, this was in the sense developed by Erik Erikson. Immediately the awareness sprang into my eyes that it had indeed happened and was important in Marx's life and in world revolution. In my study, Marx as Politician (1983), I could then write: “Marx, the thunderer of the Communist Manifesto and the dictator of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, became the meticulous scholar, amiable corresponding secretary for Germany, and adept of half-measures. Marx’s personality had consolidated itself on a superior level.” I am sure that many others can give similar accounts of equal professional and personal changes according to Dr. Brody.
David Felix, PhD, is a historian and biographer who may be reached at dflixx@msn.com.
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