Andrew Morrison 1935-2010

Click Here to Read:  The title of Andrew Morrison’s papers from the PEP CD Rom.

Click Here to Read:  Shame in the Transference/Countertransference Interaction by Andrew Morrison.

Dear Colleagues,

On February 28, 2010, Dr. Andrew P. Morrison of Cambridge, Massachusetts, died after a battle with lymphoma. His wife, Holly Levenkron, has asked me to post a remembrance of Dr. Morrison to the membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association, of which he was a beloved and revered member.

Andy was a distinguished practitioner of psychoanalysis, a gifted teacher at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Massachusetts Institute of for Psychoanalysis. He was a pioneer in the psychoanalytic study of shame, which, prior to the nineteen seventies, had been seriously neglected. His edited book, Essential Papers on Narcissism (1985,) still one of the finest anthologies on the topic, pointed to what was at the time a dearth of specific attention to the dynamics of shame in relation to the problem of narcissism. That collection also serves as the backdrop for his 1989 book, Shame: The Underside of Narcissism, still a classic in the field, which embraced the insights of Heinz Kohut without rejecting the mainstream of psychoanalytic thinking. He and I co-edited The Widening Scope of Shame (1997), a broad-based collection
of writings on shame by psychoanalysts which also includes contributions from academics from the social sciences and humanities. A fourth book, The Culture of Shame, (1998) was addressed to a wider nonprofessional audience.
He was a member of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a council member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, a frequent presenter at psychoanalytic congresses and institutes and was, with Dr. Benjamin Kilborne and myself, a founder in 1991 of the American Psychoanalytic Association*s Shame Dynamics Discussion Group, which has been well received and has continued to the present.

Andy was a kind, gentle, and compassionate, loving person, a generous and understanding colleague and a warm and giving friend even in the midst of the ravages of illness. He is survived by his wife, Holly Levenkron, and his daughter, Rachel Morrison, daughter of the late Amy Lichtblau Morrison.

He will be sorely missed, and his memory will live in our hearts.

Sorrowfully,
Melvin R. Lansky