Anthony Storr, 80, Psychiatrist and Writer
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: March 28, 2001
Published: March 28, 2001
Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist who made a successful second career as a popular writer and broadcaster exploring depression, creativity, sexual deviance and other aspects of human behavior, died March 17 in Oxford, England. He was 80 and lived in Oxford.
He suffered a heart attack while giving an after-dinner speech at Wadham College.
Although influenced by Freud and Jung -- he wrote books on each of them -- he concluded that they had overgeneralized their ideas.
''Since I was not able wholly to subscribe to any one set of beliefs advanced by any 'guru,' '' Dr. Storr wrote in his first book, ''The Integrity of the Personality'' (Atheneum, 1961), ''I had to fall back on my own, however derivative.''
Written chiefly to clarify his own thinking and experience, this book examined the goals of psychotherapy, which its author identified as self-realization and the integration of the personality. The experience of being ill mattered more to Dr. Storr than the etiology.
''It's not psychopathology that counts,'' he later said, ''it's what you do with it.'' He himself suffered a sickly, lonely childhood with bouts of depression that were to last his entire life.
Charles Anthony Storr was born in London May 18, 1920, the youngest child of the Rev. Vernon Faithfull Storr (a canon and later sub-dean of Westminster Abbey) and his wife and first cousin, Katherine Cecilia Storr, whose consanguinity may have accounted for Anthony's severe asthma and tendency to depression. At age 8 he was sent to public school at Winchester, where he was bullied and miserably unhappy.
By his own estimate he turned this background to his advantage, cultivating an ability to listen to others and feel compassion. From Winchester College he went to Christ's Church, Cambridge, where he began to emerge from his shell. He met C. P. Snow, who served as his moral tutor and was to become both a lifelong friend and an inspiration to span what Snow was to call the two cultures of science and art.
He went from Cambridge to continue his medical studies at Westminster Hospital (1941-1944), then to serve as house physician in various hospitals.
Thereafter he practiced psychotherapy privately and, from 1961, combined his practice with various hospital appointments as a consultant. In 1974 he gave up his private practice to teach postgraduate doctors in Oxford, where he gained dining rights at Wadham College and became a fellow of Green College.
When his first book proved popular to a lay audience, he began to think of himself as a writer and 11 more books followed in the next 26 years, in addition to those on Freud and Jung.
Among these were ''The Art of Psychotherapy'' (Methuen, 1979), ''Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind'' (Grove, 1989), ''Music and the Mind'' (Free Press, 1992) and ''Feet of Clay'' (Free Press, 1996), about the nature of gurus and other charismatic leaders.
His books sold well, especially in the United States, and were widely translated. He was a frequent book reviewer, both in England and the United States, and became a familiar figure on English television, cutting, as The London Daily Telegraph put it, ''an authoritative, urbane, almost avuncular figure.'' Among the documentaries he wrote and presented was ''Our Sporting Life,'' an examination of violence in sports.
A recurring theme in his writing is his skepticism over the notion that interpersonal relations are the sine qua non of mental health. In ''Solitude: A Return to Self'' (Free Press, 1988) and other works, he proposed that being alone can be beneficial to both achievement and personal growth. ''If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears,'' he wrote.
He expressed a belief in the creative possibilities inherent in mental suffering and the potential for self-healing to be found in artistic and intellectual creativity.
''I want to show,'' he wrote, ''that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place. The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.''
Dr. Storr was married twice, first to Catherine Cole (the children's writer Catherine Storr, who died in January), with whom he had three daughters, who survive him, as does his second wife, Catherine Peters.
Photo: Anthony Storr (The New York Times, 1988)
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/anthony-storr-80-psychiatrist-and-writer.html
No comments:
Post a Comment