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Our esteemed colleague and dear friend, Dr. Jack Danielian, died on March 28, 2018. He left a large, indelible mark on many of us—one not easily erased.

From 1974 to the present, Jack was a cherished and a prodigious contributor to the work of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (AJP), both as an author and as a highly respected Editorial Board member. The readers and the editorial board members of the AJP have lost a beloved colleague. Dr. Danielian was also a long-term member and officer in various capacities of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, the society which publishes the AJP. Since 2008, after many years of teaching and supervising, he served as distinguished Dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. His presence, invaluable insight, and kindness are irreplaceable. He touched each and every one of us at the Karen Horney Center, as elsewhere, and his presence will be sorely missed.

Dr. Danielian graduated with a B.A. from Harvard University in 1956, and he received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1964. In 1971, after several interviews—one of them with Dr. Louis DeRosis, his future training analyst—Dr. Danielian was the first psychologist to be accepted into the psychoanalytic training program at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis (AIP). Jack applied to the AIP at a time when the Institute’s admission policy of restricting admissions solely to medical doctors, held since the Institute’s inception in 1941, was open to modification. Clearly, Dr. DeRosis saw something special in Jack when he agreed to become his training analyst. And Jack’s trailblazing entrance into the Institute paved the way for fellow psychologists and social workers to join the psychoanalytic training program of the AIP.

Jack would tell you that he was fortunate to have Dr. DeRosis as his analyst. He would say that Louis DeRosis represented the first flowering of Horneyan analysts at the Institute—having been trained by some of the great pioneers, including Muriel Ivimey, Harold Kelman, and Karen Horney herself. Dr. DeRosis’s knowledge and psychoanalytic expertise left a lasting mark on Jack. It helped to shape his meta-theoretical approach and his skill as an analyst. The privilege of hearing first-hand anecdotes about Karen Horney and the early days of the Institute from his analyst also helped to cement his sense of commitment to the Horneyan perspective and to the Karen Horney Center.

A training and supervising analyst at the AIP since 1986, Jack possessed a rare combination of qualities. He was a wise and respectful teacher, an empathic listener, and an innovative thinker who encouraged everyone to challenge their meta-theoretical assumptions in the service of bringing the art and craft of analytic therapy into the 21st century. Jack used his wit, curiosity, razor-sharp intellect, and ever-present humility to encourage analysts and supervisees to reach beyond themselves and stretch further into their fullest potential as clinicians and analysts.

Toward that end Jack provided cogent instruction to students and practitioners throughout his career through numerous academic engagements and professional affiliations. His graduate teaching fellowship at Columbia University was followed by an assignment in the U.S.S.R. through a special travel grant through the American Psychological Association. He later became an Associate Professor of Psychology at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York (CUNY), where he taught from 1971–1972.

In addition to being a training and supervising analyst from 1986 and the Dean of the AIP from 2008 until his death, Jack was a senior faculty member of the Wayne Institute for Advanced Psychotherapy at Bellarmine University. Beginning in 2014, he was instrumental in designing the curriculum, as well as teaching and supervising students in this year-long, low-residency, distance learning certificate program in Louisville, Kentucky. He will be deeply missed by students and faculty at both institutions.

Jack augmented his training, supervision, and clinical practice by participating in various professional activities. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis since 1992, chair of the Task Force on Sexual Misconduct for the New Hampshire Psychological Association from 1990 to1994, speaker at the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integrations (SEPI) Conference in 2012, and speaker at the Division 39 of the American Psychological Association (APA) Conferences in 2010 and 2013.

Dr. Danielian was a prolific writer, publishing numerous journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews, including: “Karen Horney and Heinz Kohut: Theory and the Repeat of History” (1988), “Meta-Realization in Horney and the Teaching of Psychoanalysis” (2010a), and “A Century of Silence: Terror and the Armenian Genocide” (2010b). He also recently co-authored two books, Listening with Purpose: Entry Points into Shame and Narcissistic Vulnerability (2012), and Uncovering the Resilient Core: A Workbook on the Treatment of Narcissistic Defenses, Shame, and Emerging Authenticity (2017).

The influence of Horneyan theory was evident throughout his publications. Jack valued Horney’s early understanding and clear articulation of the power of shame as a profound factor in human suffering. He credited Horney’s ability to articulate the connection between trauma and neglect to early attachment injuries and defensively-based over-compensations that interfere with authentic self-emergence. Above all, Jack appreciated Horney’s systemically-based meta-theoretical view, which he saw as both ground breaking and theoretically relevant to contemporary practitioners.

In the two books that Jack and I had the privilege of writing together, one of our goals was to illustrate how Horneyan precepts around character development, shame, and defense responses had direct relevance to recent advances within the field of trauma treatment, attachment injury, and neuropsychological research. Additionally, we both made a strong commitment to developing a writing style that was as jargon free and non-pathologizing as possible. Our aim was to provide a clear, unifying, process-oriented methodology that could bridge a gap across theoretical paradigms in a manner that was integrative and comprehensive—one that drew from the writings of other relationally-based theorists and practitioners as well.

For me what was most remarkable about both of these writing endeavors was the ease with which Jack and I were able to form a partnership. There was never an argument or display of frustration; ideas were discussed, disagreements resolved in a way that profoundly changed my relational expectations around the power and possibility of partnership.

Never one to take himself too seriously, Jack used his playful nature to make certain that the commitment we each had to our writing be placed in its proper perspective. This perspective, I might add, was enhanced by Jack’s love of fine bourbon. Over the course of those seven years, Jack instituted a ritualistic “raising of a glass” upon the completion of each chapter of our books. I continue to use this ritual at appropriate moments of celebration.

Recently, I came across a copy of the In Memoriam to Louis DeRosis who died in 2010, written by Jack and published in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. In that tribute Jack described Louie as “an utterly rare combination of conviction and unaffected modesty. Passionate about many things, he nevertheless had the authenticity of an honest and kind man working at the trade he loved” (Danielian, 2011, p. 182). These are the very words I would use to capture the essence of Jack Danielian.

After reading Jack’s tribute to Louie, I realized for the first time that something of Karen Horney—the best of Karen Horney—had been transmitted to Louie, which, in turn, he transmitted to Jack. Jack always described Louie as one of those rare individuals who had the capacity to encourage others to enter more fully into themselves and engage wholeheartedly in life’s unfolding process. Jack was able to offer the same invitation to so many of his students, supervisees, and colleagues.

I suppose this is the true power of a successful analysis; the best parts of an analyst eventually become internalized and carried forward by those they touch. Karen Horney recognized early on that the vehicle of change between a therapist and patient (and I would add mentor and supervisee) was neither content nor knowledge but rather a deepening experience of self and other.

With Jack’s passing, a bright light has been extinguished. In Jack we found the gentlest of souls; yet, he possessed strength in his convictions combined with a palpable sense of decency and humility. His belief in the power of analytic treatment was unwavering, in part because Jack was able to witness fifty years of the long arc of theoretical progress, which gave him an invaluable perspective, and in part because Jack saw character as something that was mutable. His belief that human suffering and defense structures were responsive to the healing environment of therapeutic holding left Jack with a great sense of optimism about the direction of our field.

With every death comes an invitation. As we honor Jack Danielian’s life and mourn his loss, perhaps we can reflect upon the mentors in our lives, those living and those who are gone. How does their light shine in us, live on through us? And how can we persevere to make that light stronger? It is, after all, the cycle of life, how the proverbial torch gets passed.

Jack is survived by his wife, Hasmig; his son Garin and wife Emiko; his daughter Ani Huang and husband Zhen; and Jack’s three grandchildren, Zaven, Zoe, and Nishan, the lights of his life.