FEIFEL, Herman 1915-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 15 (some sources cite November 4), 1915, in Brooklyn, NY; died January 18, 2003, in Los Angeles, CA. Psychologist, thanatologist, educator, and author. Feifel devoted much of his life to the study of death. When his book The Meaning of Death was published in 1959, the topic of dying was generally avoided in polite conversation, especially in dialogue involving dying patients themselves. Feifel's edited volume of essays by prominent psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians opened a new conduit for communication about death, dying, and bereavement and created a framework for the scholarly study of death issues known as thanatology. The medical profession was slow to embrace the idea that many dying patients welcome conversation about their impending demise, but within ten years of Feifel's publication thanatology had become an important field of academic research. Feifel spent most of his career as an active clinical psychologist at Veterans Administration hospitals; he was chief psychologist at the Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic in Los Angeles, California, from 1961 until his retirement in 1992. Feifel also taught psychology at the University of Southern California and other educational institutions, and he served on the board of directors of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, and Bereavement. He was awarded the Harold M. Hildreth Award of the American Psychological Association. Feifel's other writings included New Meanings of Death, published nearly twenty years after the appearance of his groundbreaking original volume.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Strack, Stephen, editor, Death and the Quest for Meaning: Essays in Honor of Herman Feifel, Jason Aronson (Northvale, NJ), 1997.

periodicals

Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2003, obituary by Elaine Woo, p. B15.