Ostow, Mortimer 1918-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 8, 1918, in New York, NY; died of cancer, September 23, 2006, in Riverdale, NY. Psychiatrist, neurologist, educator, and author. Ostow was a professor emeritus at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, and he made a name for himself by studying the underlying psychological causes of anti-Semitism, as well as religious fanaticism and terrorism. He studied chemistry at Columbia University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1937 and a master's degree in 1938. He then completed a medical degree at New York University in 1941 and studied at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the late 1940s. Ostow opened a private practice around 1950 while simultaneously working as an attending neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City until 1975, and at Montefiore Hospital from 1953 to 1980. He was a preceptor in psychiatry at Mount Sinai from 1969 to 1980, and lecturer and then attending psychiatrist at Montefiore in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Ostow taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, first as a visiting lecturer from 1954 to 1963, and later as Edward T. Sandrow Visiting Professor from 1965 to 1990, when he retired. During the 1960s, Ostow was known for advocating continued psychiatric care for patients who were released from hospitals with only prescription drugs to treat their mental illnesses. He asserted in Drugs in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (1962) that, contrary to views at the time, drugs merely treated outward symptoms and did not affect underlying causes of mental illness. Further psychotherapy follow-up was in order for most patients, an idea that is now widely accepted. It was in the 1980s, however, that Ostow conducted his research concerning anti-Semitism and the psychological causes of terrorism. Ostow believed that anti-Semitic people could be acting out aggressions toward their parents which were transferred to Jews as a release; he also hypothesized that trouble with toilet training could sometimes be a cause. As for people who became terrorists, he also considered childhood issues to be the underlying cause. Ostow believed that a sense of helplessness and anger experienced during childhood stimulated a need to believe that evil in the world could be violently overcome. The recipient of the 1995 Sigmund Freud Award, Ostow wrote or edited a number of other texts in the field. Among these are The Psychology of Melancholy (1970), Judaism and Psychoanalysis (1982), and Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism (1995).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, October 7, 2006, p. A25.