In Memoriam: L. Bryce Boyer (1916-2000)

In the century since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a handful of psychoanalysts have devoted entire careers to the exploration of the unconscious from clinical material together with material gathered via ethnographic fieldwork, historical scholarship, folklore, religion, art, music, workplace organizations, or other “social” institutions and units. On August 9, 2000, L. Bryce Boyer, MD, one of the most fertile minds in this effort, died in Walnut Creek, California, at age 84. To the end, he was developing. His late works read like the Verdi of Otello and Falstaff, and like the Beethoven of the final quartets.