Obituary Dr. Eli Weisstub MD
10.1.1943 – 30.3.2015
I met Eli when I studied Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he had just arrived from San Francisco. An instructor of students performing clinical work in hospital psychiatric departments (in 'Hadassa' Medical Center and 'Ezrat Nashim' Hospital), he was always available, collegial without maintaining any distance, and with a Californian spirit of equality. He brought with him a fresh and open professional attitude. Eli was a person of refined taste, and meticulous about quality in every area, from the criticism of theoretical approaches, professional papers and clinical presentations up to and including the choice of a site for a conference, a car or a jacket. In those years Eli played an important role in founding and formalizing the Israeli Society for Analytical Psychology.
When I heard that in moving to Israel, Eli had left an assistant professor post at Stanford University, a succsessful private clinic and a very comfortable life style in San Francisco, I recalled the famous lines of R. M. Rilke in The Book of Hours II - the Book of Pilgrimage (translated by Robert Bly):
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors,
and keeps on walking,
because of a church
that stands somewhere in the East.
Years later, at his funeral, his brother told a story about their father, which came from Eastern Europe to study medicine in Vienna, and later settled in Canada. He was interested in Jewish thought no less than in medical practice, and in his hidden writings declared that one of his sons would become a doctor in Israel. I thought that Eli was the son who set forth to seek the “church which he [his father] forgot” as in the Rilke poem.
Eli in a very characteristic way, deconstructed the symbolic scheme of Rilke's poem, and did not leave a house and a family to set for his quest, but founded them here, in Jerusalem, in a glorious fashion. He was the combination of a knowledgeable father, well acquainted with analytic psychology and psychoanalytic writings, a profound and precise scholar, and along with these qualities, also a challenging and sometimes even rebellious youngster in his roles as a therapist, a teacher, and in every position he took in the local and global professional world of analytic psychology. These attributes are also expressed in his unique papers: “Questions to Jung on 'Answer to Job'” (JAP 1993) and 'Self as the Feminine Principle' (JAP 1997). It was Eli who taught me Jung's saying: “Thank God I'm not a Jungian”. I learned from him how dangerous the state of an uncritical enthusiast (a “Freudian or Jungian parrot” as he put it) is to individuality, and also to psychoanalytic and analytic psychology institutes and societies.
As an analyst and a teacher Eli was a mentor. A mentor in the Odysseyian way: a guide, a protector, a teacher, a model, sympathetic and encouraging but also uncompromisingly challenging and critical. In the well-sated, politically correct western-world and specifically in the too soft western therapeutic world, some colleagues and students found it difficult to accept his manly direct, confrontational style, and for this reason he did not always receive the appreciation and gratitude he so much deserved. It might be said That Eli was one of the last 'fathers' in the world described above, where maternalizing and feminizing trends are dominant, as Jung himself recognized a century ago (1912). I'll end by quoting Nathan Alterman, an Israely poet of the last century:
Because the father won't die. For he is an endless father.
Alive he will descend to Sheol
...
The father's lips are still,
Yet the father's voice will be heard.
Shmuel Bernstein
Jerusalem, ISAP