Ekstein, Rudolf 1912–2005

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EKSTEIN, Rudolf 1912–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 9, 1912, in Vienna, Austria; died March 18, 2005, in Los Angeles, CA. Psychologist, educator, and author. Ekstein was an authority on child psychology who worked for such institutions as the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center and the Menninger Foundation. After earning his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1937, he fled Europe with the rise to power of Adolph Hitler. Immigrating to the United States, he studied at Boston University, where he received a master's degree in 1942, and became a U.S. citizen that same year. He joined the prestigious Menninger Foundation as a training analyst in 1947, moving to the Reiss-Davis Center in Los Angeles in 1957. Here he coordinated training and research and directed the childhood psychosis project. In 1957, Ekstein joined the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, but he left the practice of psychiatry behind in 1968 to become a professor of medical psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author or editor of several books, such as Children of Time and Space, of Action and Impulse (1966) and In Search of Love and Competence: Twenty-Five Years of Service, Training and Research at the Reiss-Davis Study Center (1976); he also wrote or edited several sound recordings, including Speaking of the Truth behind Fairy Tales (1974) and The Language of Psychotherapy (1989).