Walter Bromberg, MD

In the past few years, his articles in Sacramento Medicine have been more nostalgic but no less challenging. His unconventionality is what characterized Walter Bromberg for me.

When I first heard of him and met him I was a psychiatric resident. He had already published The Mind of Man and Crime and the Mind and had just inaugurated a treatment program for sexual psychopaths at Mendocino State Hospital.

His approach included the experimental use of improvisational theater to get to the interpersonal emotions of his patients. That and other questioning behaviors brought him into conflict with traditional psychiatry and the rigidities of the state hospital system. He responded by codifying his clinical rationale and his methodology, and reporting his results.

Although he left state service soon after and began to practice in Sacramento, he continued to be in the avant garde in both psychotherapy and forensic psychiatry. The former led to his masterful history of psychotherapy, Man Above Humanity, whose purpose, he said, was "to try to give a unity to man's long-standing, systematized and persistent efforts at helping human beings with their human troubles."

The latter, his extensive work in forensic psychiatry, led to his greatest fame, his study of Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Harvey Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

He revised and re-published his Crime and the Mind and wrote five more books and many articles challenging the validity of the insanity plea and the bluntness of the determination of mental competence.

He testified at dozens of murder trials, including as a defense expert in the 1971 trial of Juan Corona, who was convicted of murdering 25 farm workers in Sutter County.

He had a solid grounding in neurology and studied psychoanalysis under Abraham Kardiner, an American founder of psychoanalysis. His interest in forensic psychiatry began during this training and persisted even when he left New York for the Navy and then settled in Reno, the first psychiatrist in Nevada.

From there to Mendocino, where I met him.

In recent years, we have collaborated to support and promote a more effective United Nations. He continued to challenge himself and others-except regarding the use of electronic word processing. He still wrote his books and articles in long-hand, leaving to his son the electronic processing of his manuscripts.

We are the better for Walter Bromberg's outspoken challenges and forthright answers-even when they did not prevail.

-By Ed Rudin, MD