Ralph Colp: Darwin Scholar and Psychiatrist

Ralph Colp Jr. died in the early morning of October 11^th, a day before his eighty-fourth birthday, after a long struggle with prostate cancer. He was Senior Attending Psychiatrist at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center for many years and a psychiatrist at Columbus University and in private practice, member of the Editorial Board of Clio’s Psyche, a host of many of the Psychohistory Forum’s Work-In-Progress meetings, and a man of great erudition. Most of all he was a distinguished

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Darwin scholar whose greatest achievement was To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (1977), which was revised substantially and expanded to include Darwin’s “Diary of Health.” The result was Darwin’s Illness, published at the end of May of this year by Florida University Press, allowing him to see the fruits of his loving scholarship.

Ralph was born on October 12, 1924 to Miriam Mirsky, a homemaker and graduate educated biologist, who her only son remembered as maintaining a type of intellectual “salon” in her New York apartment. His father was a distinguished surgeon of German-Jewish descent whose name he was given despite the normal Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of not naming a child for a living person. This was one of many ways the family distanced itself from their Jewish roots. Though his parents divorced when he was four, his father was an important, though emotionally distant, part of his life. This distance appears to have been produced by the shy boy’s identification with his mother, the awe with which he held his namesake, and his father’s critical personality. Throughout his entire life, he insisted upon being Ralph Colp, Jr., which I resisted because he was such a distinguished man in his own right.

In his childhood “Tommy” Colp enjoyed listening to his family speak passionately about left-wing politics, even at the expense of playing with other children. At an early age he identified strongly with Trotsky in opposition to Stalin whom the adults then laid their hopes for a better world upon. Throughout his life he would identify with the underdog, as Trotsky was in the 1930s. While Tommy disagreed with his mother over politics, according to his cousin Jonathan Mirsky, they did not argue.

As indicated above, his parents did not particularly like being Jewish, although most of their friends were also Jewish, as Ralph’s would be. They sent their son to the same Ethical Cultural schools they had attended and to which he would send his own two daughters—in fact, four generations of the family have attended them. About eighty to ninety percent of the students in the Ethical Culture schools also grew up in Jewish homes. Columbia University, which did not have the usual quota restricting the number of Jewish students, was where he earned his bachelor’s (1945) and medical (1949) degrees prior to two years of military service (1953-55), primarily in Germany as a surgeon. Surgery, a field for which he had no special talents and in which he felt more intensely under the shadow of his awe-inspiring namesake, was soon abandoned for psychiatry where he could listen to people, rather than cut them open. As the most intellectual field of medicine, it was well suited to his inclinations and talents.

Dr. Colp’s scholarly accomplishments and service to mental health were considerable. He served Columbia University graduate students as a psychiatrist from 1960-1993 and patients in private practice until the total collapse of his health just over a year before his death. Though a shy and, in some respects, inhibited man, he taught a course on the history of sex and was a Senior Associate Sex Therapist in the program of sex therapy at the New York University Medical Center. He wrote well over a hundred articles and book review essays mostly on Charles Darwin, but also on the surgeon William Halsted, Sacco and Vanzetti, Trotsky, Stalin, medical history, and many other subjects. He authored the “History of Psychiatry” section for the Sadock and Sadock (formerly Kaplan and Sadock) Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry since 1986,

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painstakingly updating edition after edition, giving proper recognition to the role of psychohistory in expanding our knowledge. Although for sixty years Ralph used the same typewriter, given to him by his father, he usually wrote in longhand prior to having a typist prepare it for submission. He never entered the age of computers.

Some of his smaller articles were gems, such “Trotsky’s Dream of Lenin” in these pages (1998: (pp. 50-54), touching on why Trotsky didn’t succeed Lenin. “Why Stalin Couldn’t Stop Laughing” (1996), also on these pages, touched on Stalin’s envy and sadism as powerful motivation forces, which he also treated in The Psychohistory Review (1990 and 1993).

Dr. Colp was a man of the Enlightenment, searching out reason in the irrationality of individuals and groups, including of his hero probing the psychosomatic and physiological elements in Darwin’s illnesses. His curiosity about people led him to search out what motivated them, where they had invested their “libido.” Psychohistory, which brought together his love of history and psychology, had special meaning to him. He gave generously to the Psychohistory Forum as a host of our meetings, a Founding Member of Clio’s Psyche’s Editorial Board, a member of the Program Committee who never wanted recognition, and as a valued counselor. He was a tall, thin man who worked seven days a week and ate only one meal a day. A favorite restaurant of his was Pig Haven.

The intellectual friendship he formed in the Psychohistory Forum were quite important to him, even though his marked reserve meant that he was more of a listener than a speaker in even small groups. Ralph was most comfortable speaking on a one-on-one basis, as he acknowledged in our September 2001 interview (published in September 2002). A chapter closely related to that interview was “Living With Charles Darwin,” in my edited book, Historical and Psychological Inquiry (1990, pp. 219-235). In it he acknowledged that his identification with Darwin was based in part on their both having to struggle with growing up in the shadow of powerful and successful fathers.

To an amazing degree Ralph Colp identified with Charles Darwin, another shy, selfeffacing man with a passion for scientific knowledge based upon an observational method. In his letters and manner he was formal enough to be referred to as “Victorian.” He self-consciously copied the work habits of the great scientist, getting up daily at five a.m., or even before, to write. His office featured a portrait of Darwin, as well as one of Freud, and a large number of books by and on them. He saw patients and wrote in this office that he so loved. Ralph referred to communing there with his English hero and to putting him on his therapeutic couch. In recognition of this, the dedication to his first book states, “To Charlotte, Ruth, and Judy [Colp], who lived with me, while I lived with Darwin.” In his final year, he was like the naturalist in limiting his contact with the outside world and in having loved ones read to him— necessitated by his failing eyesight. Like Darwin he was a nonbeliever in religion. His vacations were often to England, where he sought out every detail of his hero’s life and thought. He made friends with librarians charged with Darwin papers and memorabilia both in England and the U.S.

He was a lifelong New Yorker of the type who, at an emotional level, had trouble understanding why people would want to live anywhere else. Ralph was a particular type of New York secular Jewish intellectual. Although his building faced a synagogue, he had a certain pride in declaring that he had never been in a synagogue nor had any Jewish training. His marriage on Thanksgiving Day in 1956 to Charlotte Rappaport, a Jewish pulmonary physician, was in a private ceremony in the rabbi’s office. In our 2001 interview he described his ambivalence about a Jewish identity, which seemed constricting to him. His ideal was a socialist meritocracy rejecting nationalism and religion as impediments to the betterment of humankind.

As a teenager and young man, Colp’s causes were opposition to the Nazis, opposing fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and building socialism in Russia—until he realized the extent of the betrayal of democratic/socialist ideals under Stalin. He feared anti-Semitism, which was another reason not to acknowledge his Jewish background. Even in medical school at Columbia University, where he had also done his undergraduate work and was identified as Jewish because his father was a famous surgeon, he reported that there was considerable anti-Semitism. Upon traveling after the completion of his military service as an

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Army physician in Europe, he discovered when he crossed into Israel from Jordan that he was profoundly pro-Israeli and that he had a Jewish identity despite his prior efforts to deny it. In recent years he would discuss European Jewish history, Israel, and Darwin with David Kohn, who is editor of the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Ralph’s younger daughter, Judith Colp Rubin, lives in Israel with her American-born husband and children. Like her father and paternal grandmother, she is devoted to the life of the mind, writing books with her husband.

Ralph Colp had extensive psychiatric training and was enormously influenced by psychoanalysis, but never formally went through a psychoanalytic training program with personal analysis, years of course work, and supervision. His ten years of psychoanalysis four and five times a week with Freud’s personal physician, Max Schur, was terminated abruptly on his birthday in 1969 by the sudden death of his analyst. Though he never took the formal course work, he did have extensive psychoanalytic supervision from 1956-1965 at Massachusetts Mental Health, St. Luke’s Hospital, and Hillside Hospital. Analytic principles guided his own work with patients and it was from a psychoanalytic perspective that he supervised residents at Columbia University. These same principles guided the direction of his careful scholarship. Dr. Colp generously shared his psychiatric and medical knowledge with his friends and associates.

Ralph Colp was a very private man who related through the world of ideas, the lives of the historical people he knew so well, and his patients. He did not like talking about his own feelings or problems, though he would express great concern for those of his patients and the few people to whom he felt closely connected. In terms of his own illness he was very quiet about the prostate cancer he was diagnosed with five years ago and which he thought was under control for a long period. About two years ago he spoke of having his schedule modified by the aftereffects of treatments, limiting his ability to attend or host Forum meetings. The last year was spent primarily in the Dewitt Nursing and Rehabilitation Home close to his East 79^th Street home in Manhattan. He maintained a stoical attitude about his situation. In his final weeks and days, he struggled with pneumonia and difficulty swallowing. In a typical act of generosity, he donated his body to the Columbia University Medical Center to assist the work of a new generation of physicians and scientists.

On November 16^th family members, friends, and colleagues gathered at the Ethical Culture Society in New York City for a moving memorial to Ralph Colp. There were about seventy people from three continents in attendance. We wish to extend our condolences to his widow Charlotte Colp; his daughters Ruth and Judith; his sons-in-law Barry Rubin and Eric Haber; grandchildren Daniel, Gabriella, and Carla; Darwin scholar James Moore (with whom he had a father-son relationship); former patients; and all others who held him close to their hearts.

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