In Memoriam: Rita Ransohoff (1916-2003)

Rita M. Ransohoff, psychologist, psychoanalyst, and author, died at age 87 on December 13, 2003 in Connecticut. A memorial ceremony was held for her on March 6^th in Manhattan. She was a founding and active member of the Psychohistory Forum who periodically presented her research on women, Eleanor Roosevelt, and male attempts to dominate women, and often hosted Forum meetings in her elegant apartment on the 21st floor of 343 East 30th Street. She loved the intellectual exchange of our small group meetings.

Rita Mayer was the second of three daughters born on September 1, 1916 in Cincinnati, Ohio to prosperous Jewish Republican parents. Eschewing her families’ country club life even at a young age, she instead chose an intellectual and socially committed life. While at Smith College, she led the parade for the Democratic Roosevelt through the

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streets of North Hampton, an event reported in the Cincinnati press, no doubt to her parents’ chagrin. Rita and Joseph Ransohoff had been dating since they were 16 and were married before college ended.

In her clinical career her interests included an early focus on adolescents and the use and meaning of humor in their lives and later attention to the treatment of adults and issues of aging. With a bachelor’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago (1941), a masters of social work from Adelphi University (1953), and a doctoral degree in psychology from the Union Graduate School (1979), her career reached an interwoven and impressive synergy when her interests and degrees in history and psychology, in people and places combined.

Dr. Ransohoff’s interests were exemplified in her publications; first in her annotations to Edmund Engleman’s photographs of Freud’s Vienna home exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York and published in Bergasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (1976). Subsequently she brought her interests and struggles to powerful light for herself and others in two books. Venus After Forty: Sexual Myths, Men’s Fantasies, and Truths About Middle-Aged Women (1987), uses sources including modern cultural material, medieval myths, and psychological theory to reveal and rectify the powerful and pejorative myths about middle aged and aging women in America. Fear and Envy: Why Men Need to Dominate and Control Women (2001) is a cross cultural study of man’s fear and deeply repressed envy of woman’s power and sexuality. It traces men’s feelings, fantasies, and internalized experiences that find expression in the practices of everyday life: hiding women’s bodies in cloaks and veils, restricting them to different parts of the mosque or synagogue, denying them an education and other forms of access.

In her professional life, among other positions, Dr. Ransohoff was an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a faculty member of the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University School of Social Work. From the 1970s until the late 1990s she also maintained a private practice. Dr. Ransohoff lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad on a variety of topics. She was a Charter Member of the National Association of Social Workers and a Life Fellow of the American Orthopsychiatric Association.

Dr. Ransohoff’s travels around the world fueled her interest in the treatment of women. Places she visited included the familiar, the well traveled and the less common place: Bamako and Timbuktu; Ephesus and Pergamon; Jerusalem and Jericho; Bombay, Delhi, and Andra Pradesh; China, Japan, Sicily and England; Paris and Corsica were just some of these places.

As a person Rita Ransohoff was determined, elegant, and traveled; an avid, endless reader; and a person whose friends spanned continents and generations. Her surroundings were filled with wonderful taste in both furnishings and food. Her daughter remembers her mother moving into a summer cottage on the beach in Long Island, using a weather-beaten row boat for a room divider, filling the rooms with wild flowers, and providing breakfasts with her homemade tomato jam and dinners with local seafood. Over the years, her homes in Manhattan and Sag Harbor were elegant and equally full of life. She loved her garden and gardening.

Dr. Ransohoff was private, proud, uncomplaining and could be at least outwardly tough. An example of this was when her daughter, son-in-law, and their 18-month-old son were moving to Albany rather than New York City and the bosom of her family. Her daughter recalls that she called her mother in tears from London where she had lived for over three years. Her mother’s reply to her sorrows was: “Oh, for God sakes Joan, pull your self together. You have a wonderful husband and son. Go learn how to plant cows and raise beans!” (The humor involved in this declaration was almost certainly intentional.) While Dr. Ransohoff could cut off family and friends with this apparent toughness, it was the same standard by which she lived her own life in which she suffered some major losses. She rarely complained about life and its disappointments, and then only briefly, even toward the end of her years when she could no longer live fully on her own, but moved to an assisted living facility near her son’s home in Connecticut. In fitting with her life style, this residence was first rate and it provided many intellectual activities.

Rita Ransohoff died peacefully at home after a brief undiagnosed illness. Her children were by her side. She is survived by her daughter Joan Ransohoff Wynn, her son Joseph Ransohoff, and five grandchildren. Condolences may be sent by e-mail to her children at and

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