As director of the Research Center for Mental Health at New York University from 1953 to 1971, Robert R. Holt supervised “scientific research dedicated to the clarification and testing of psychoanalytic theory,” as he put it in an address at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge in 2006. It was part of his lifelong effort to bring research to bear on real-world problems.
Holt was a central figure in what became known as the “crisis of metapsychology,” generated in the encounter between psychoanalysis and academic psychology in the 1970s. He helped train a generation of psychoanalytically oriented researchers.
An NYU professor emeritus, Bob Holt died in hospice care at his home in Truro on April 10, 2024 with his wife, Joan, and son Michael by his side. He was 106.
He was born on Dec. 27, 1917 in Jacksonville, Fla., the son of Grace Lloyd Hilditch Watson and Walter John Watson. His parents were “not a match made in heaven,” wrote his son Daniel in a brief biography composed for his father’s 100th birthday, and when Robert was three, they divorced. He and his sister Dorothy went to live with their grandparents.
When his mother married Francis Michael Holt two years later, Robert returned to live with her, but Dorothy went to live with their father. Holt later adopted Robert, giving him “not only his name but also love,” Daniel wrote.
Signs that Robert was drawn both to the solid world of nature and the abstract world of ideas were visible early in his life. In 1926, he camped with his family in Nova Scotia, eating foraged berries and fish that he caught and observing wildlife; he also “tried to read the dictionary,” as Daniel put it, and had many academic interests before graduating from high school at 16. After a year at a Pennsylvania prep school, he went to Princeton.
In his adolescence, Robert “became intrigued by auras and other subjective phenomenon he experienced in connection to a series of seizures,” Daniel wrote. That may have contributed to his majoring in psychology; his senior thesis was on the psychology of names. After graduating with highest honors in 1939, he entered the graduate program in psychology at Harvard, earning his M.A. in 1941 and his Ph.D. in 1944.
While in graduate school, Robert worked as a research assistant at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, where he was involved in cutting-edge research that deepened his understanding of personality.
At Princeton, Bob sang in the glee club and choir and wrote poetry. At Harvard, he organized a barbershop quartet.
In the same week that he defended his dissertation and completed his own psychoanalysis, he married fellow graduate student Louisa Pinkham.
Their first daughter, Dorothy, was born while Bob was working for the federal government in Washington; their second daughter, Catherine, was born during his time at the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital in Topeka, Kan., where he met David Rapaport, with whom he developed a close intellectual relationship. Rapaport died in 1960; in 2017 Robert published a volume of their correspondence from 1948 to 1960.
Robert and Louisa divorced in 1952.
In 1953, Bob became the director of the newly established center at NYU. Although the clinic closed in the early 1970s, a victim of the vagaries of research grant funding, he remained at NYU until his retirement in 1989.
Early in his years at NYU, Robert met Crusa Adelman, whom he married in 1957. Eighteen months later, she was killed in a car accident. Robert embarked on another period of psychoanalysis after her death, and after a fellowship year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, he returned to New York and embraced the peace movement in support of nuclear disarmament and de-escalation of the Cold War.
He served on the Council for a Livable World, the Exploratory Project on Conditions of Peace, the advising committee for the Center for War and the Child, and the International Society of Political Psychology, and he organized a conference of Soviet and American psychologists.
Joan Esterowitz, a graduate student in psychology, signed on to help with a national meeting of the Congress of Scientists on Survival that Robert was organizing at NYU in 1962. According to Daniel, Robert wanted to date her, but “she was hesitant,” given their age difference — 17 years. By August 1963, they were married. Shortly afterward, they bought a house in Truro. Daniel was born in 1965 and Michael in 1968.
Bob’s career at NYU was extraordinary. With more than 300 publications, including 17 books, on a dizzying array of topics, he became one of the leading figures in academic clinical psychology in the second half of the 20th century.
He won NYU’s Great Teacher Award and was named Psychologist of the Year by the New York Society of Clinical Psychologists. The American Psychiatric Association presented him with the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Clinical Psychology; he won the Great Man Award of the Society for Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment; and the National Institute of Health gave him research career awards in 1962 and 1988.
In retirement he was hardly idle. Having summered in Truro since 1963, Bob and Joan settled in year-round in 1989. He served as chair of the town’s recycling committee, as a member of the board of health, as chair of the Truro Committee for Human Services, as secretary of the Truro Democratic Committee, and as vice chair of the energy committee. He was honored by the select board for his years of community service.
Bob sang for 15 years with the Provincetown Choral Society and the Outer Cape Chorale, sometimes as a tenor soloist. He also developed his gardening skills, which he learned as a child in his grandparents’ back yard on the northern edge of Jacksonville, where he grew carrots and radishes. “He expanded his summer gardening into a three-season affair,” Daniel wrote, “coaxing delicious vegetables from sandy soil well into his 90s.”
Robert’s “last great passion over these past 10 years was climate breakdown,” said Joan. “He was always urging the family to be active on that.” He converted their house to solar power eight years ago.
Robert is survived by his wife, Joan, and son Michael Holt of Truro; son Daniel Holt and wife Ellen Baker of New York City; daughters Dorothy Prickett of Ottawa, Canada and Catherine Holt of Baricharra, Colombia; grandchildren Rachel Baker-Holt of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Catherine Prickett and husband Christopher Lahaise of Ottawa, and Robert Prickett of Ottawa; and one great-grandchild, Joshua Vaclav of Alberta, Canada.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Robert’s name may be made to the humanitarian NGO Avaaz at avaaz.org/campaign/en/donate/.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary, published in print on April 18, misspelled the first name of Robert Holt’s granddaughter Rachel Baker-Holt.
