Anne Parsons
Fox, Renee C. & Coser, Rose Laub
The brief life of Anne Parsons was a search for purity and meaning, a longing for a better world to live in. There was about it the white beauty of a church steeple or of a fresh snowfall in the...
...Anne linked her identity to that of the protesters and Protestants in history...
...To this heritage, she added that of the radical movement...
...The major fruit of Anne's study in France is a still unpublished dissertation which analyzes the sources of French resistance to psychoanalytic thinking...
...Anne Parsons found no easy or final answers to any of her queries...
...The brief life of Anne Parsons was a search for purity and meaning, a longing for a better world to live in...
...Anne brought her concern for human dignity to the field in which she did her life's work—anthropology and psychiatry—a field which linked her strivings for human dignity and her concern with the underdog with the consecrated ministers, the healing physicians, the luminous social scientists from whom she came...
...She dissented and made her disagreement known, even to DISSENT, the magazine she admired...
...she was active for the Congress of Scientists on Survival...
...There was about it the white beauty of a church steeple or of a fresh snowfall in the New England where she was born, at the same time as there was in her the restlessness of the person who can say "no...
...The person she admired most was Rosa Luxemburg...
...After graduating from Radcliffe in 1952, Anne left Boston for Paris to study for her doctorate in Anthropology at the Sorbonne...
...Through the lineage of her mother, Helen Walker Parsons, as well as of her renowned socioligist father, Talcott Parsons, Anne was a descendant of Yankee sea-captains, clergymen, physicians, college professors, and of the courageous women who were their mothers, sisters, wives and maiden-aunts...
...Anne was modest, reticent and shy, but she was brave and fearlessly willing to act on her beliefs...
...like Rosa, Anne fought in her own individual manner for freedom...
...Yet as her family, her friends and colleagues already know, and as other persons will realize when her writings are published, the life and work of Anne Parsons achieved transcendent meaning and a radical message...
...She was never quite at home either in her native New England or the Italy she had come to know...
...she took part in the campaign for Stuart Hughes in the Italian section of Boston where she had established her home...
...And she wrote in a style that fell somewhere between science and poetry...
...She was on the picket line in the fight for integration...
...There she came under the influence of Claude Levi-Strauss whose own journeys had led him to warm climes—the Tristes Tropiques of the Amazon basin and the jungles of Brazil, as well as into the land of the unconscious...
...She was not a member of a university faculty or of a particular church...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
