Harry Trosman, psychiatrist, 1924-2024

Harry Trosman, MD, a Professor of Psychiatry who spent 70 years working for the University of Chicago, died August 27. He was 99.

“Many people in our department repeated that Harry Trosman was kind, generous of spirit, intellectual and always helpful,” said Daniel Yohanna, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience and the department’s former interim chair. “We will miss him dearly.”

During his first years at UChicago, Trosman participated in studies on the psychophysiology of dreams just as Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, Professor Emeritus in Physiology, and then-graduate student Eugene Aserinsky were developing their landmark research on REM sleep and dreams.

Working with Edward Wolpert, PhD, formerly a Clinical Associate Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine, Trosman wrote some of the first papers on the implications of that new research for the psychoanalytic theory of dreams. Trosman taught a UChicago course to fourth-year Psychiatry residents on the concept of psychodynamic psychotherapy — which focuses on the psychological roots of emotional suffering — that frequently won him accolades from students.

Trosman also had an interest in applying psychoanalysis to study humanities and the arts. He authored two books — “Freud and the Imaginative World” and “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Masterworks of Art and Film” — and he was passionate about travel, literature and family during his off hours.

Trosman was born in Toronto and attended medical school at the University of Toronto before holding residencies in psychiatry at the University of Iowa and the University of Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, he met and would later marry Marjorie (Mardi) Goldman. The couple settled in Chicago, where Trosman started working at UChicago in 1952.

During this period, the couple started a family, and Trosman also served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve for two years in Oceanside, California.

Trosman returned to UChicago to direct the psychiatry department’s outpatient clinic from 1956 to 1968, later serving as the acting chair for the department from 1986 to 1988. Trosman was also an active member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Trosman was preceded in death by Mardi, his wife of 67 years, and is survived by his three children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.