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Alan A. Stone, an iconoclastic scholar who has used his dual appointments to the Harvard law and medical schools to exert a powerful influence on the evolution of psychiatric ethics over the past half century, died on January 23 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92 years old.
His son, Douglas, said the cause was throat cancer.
Dr. Stone was educated as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and began teaching at Harvard Law School in the late 1960s, just as the foundations of both fields came under scrutiny.
He was at the forefront of questions about how psychiatry was used as a public policy tool; for example, he criticized the role played by psychiatrists in laws outlawing abortion based on claims about a woman’s mental health and in the reluctant commitment of millions of Americans to public mental institutions.
As psychiatrists began careers as expert witnesses in criminal cases, he made enemies by opposing the practice and refusing to take a stand himself. This did not prevent him from becoming president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1979, a post where, among other things, he guided the decision to remove homosexuality from the profession’s list of mental disorders.
Despite not having a law degree, Dr. Stone has been considered one of the best and most popular professors at Harvard law school. He has lectured frequently with criminal attorney Alan M. Dershowitz on subjects ranging from criminal insanity to Shakespeare.
“They were the perfect yin and yang,” said former New York City school rector Joel Klein, who took one of his classes as a law student. “Dershowitz was doing what every good Harvard Law School professor does, emphasizing the rational, and what Stone was doing was, ‘This will get you part of the way, what about X?’
Many former students, including Mr. He spoke of Stone not only as an exemplary teacher, but also as a profound influence on their careers, because his approach differed from the legal thinking described by other faculty members. His colleagues tended to agree.
“The world has never been right or wrong for him,” said Mr Dershowitz. “It’s always ‘why?’ was”
Partly because of his comprehensive, critical-thinking capacity, the Department of Justice Dr. Stone to join a multidisciplinary panel that will examine a 1993 raid by federal agents on a campus near Waco, Texas, occupied by a religious cult called his name. Branch Davidians. Four agents and 76 members of the cult were killed, and Dr. Stone’s panel was charged with assessing whether the tragedy could have been prevented.
But very early on, Dr. Stone came to believe that their job was actually to rubber-stamp the government’s self-justification assessment. He publicly criticized the Justice Department when he refused to give him confidential material and refused to sign the final review until he was allowed to submit his own opposition report.
He remained a vocal critic of the government throughout the 1990s, and in 1999 he called for the pardon of the surviving Branch Davidians, many of whom were sentenced to prison.
“Branch Davidians were more victims than criminals,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that year.
Dr. Stone acquired more enemies in 1995 when he declared that Freudian psychoanalysis was no longer useful as a science and was relegated to the best humanities that could be used to evaluate works of art.
“Psychoanalysis is an art form, both in theory and in practice,” he said. In a speech to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. “I don’t think psychoanalysis is an adequate form of treatment.”
While many psychoanalysts make exceptions, Dr. Stone said that assessment was not an insult—he thought art and psychiatry were closely intertwined and supported each other. In addition to teaching law and literature a film critic for the Boston Reviewuses his professional insights to distinguish films like The Million Dollar Baby (2004), which he claims is a story about the ethics of euthanasia, and “The Tree of Life” (2011), which he praises for treating Oedipal. conflicts
Later, psychiatrists, Dr. He denounced his profession for complicity in the so-called war on terror under George W. Bush, where he was employed in “advanced interrogation” sessions that amounted to torture, Stone said.
“American law and what American psychiatrists and psychologists must do now,” he wrote. In the New York Times in 2005“To reassert our basic norms of decent and ethical behavior that seem to have collapsed in our response to 9/11.”
Alan Abraham Stone was born on August 15, 1929, in Boston. His father, Julius, was a lawyer, and his mother, Betty (Pastan) Stone, was a housewife. All four of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.
Along with her son Douglas, she is survived by her partner Laura Maslow-Armand; another son, David; six grandchildren; and two grandchildren. His wife Sue (Smart) Stone died in 1996. His daughter Karen Stone Zieve died in 1988.
His parents led a liberal family that accepted Jewish refugees in the 1930s while also eradicating antisemitic prejudice; Despite the obvious qualifications, his father struggled to get a low-level magistrate.
He studied social relations at the Boston Latin School and Harvard. He also played as a right striker on the college football team; Among his teammates in the 1947 squad was Robert F. Kennedy.
He graduated in 1950 and earned his medical degree from Yale in 1955. He resided at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, and studied psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
At one point he made an exception to his refusal to testify as an expert witness. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy held a “trial” for Hamlet in 1994 on the grounds that he had survived the bloody end of the play and is now accused of murdering his uncle’s adviser, Polonius.
The question, as Judge Kennedy construed, was not whether Hamlet killed Polonius – this is clear in the game – but whether he was guilty of insanity. Dr. Klein, Stone’s former student, was working in the White House at the time and recommended his former professor as an expert witness for the prosecution.
The mock trial was conducted several times (in most cases the jury was stuck), at Boston University in 1996..
On that occasion, when asked if he was familiar with the “record” in the case, the game itself, Dr. Stone replied, “Yes, and I rightly agree that it is well written.”
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