President Bok this morning conferred honorary degrees on eight men and three women, including psychoanalyst Anna Freud, Mexican poet Octavio Paz and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.
The recipients also included broadcaster Walter Cronkite, artist Helen Frankenthaler and Richard Lyman, outgoing president of Stanford University.
Bok also bestowed degrees on three well-known American academics, including zoologist Ernst Mayr, historian John M. Blum '43, and sociologist Robert Merton; and two British scholars, economist Joan V. Robinson and legalist Herbert L.A. Hart.
***
Widely regarded as the world's leading psychoanalyst, Freud has spent almost six decades teaching, practicing and refining the techniques developed by her father, Sigmund. The foremost authority on child analysis, Freud has been director of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic since 1962.
In 1970, a poll of leading psychiatrists and psychoanalysts fround Freud to be the most outstanding living psychoanalyst.
The last of her father's six children, the 85-year-old Freud was her father's companion, secretary and student from 1913 until his death in 1939. She is most renowned for her work on the psychoanalysis of children and her theories of "ego psychology." More recently, Freud has argued for the legal rights of children.
Since 1922 when she delivered her first paper as a young student in Vienna, Freud has written prolifically with what psychologist Robert Coles has called "luminous coherence." Her works include the ground-breaking, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, and a variety of studies of child analysis. More recently, critics have praised The Writings of Anna Freud, a seven-volume collection of her works.
Freud, who has lived in London since 1938, last received an honorary degree at Columbia University's 1978 ceremonies.
Her citation reads: Seeing into the minds of children she has championed their needs and enhanced our understanding of the growth of human personality.
One of a group of Latin American writers who have profoundly influenced the policies of their nations, Paz is a poet, essayist, diplomat, critic and professor. Sixteen years in Mexico's diplomatic service gave the 66-year-old Paz the chance he needed to begin writing. Today, as countryman and novelist Carlos Fuentes has labelled him, Paz is "the greatest living Mexican writer, a great renovator of the Spanish language, a great universal poet and essayist."
Since his first work in the early thirties, Paz has been identified with the surrealist writers, a school he once described as "a negation of the contemporary world and at the same time an attempt to substitute other values for those of democratic, bourgeois society." His best-known works include El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), an essay on Mexican character described by Irving Howe as "a central text of our time" and long metaphysical poems like Piedra de sol (Sun Stone) and Blanco.
In 1971-72, Paz was the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, where he lectured on "Modern Poetry: A Tradition Against Itself." Later, he was a visiting professor of Comparative Literature here.
Paz's citation reads: A public servant of integrity and courage, a poet whose metaphors define the alternating currents of life.
An ardent pacifist and fighter for civil rights, Rustin has been involved in the movement for racial equality since his days as youth coordinator for A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington. Special assistant to the late Rev. Martin Luther King and the chief organizer of the civil rights March on Washington of August, 1963, Rustin has continually espoused non-violence and has advocated fundamental changes in the U.S. socioeconomic order.
Read more in News
Ashong Trades Harvard's Yard for Spielberg's Set