Bertram Cohler

Bertram Joseph Cohler
Born	3 December 1938 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died	9 May 2012 (aged 73) Des Plaines, Illinois, United States
Nationality	American
Fields	psychoanalyst, psychologist
Institutions	University of Chicago, Harvard University, Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Influences	Sigmund Freud, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Bruno Bettleheim, Bernice Neugarten, Nancy Chodorow, Erik Erikson, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky

Bertram Joseph Cohler (3 December 1938 – 9 May 2012) was an American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and educator primarily associated with the University of Chicago, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Harvard University. He advocated a life-course approach to understanding human experience and subjectivity, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, personology, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and the interdisciplinary field of human development. Cohler authored or co-authored over 200 articles and books. He contributed to numerous scholarly fields, including the study of adversity, resilience and coping; mental illness and treatment; family and social relations in normal development and mental illness; and the study of personal narrative in social and historical context. He made particular contributions to the study of sexual identity over the life course, to the psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality., and to the study of personal narratives of Holocaust survivors. Other than his graduate study at Harvard, Cohler spent his career at the University of Chicago and affiliated institutions, where he was repeatedly recognized as an educator and a builder of bridges across disciplines. He was treated for esophageal cancer in 2011, but became ill from a related pneumonia and died on 9 May 2012 not far from his home in Hyde Park, Chicago.

Bertram "Bert" Joseph Cohler was born in Chicago on 3 December 1938 to Theresa Belle "Betty" Cohler (née Cahn) and Jonas Robert Cohler. His siblings were Jonas Robert Cohler, Jr., and Betsy Cohler. From the age of 10 to 17 years old, he was a student at the Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center for children with emotional disturbances; years later he became its director and was celebrated as one of its most successful graduates.

Cohler received his A.B. in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1961. He then studied at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary collaboration among the departments of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. As a graduate student he assisted with coding and analysis of data from the Six Cultures Study under John and Beatrice Whiting. In 1964-5 he served as a teaching fellow with Gordon Allport for the course, Theories of Personality, and in 1967-9 was a lecturer in clinical psychology and shared responsibility for instruction of psychiatric residents in social psychiatry with Elliot G. Mishler. Among his major influences at Harvard, Cohler counted personality psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry A. Murray, and narrative psychologist Elliott Mishler. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1967. His dissertation was titled "Character, Psychopathology, and Child Rearing Attitudes in Hospitalized and Non-Hospitalized Mothers of Young Children" (committee members: Justin L. Weiss, chair; Arthur S. Couch, Beatrice B. Whiting). Cohler returned to Chicago in 1969, where he trained in child and adult psychoanalysis at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.

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