Dr. Stuart T. Hauser, at 70; headed Judge Baker center

STUART T. HAUSER

Freudian analysis and long-term clinical research don't always go hand in hand, but they melded comfortably in the mind and career of Stuart T. Hauser, who was at ease in a variety of academic disciplines.

A curriculum vitae often displays a straightforward stairway of scholarly ascent. Not Dr. Hauser's. During more than two decades of postsecondary study, he received an undergraduate degree in physics and philosophy, a master's in social anthropology, a medical degree, a doctorate in psychology, and a diploma from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.

Dr. Hauser died Tuesday at Massachusetts General Hospital Tuesday of complications from treatment for cancer of the esophagus. He was 70 and had lived in Brookline.

"His training as a psychoanalyst was fairly traditional, but he had a foot in the academic world - more than a foot, actually," said his son Ethan of Brooklyn, N.Y. "I don't think he ever tried to reconcile those things, he did them parallel. He was unusually comfortable with being open-ended and ambivalent - those things others are so uncomfortable with."

On the faculty of Harvard Medical School for more than 30 years, Dr. Hauser simultaneously juggled administration and research. He led the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston for more than a decade, all the while conducting a study of ego development in high school students and psychiatric patients that is in its 20th year.

"He was a remarkable scholar," said Peter Fonagy, the Freud memorial professor of psychoanalysis at University College London, where Dr. Hauser also taught and was head of faculty for the psychology department's research training program. "His longitudinal study of adolescents, now grown up and now having their own children, really was a major scientific achievement and is one which will stand the test of time."

Dr. George Vaillant, a senior psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said that "one of the extraordinary things about Stuart was his tenacity in really trying to understand the lives of adolescents over time. He had an ability rare in longitudinal research to do careful quantitative work. At the same time, he didn't lose sight of the human forest for the statistical trees."

Stuart Theodore Hauser grew up in the Bronx and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He went to Antioch College in Ohio, where he majored in philosophy and physics; then to Harvard, where he graduated with a master's in social anthropology; and to Yale, where he received a medical degree. Then it was back to Harvard for a doctorate in psychology and on to the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.

In 1964, he married Barbara Blank. In the early 1970s, he began teaching at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which was affiliated with Harvard.

Twenty years ago, he began a study called Paths Over Time and Across Generations, through which he and other researchers examined the family aspects in the ego development of adolescents.

By studying many of his patients as they aged from their teens to their 30s and started families of their own, Dr. Hauser's research had echoes of the "7 Up" film series in England in which documentary filmmakers have revisited the same subjects every seven years for the past few decades.

"It didn't quite have the mainstream appeal of the films," his son said with a chuckle, "but that was always my way of explaining it to people."

Fonagy said that instead of focusing solely on the problems that result in chronic difficulties for teenagers, Dr. Hauser looked at how a "flexibility in thinking" allowed some adolescents to persevere, rather than succumb to adversity.

That research also helped Dr. Hauser coauthor the 2006 book "Out of the Woods: Tales of Resilient Teens."

"I think what I'm most grateful to Stuart for is his informing us all about the dynamics of how to understand what's really important to adolescents," Vaillant said. "I think his book 'Out of the Woods' is going to remain useful not only for scholars, but for the parents of teenagers."

In 1993, Dr. Hauser became director of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He was named president a few years later and served in that post until 2004.

"He added greatly to the scientific stature of the center in children's mental health through his own research and through judicious selection of colleagues to do research at Judge Baker," said John R. Weisz, president and CEO of the center. Dr. Hauser, he added, also nurtured the center's clinical research training program, which has just received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health that will allow it to continue into its third decade.

As he ran the center, taught, and continued his own research, Dr. Hauser remained someone who was sought out as more than a colleague.

"He had an amazing number of very close friends," Weisz said. "Everywhere I went, I ran into people who said to say hello to Stuart and give him a hug."

"You would feel that he was interested in you, that he understood what you were trying to say, what you were trying to achieve," Fonagy said. "He was able to restate your ideas in more eloquent words than you could say, and at the same time not make you feel like he had hijacked your thoughts or your feelings."

With duties in Harvard and London, and visiting professor appointments as distant as Kansas and Norway, Dr. Hauser traveled frequently, retreating when possible with his family to their house in Center Lovell, Maine, on Kezar Lake.

"One thing about him is that he pretty much never said no to an opportunity," his son said. "He led both a tiring life and an enormously stimulating life. It was amazing watching him go."

In addition to his wife and son, Dr. Hauser leaves another son, Joshua of Evanston, Ill.; a grandson and a granddaughter.

A service will be announced.