Arthur Valenstein, 98; curiosity led to career in psychotherapy

When he went to Cornell University, he started out in engineering, but bleak job prospects made him reconsider and he felt tugged in a different direction.

“I had been curious about people, how and why there were as they were,’’ he wrote in 1995 for the Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre. “I was puzzled about myself, as well, feeling myself to be somewhat of an ‘outsider’ in school. As I learned later, this is one of the elements contributing to psychological-mindedness, a predisposition that is conducive to psychoanalytic inquiry.’’

Dr. Valenstein, a longtime Cambridge analyst who was analyzed by Anna Freud, the youngest child of Sigmund Freud, and who was among the few remaining direct links to that earlier era of psychoanalysis, died at home Jan. 17 of complications of a stroke and other ailments. He was 98 and had lived in his Cambridge home for more than six decades.

Known to friends as Val, Dr. Valenstein formerly was president of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and subsequently was affiliated with the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East. He taught at Harvard Medical School for more than four decades and retired nearly 30 years ago, but kept seeing patients privately into his 90s.

Black beret atop his head, he was fond of walking along the Charles River.

One strolling companion was Dr. Alexandra Harrison, a Cambridge child psychiatrist he supervised years ago during her training.

“I think one of the most important things I would say about Val is that he never stopped thinking,’’ she said. “His inquiring mind was really quite prodigious.’’

Dr. Valenstein published more than 30 articles and book chapters and “wrote on everything under the sun,’’ said Dr. Sanford Gifford, an analyst and longtime friend.

At what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Valenstein contributed to a long-term study of “the psychophysiology of normal college-age twins,’’ the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute said in announcing his death.

He also contributed to a study at Beth Israel Hospital of normal pregnancies and was an early advocate of the benefits of extended psychoanalytic treatment for the elderly.

“As a teacher, as a really thoughtful writer, as a kind of representative of an earlier period of psychoanalysis, he was a major figure, and I think he influenced a lot of his students, a lot of his supervisees, a lot of his colleagues,’’ said Dr. Malkah Notman, a Brookline psychoanalyst.

“Dr. Valenstein was an admired and prolific contributor to our field and a warmly appreciated teacher and colleague of many of our senior members,’’ Ann L. Katz, president of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, said in a statement to the institute’s membership.

In his Anna Freud Centre essay “How I Became an Analyst,’’ Dr. Valenstein wrote that discovering “the world of books and the imagination’’ as a boy fed his inquisitiveness about people.

“The same curiosity informed my later life and my interest in listening when patients in analysis would tell about their lives, reliving their experiences,’’ Dr. Valenstein recalled.

He added that “it may not have been altogether fair that people paid me to listen to their stories. Perhaps I should at least have paid the true storytellers.’’

Born in New York City, he grew up in Manhattan, the youngest of three children.

His grandparents emigrated from Lithuania and Poland, and his parents ran clothing stores, with some wares created by his father, a tailor.

Dr. Valenstein, who graduated from Cornell and Cornell Medical College, was drawn to psychoanalysis, even though it often was touched on lightly in his medical curriculum.

“Nonetheless, I was curious and tried to find out about this strange thing, psychoanalysis, even though no literature was forthcoming which might provide answers or even suggestions,’’ he wrote in his autobiographical essay.

He took a psychiatric residency at Boston Psychopathic Hospital and served as a psychiatrist in the US Army Air Corps during World War II.

Stationed for a time in New Mexico, he married Adelaide Ross. That marriage ended in divorce.

He also was sent to Florida and the Pacific theater, treating and studying soldiers suffering from variations of what then was often called combat fatigue.

After the war, he returned to Boston.

In 1959, he married Katrina Burlingham, daughter of psychoanalyst Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, a longtime friend and partner of Anna Freud.

Dr. Valenstein and his second wife, who was known as Tinky, had a son, David, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md. She died in 1998.

At Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., Dr. Valenstein learned to ride horses and ski, outdoor activities less available during his urban childhood.

With his friend Gifford, he shared a love of skating and music.

“He was a brilliant ice skater, much better than I was, and we explored all the local ponds,’’ Gifford wrote in remarks for his friend’s private memorial service. “He loved chamber music, and we had similar tastes for Schubert, Beethoven, and Brahms, also the sweet simplicity of Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words,’ which we had both played as children.’’

For Dr. Valenstein, music “was a meditative place for him to go and be in his thoughts and memories,’’ his son said.

In addition to his son, Dr. Valenstein leaves a stepdaughter, Anne Heller of Belmont, and two granddaughters.

In his conversation, Dr. Valenstein “loved plays on words, and he liked to engage people and find out what they were about,’’ his son said.

“He was intellectual, but kind of whimsical,’’ Harrison said, recalling their talks during walks along the Charles River. “He used a lot of humor, but it was often language humor.’’

Humor was part of what Dr. Valenstein remembered fondly about Anna Freud, with whom he studied at the Hampstead Child Therapy clinic that she cofounded in England and who he said “greatly influenced my identity as a psychoanalyst.’’

“She was truly an exemplar in bringing forth from the students and staff at the clinic what appeared to be ‘beyond their best,’ ’’ he wrote in his autobiographical essay.

“The pervasive ambience simply motivated one to a higher standard in one’s work and presentations than might have seemed possible. Yet Anna Freud carried into her work as a teacher, and as analyst, a sense of humor that bespoke of something universal.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.