Dr. Emanuel Tanay papers

Dr. Emanuel Tanay (1928-2014), a forensic psychiatrist who became one of the leading researchers in the area of post-traumatic stress syndrome, was born in Wilno, Poland (later Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1928, to a Jewish family. During the invasion and occupation of Poland by the Germans in World War II, Tanay survived using false identification papers that described him as being Roman Catholic, and by taking shelter in a monastery, but other members of his family, including his father, perished. Following the Holocaust, he was determined to study psychiatry as a means of better understanding the minds of its perpetrators, and his subsequent work in forensic psychiatry also led him to testify as an expert witness in thousands of court cases in the United States. However, his work on post-traumatic stress syndrome also led him to urge the American Psychiatric Association to recognize PTSD as a diagnosable medical condition, and to work with hundreds of Holocaust survivors, in order to diagnose and describe their psychiatric trauma for compensation cases that survivors filed with the West German government. Tanay taught psychiatry and law at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, and lectured widely on the topics of forensic psychiatry, post-traumatic stress, and the Holocaust. His own account of his experiences during the Holocaust, "Passport to Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust," was published in 2004. Tanay died in Ann Arbor, Michigan on 5 August 2014.