AppId is over the quota
The cause was leukemia, said his wife, Stephanie Rosen. He also had Parkinson’s disease, she said.
Dr. Halpern, who was president of the American Academy of Psychotherapists from 1970 to 1972, was a therapist for more than half a century, early on with a focus on young children.
His first book, “A Parent’s Guide to Child Psychotherapy,” was a manual for parents of troubled children, published in 1963, when emotional problems and talk therapy to address them were often stigmatized. His primary interests later changed to adolescents and adults; his syndicated newspaper column, “On Your Own,” about single life, ran for seven years in the 1980s.
“From the beginning,” Dr. Halpern wrote in an autobiographical statement in 2002, “my overriding interest and concern was in helping people who were in emotional pain because of problems in their most important relationships.”
In 1976, addressing the sometimes malign influence that parents exert over their young adult children, he published “Cutting Loose: An Adult’s Guide to Coming to Terms With Your Parents,” and three years later he examined the reverse side of the equation in “No Strings Attached: A Guide to a Better Relationship With Your Grown-up Child.”
Dr. Halpern considered his overall subject to be the importance of empathy.
“Social psychologists and demagogues have long known that if ordinary citizens are to be provoked to violent actions against individuals or groups of fellow citizens, it is necessary to sever the empathic bond with those to be attacked by painting them as different and despicable,” Dr. Halpern wrote in a letter to The New York Times shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
For example, he said, “we are unlikely to harm a friendly neighbor because she has strong views about equal rights for women, but if we call her a ‘femi-Nazi,’ she becomes ‘the other’ — evil, dangerous, hated.”
He added: “When our shared humanity with those with whom we disagree is stripped away, it becomes acceptable to blow them up. The answer is certainly not to censor such speech, but those who recognize this danger must challenge it wherever it exists, even in those with whom we politically agree.”
Howard Marvin Halpern was born in the Bronx on March 5, 1929, the youngest of six children of Romanian immigrants. His father, Samuel, owned a small furniture factory and moved the family to Forest Hills, Queens, in time for young Howard to go to high school there.
He graduated from Syracuse University and earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Columbia.
His final two books were about love relationships in general and unhealthy ones in particular. “How to Break Your Addiction to a Person” (1982) examined the reasons people stay in painful relationships and offered advice for weaning themselves from them. “Finally Getting It Right: From Addictive Love to the Real Thing” (1994) offered strategies for avoiding making the same mistakes in choosing a partner that previously led to misery.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Halpern is survived by two daughters, Sharon Halpern Kleinerman and Dina Halpern Kornblau; 11 grandchildren; four stepdaughters; and a step-grandson.
It was shortly after finishing his last book that the twice-divorced Dr. Halpern met Ms. Rosen, a lawyer, on a blind date set up by their daughters Carole Rosen and Ms. Kornblau, who were pediatric residents at Bellevue Hospital Center. Smitten, Dr. Halpern wanted to dedicate the book to her, but a friend talked him out of it, saying a dedication was like a tattoo, often entered into impulsively and ineradicable. If you still feel the same a year from now, the friend said, you can dedicate the paperback to her.
And so he did. Dr. Halpern and Ms. Rosen were married in 1995.
“For Stephanie, the Real Thing,” the dedication read.
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