J R Maze 1923 - 2008

It was with deep feelings of loss and sadness that I learned of John Maze's death, on June 1st. My gratitude to him will never dim, as it seems always with an inspiring teacher who has left his or her indelible mark on the developing psyche of a student. A perennial straggler, I took advantage of the free educational opportunities of the early Eighties to enrol as a mature age student in an Arts degree at Sydney University, majoring in Psychology. There it was my happy fate to encounter the intellectual rigour and philosophical breadth of John Maze's lectureship and tutelage in the last years of his academic tenure in the Psychology Department.

In the dry academic atmosphere of what in one's most besieged moments felt like unreasonable scientism, Maze's measured debunking of dogmatism, sophistry and woolly-thinking was refreshing, challenging, and often amusing. His philosophical emphasis upon logic and critical thinking (expressed in the formal thought of Andersonian Realism), through which he strenuously inveighed against moralism and relativism in psychological theory and asserted the ubiquity and observability of unconscious processes, significantly informed my postgraduate studies and eventually my clinical practice.

His psychoanalytic scholarship, the penetrating depth, concision and clarity of his authorship, and his metatheoretical contributions to psychology in the face of energetic neobehaviouristic repudiation of unconscious motivation - all tinged with his special humanism and wit - can be better attested to by others and by virtue of his legacy. I had the privilege for a short while, however, of having in John Maze a mentor who, despite a busy life, found time to encourage me in my moments of befuddlement and self-doubt - and in doing so, gave me something of inestimable value, forever to be drawn upon.

Megan F. McDonald
Clinical Psychologist

Read the Sydney Morning Herald obituary