Eva Spitz-Blum's varied career found her trekking through the Amazon rainforest, rubbing shoulders with anthropologist Margaret Mead, working beside Ken Kesey, Gr. '59, before he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and studying the control of opium poppies in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion.
But Spitz-Blum always returned home to the windswept ridges in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where she raised Southdown sheep and Scottish Highland cattle. "My mother got to be an excellent vet," said her daughter, Lisa Duhl.
Spitz-Blum, PhD '54, who was affiliated with Stanford for six decades, died on May 2 at Stanford Hospital. She was 90.
Eva Spitz was born in Budapest in 1919. Her father, René, was an early psychoanalyst and follower of Sigmund Freud. (A Spitz biography titled Through a Daughter's Eyes remains unfinished.) Her family bounced around Europe, first fleeing a revolution in Hungary and later living in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In 1938, her family moved to New York where she graduated from Barnard College. In 1949, having married, had two children, and divorced, Spitz-Blum moved to California and earned her doctorate in clinical psychology and studied anthropology.
From the mid-1950s, she and second husband, Richard Blum, PhD '51, did research on drugs, alcohol and mental health. The couple separated in 1984 and divorced several years later.
As late as 1995, this Explorers Club member took a trek in the Ecuadorian Amazon to study female shamans. "She was raised basically the same way her father was—in a Victorian household with nannies," Duhl says. "To go from that formality to the United States in the 21st century—she kept pace. It was amazing to watch."
Spitz-Blum is survived by Duhl; a son, John Shippee, MA '67; a grandchild; and two great-grandchildren.
