Elise Snyder, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry, died January 9, 2026. She was 91. Dr. Snyder was a leading figure in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy education. She also was an innovator in the use of teleconferencing and then videoconferencing to advance psychoanalytic training internationally, particularly within China.
Dr. Snyder pursued medical and psychiatric training at a time when this was not common for women. She became interested in psychoanalysis while reading Freud in a Bronx public library as a teenager. Using money raised as a babysitter, she entered psychoanalysis against her parents’ wishes at the age of 16. Despite a period of inactivity related to contracting polio, she graduated high school at the age of 16 and then attended Queens College. She graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1958, one of 10 women in her class. After completing psychiatry residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she established a busy psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice in Manhattan.
Dr. Snyder and her then-husband, the noted psychoanalyst Victor Rosen, moved to Connecticut, which brought her to the Yale Department of Psychiatry and the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.
She emerged as a leader in the field of psychoanalysis. She was on the American Psychoanalytic Association Board of Directors for over 33 years, a past president of the American College of Psychoanalysts, and the founder and president of the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance.
She was known as a wonderful teacher, mentor, therapist, and colleague. Later in her career, she established collaborations with clinicians in China, creating a program that provided psychoanalytic clinical supervision to clinicians in China. In so doing, she facilitated the building of a psychoanalytic community there. This work began using teleconferencing and then she became an early adopter of teleconferencing for this purpose. She built this program on a shoestring and was very creative in garnering resources to expand it.
Dr. Snyder received the Sigmund Freud Award of the American Association of Psychoanalytic Psychiatrists and the Presidential Award of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry.
She is survived by her daughters Margaret Hamilton, MD, and Katherine Snyder, PhD; as well as five grandchildren.
This obituary was prepared by John Krystal, MD, chair, Yale Department of Psychiatry.