Dr. Sydney Pomer, 88; Analyst Helped Survivors of Torture

In a city where a good psychoanalyst could build a lucrative career solely treating the rich and famous, Dr. Sydney Lawrence Pomer also used his skills and influence to help repair lives that repressive Third World regimes had nearly destroyed.

Working with a human rights organization that he co-founded, Pomer recruited doctors to provide free mental health treatment to survivors of torture from around the world.

Such work was one chapter of a long and distinguished medical career, written with a humanitarian’s pen. Pomer held fast to the notion that physicians have a responsibility to not only treat patients, but to tend to society by sometimes taking a stand on vexing problems.

“Larry ... always put first what can we do, what must we do to take care of each other.” said Dr. Roderic Gorney, professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Pomer, who was a supervising staff psychiatrist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for more than 40 years, a USC clinical professor and a leader of psychoanalytic organizations, died March 4 at his home in Brentwood. He was 88.

The cause of death was amyloidosis of the heart, a rare form of heart disease, said his daughter, Karen Pomer. Just days before his death, Pomer was still seeing patients, though of late he treated them at a home office, said his wife, Dr. Kato van Leeuwen, an emeritus associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

“He cared very deeply about the suffering of other people and had a great desire and will to reduce the store of social injustice in the world,” said retired Rabbi Leonard Beerman, who once led Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles. “He possessed what the Jewish people at least once considered the highest accomplishment, called menschlichkeit, a subtle mixture of intelligence, wisdom and compassion.”

Pomer was co-founder and then president of the Walter Briehl Human Rights Foundation, an organization dedicated to the elimination of human rights abuses. Los Angeles is a city where the world meets itself, where people carry pain from places a million miles away -- and sometimes find new trauma. In one instance, a torture survivor told of walking into an establishment here and seeing a person who had been a torturer in another country, said Gorney, one of the doctors Pomer recruited.

The doctors Pomer signed up helped to treat such patients by creating an authentic caring relationship with them, by helping some survivors to explore painful memories and others to avert those experiences.

The overall goal was to help the survivors discover the “prospect of a future that can be fulfilling because it is not too burdened by an awful past,” Gorney said.

Pomer was born May 1, 1917, to Russian emigres who had fled to Canada to escape the pogroms. When World War II began, he had graduated from the University of Toronto and was working at a Bay Area hospital, a position that could have gotten him a military exemption.

But he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces, spending three years as a flight surgeon with the rank of captain. After the war Pomer served a residency at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where he met and married another resident, Van Leeuwen. During those early years, his patients included orphans who had lost their families in the Holocaust. It was the anti-communist hysteria of the postwar years that helped politicize Pomer.

Pomer was a friend and colleague of Walter Briehl, a pioneering psychoanalyst and humanitarian who made news in 1955 when he and artist Rockwell Kent refused to sign a loyalty oath, a requirement for receiving a passport. Three years later the U.S. Supreme Court handed the men a victory when it overturned the requirement.

While working part time at a mental health clinic in Berkeley, Pomer made his own stand on the loyalty oath issue. When the clinic demanded doctors sign the oath, Pomer resigned instead.

“Anybody who wouldn’t sign the loyalty oath had to resign,” Van Leeuwen said. “It made us much more aware, that even if you don’t want to get mixed up in politics there are situations where you have to take a stand.”In San Francisco, Pomer’s activism included nonpolitical issues. He helped organize and became chairman of the medical advisory board of the United Cerebral Palsy Assn. His involvement began after his first child, a son, was born with the disorder. The organization, which included Leonard H. Goldenson, founder of the ABC network, televised what is believed to be one of television’s earliest telethons.

The death of his son at the age of 4 was a pain Pomer carried with him throughout his life, Karen Pomer said. The family would grow to include three daughters, Judy, Karen and Lisa, and grandchildren Alicia, David and Matthew, all of whom survive Pomer.

In Los Angeles, where the family moved in 1953, Pomer and his wife trained at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. He served as president of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Society, edited the organization’s publication and was active in the American Psychoanalytic Assn. Along with his private practice, he helped found the now-defunct Westwood Psychiatric Hospital and began a decades-long association with USC and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Pomer had an easy manner with people and made friends of authors whose work he admired. Pomer, a skillful writer himself, wrote author Henry Miller once and then met him.

“He loved literature, he loved people ... he loved life,” Karen Pomer said. The couple raised their daughters to believe there were no limits to what they could do or become, Karen Pomer said. After she was abducted and raped in 1995, Karen Pomer came forward and spoke publicly about the horrific ordeal in newspaper articles and on television with the aim of helping other women. Her parents were her inspiration for coming forward. “My dad was proud of my activism,” said Karen Pomer, who formed an advocacy group for survivors of rape.

Her father’s position on social issues was an extension of a deep concern for his patients. The Walter Briehl Human Rights Foundation helped torture victims, many from Central and South America and Africa, who had immigrated to the U.S., often with the aid of international organizations.

Such victims, who often have been burned, raped, or beaten, provide a difficult challenge even for professionals. They force analysts to look at a particularly ugly subject and to ask questions of themselves: If they had been forced to torture someone in order to save themselves, as some torturers had been, what would they have done?

“You are being asked to turn a searchlight into parts of your own personality that you would really rather not call into question,” Gorney said. “Larry made it clear a good person has no choice, has to not only think about it, but do something about it.”

Memorial donations may be made to the Drs. S.L. Pomer and Kato van Leeuwen Research in Child Development Fund, New Center for Psychoanalysis, 2014 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025.