Elisabeth Bower

Elisabeth Bower, RN, MFT, died after a sudden, acute illness in the early hours of Saturday, June 15, 2013.

Born in 1938, in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, Elisabeth experienced the death of her father during a bombing raid and went through the horrors of the end of World War II. She left Germany at young age with her mother, brother (now deceased), and sister, and boarded a ship in Genoa, Italy, on December 1, 1949. After a seven-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and around Cape Horn, she arrived in San Francisco on January 22, 1950. This journey from war and ruins to a new fresh life imprinted her soul as an archetypal crossing and was to have indelible influences on her life, professional career, and spiritual practice.

She began her professional life as a registered nurse, doing both public health and psychiatric nursing. From the beginning, she was especially interested in the intersection of body and psyche. Her experiences in nursing led her to pursue a career in mental health at the University of California at Davis, where she was a clinical nurse specialist and a member of the clinical faculty. A course in art history introduced her to C. G. Jung and analytical psychology. She realized that Jungian psychology enabled her to bring into her work, areas of special interest: art, music, literature, and mythology. She was certified as a Jungian analyst by the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in 1998.

Elisabeth frequently taught classes on dreams, a Jungian perspective on poetry, psychology, and religion, and the spirituality of aging. Her spiritual life was deeply influenced by the works of Thomas Merton, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Brother Don Bisson, and Helen Luke. At the time of her death, she had begun to promote the exploration of The Defiant Requiem, the story of the Jews in Terezin (Theresienstadt) who defiantly sang Verdi's Requiem sixteen times in the last two years of World War II. She saw this work as a vehicle integrating her early life in Germany and her love of the spiritual, expressed through music. She was an active member of Therapists for Social Responsibility.

Married, having had three sons and seven grandchildren, the backseat of Elisabeth's car was filled with child car seats. Always thoughtful of her patients, she had made plans for them, in the event of her demise, and these plans were immediately put into place.

Vital, generous, and deeply insightful, Elisabeth was a loyal friend and a cultivator of beauty and spiritual value within and without. She will be dearly missed by her children, grandchildren, patients, friends, and by our Institute community.