Lasting Memories

Philip Stein
March 16, 1932-Aug. 20, 2012
Palo Alto, California

Dr. Philip M. Stein, Bay Area psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, fanatical tennis player, and loving husband, father and grandfather, died on Aug. 20, 2012, after contending with Parkinson's disease for 24 years.

Phil, known as "Big Phil" by family and friends, was born in Brooklyn in 1932, the youngest of seven children. As a kid, Phil inhabited the streets of East New York, playing stickball, handball and sandlot baseball (he pitched). His father, Jacob, passed when Phil was 17, and Phil went to work to take care of his mother, Rebecca. He attended City College of New York and Brooklyn College at night, and was graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Phil met Bonnie Miller, of Forest Hills, N.Y., in 1954, and they were married two years later.

Phil attended medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and was a member of its third graduating class in 1961. His residency at Stanford University Medical School took him and Bonnie to Palo Alto in 1962. Phil's oldest child, Andrew, later graduated from Einstein, making them the first pair of father-son alums in Einstein's history.

While Phil was on a surgery rotation during medical school, a nurse prophetically joked that he had "the hands of a psychiatrist." Phil had the mind, the empathy, the wisdom, the ear, and the compassion of a great psychiatrist, as well as a deep grasp of, and scholarly devotion to, psychoanalytic theory. Combining clinical skill and a capacious love of people, Phil had a busy private practice in San Jose and, later, Palo Alto until he retired in 2004. He also became a training analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and taught courses in psychiatry and psychotherapy at Stanford University Medical School and the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (PGSP) in Menlo Park.

Phil is survived by Bonnie, his wife of 56 years, and by their four children: Dr. Andrew Stein and his wife, Karen, of Danville; Julie Bolanos and her husband, Ray, of Redwood City; Paul Stein and his wife, Sarah Smith, of San Francisco; and Laura Santora and her husband, Francis, of Menlo Park. Phil had seven grandchildren: Jordan, Becky, Hanna, Matthew, Harriet, Walter and Jessie. Phil is also survived by his big brother, Alvin Stein of Barrington, Rhode Island.

A memorial service for Phil will be held at Congregation Etz Chayim, 4161 Alma St. (between Charleston and San Antonio), Palo Alto, on Sept. 30, 2012, at 3 p.m.