Frederick Hacker; Noted Expert on Terrorism
Frederick Hacker, an internationally known psychiatrist whose views on terrorism were solicited in cases ranging from the kidnaping of Patricia Hearst to the hijacking of air passengers, has died in West Germany.
Henry Alter, a longtime friend and former business manager, said this week that Hacker, a one-time professor of clinical psychiatry at USC and founder of the Hacker Clinics in Los Angeles and Lynwood, had died June 23.
He was 75 and suffered a heart attack while appearing on a West German television panel show near Frankfurt, Alter said. He reported that Hacker had undergone bypass surgery several years ago and had ongoing kidney problems.
A founder of the Freud Society, which reconstructed into a museum the rooms in Vienna where Sigmund Freud worked for 46 years, Hacker--like Freud--fled Austria when Hitler came to power.
In this country he became a specialist in terrorist acts and was consulted by governments and in courtroom cases ranging from the Hearst trial to many of the skyjacking cases of the 1970s. For several years, he served on a panel of court-appointed psychiatrists for Los Angeles County, examining mass murderers and others involved in capital crimes. He performed a similar function for the federal courts.
He was a 1938 graduate of the University of Vienna Medical School who served his internship and residencies in Vienna; Basel, Switzerland; New York, and New Jersey before becoming a professor and staff psychiatrist at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan.
He lectured and taught at the University of Vienna, where he also was an adviser to the Austrian government on prison reform, and the University of Kansas before going to USC in 1964.
At USC he taught a program called psychopolitics, which studied aggression and terrorism and was aimed at helping teach people in public and private life how to deal with them.
More recently he headed the Institute for Conflict Research in Vienna, where he was examining the question of why youths in Germany and Switzerland seem more rebellious than those in Austria.
Survivors include his wife, Anastasia; a brother, and two nephews, said a spokeswoman for the Hacker Clinics, which are private psychiatric treatment centers.
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