While on retreat in the western Netherlands in 1944, Van Kaam was trapped behind Nazi front lines following Operation Market Garden.
He hid in a barn while enduring the "hunger winter" of 1944, during which the Dutch were forced to subsist on turnips, potatoes and toxic tulip bulbs, an experience that had a permanent deleterious effect on his health.
[1] Van Kaam earned a doctorate in philosophy from Case Western Reserve University, writing his dissertation on "The Experience of Really Feeling Understood by a Person.
After an accrediting agency objected to his courses, which combined psychology and religion with a "phenomenological air",[4] Van Kaam returned to his background in spiritual direction in 1963.
The Institute of Formative Spirituality was closed in 1995 due to financial reasons,[4] and Van Kaam, with the assistance of a colleague, Dr. Susan Muto, continued his work with the Epiphany Association in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Beechview.
[3] He died on November 17, 2007, in the nursing home of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Pittsburgh's North Side, and was buried in Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Peters Township, Pennsylvania.