People (Births)

• 1930 – Yehuda Nir, Polish-American psychiatrist (d. 2014).

People (Deaths)

• 2007 – Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher (b. 1921).

Yehuda Nir

Yehuda Nir (31 March 1930 to 19 July 2014) was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author of The Lost Childhood.

Nir posed as a Roman Catholic and learned Latin to escape Nazi persecution in Poland during World War II. Nir’s ordeal led him to a career as a psychiatrist, specialising in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and severely ill children. He immigrated to the United States in 1959 to complete medical residencies in New York City and Philadelphia. He served as the chief of child psychiatry of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre from 1979 until 1986.

Paul Watzlawick

Paul Watzlawick (25 July 1921 to 31 March 2007) was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher.

A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.