Tag: Psychiatrist

What is Parataxic Distortion?

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Introduction

Parataxic distortion is a psychiatric term first used by Harry S. Sullivan to describe the inclination to skew perceptions of others based on fantasy.

Refer to Parataxical Integration.

Background

The “distortion” is a faulty perception of others, based not on actual experience with the other individual, but on a projected fantasy personality attributed to the individual. For example, when one falls in love, an image of another person as the “perfect match” or “soul mate” can be created when in reality, the other person may not live up to these expectations or embody the imagined traits at all.

The fantasy personality is created in part from past experiences and from expectations as to how the person ‘should be’, and is formulated in response to emotional stress. This stress can originate from the formation of a new relationship, or from cognitive dissonance required to maintain an existing relationship. Parataxic distortion serves as an immature cognitive defence mechanism against this psychological stress and is similar to Transference.

Parataxic distortion is difficult to avoid because of the nature of human learning and interaction. Stereotyping of individuals based on social cues and the classification of people into groups is a commonplace cognitive function of the human mind. Such pigeonholing allows for a person to gain a quick, though possibly inaccurate, assessment of an interaction. The cognitive processes employed, however, can have a distorting effect on the clear understanding of individuals. In essence, one can lose the ability to ‘hear the other’ through one’s own projected beliefs of what the other person is saying.

Etymology

From the Greek παράταξις, “placement side by side”.

Para – A Greek prefix which came to designate objects or activities auxiliary to or derivative of that denoted by the base word ( parody; paronomasia, paranoia) and hence abnormal or defective.

Taxic – indicating movement towards or away from a specified stimulus.

In this sense, Parataxic distortion, is a shift in perception away from reality.

Interpersonal Relationships and Emotions

Distorting one’s perception of others can often interfere with interpersonal relationships. In many cases, however, it may be beneficial to do so. Humans are constantly and subconsciously stereotyping. According to Paul Martin Lester, “our brains naturally classify what we see, we can’t help but notice the differences in physical attributes between one person and another.” Parataxic distortion runs parallel to stereotyping while it remains in the subconscious. As we make quick judgements, we are drawing from previous experiences stored in our memory.

Parataxic distortion can be a beneficial defence mechanism for the individual, allowing the individual to maintain relationships with others with whom he or she would otherwise be unable to interact or allowing the individual to endure difficult periods in relationships. A self-imposed blindness to certain personality traits can keep a relationship healthy, or it can also prove destructive. For instance, parataxic distortion can keep one in denial of the abusive nature of a spouse.

Attachment Theory

Parataxic distortion can begin in the early stages of development in infants. A mother’s nurturing personality and emotional warmth might be projected onto a lover later in life. This could initially generate stronger feelings for the woman than are warranted by her behaviour and character alone. This example of attachment theory correlates with parataxic distortion.

Attachment theory would have it that the fantasy selves projected onto others in parataxic distortion are informed by our long-term attachment patterns. Not only are these imagined traits the resultant of our earliest bonds and unresolved emotional issues from past relationships, but they are recreated in these fantasy selves for the purpose of recreating that past attachment in the present.

Negative Effects

Dealing with current situations or people that relate to a past event, or remind someone of a person from the past, can have negative effects on a human from an emotional standpoint. If the person from the past was a negative figure or the past event had a negative influence on a person, the person may create a self-sense of identity for the new individual they met. The negative emotional response happens when the individual realises that they have been creating a fake identity for the new individual.

Parataxic distortion is most effective in the realm of interpersonal communication. Parataxic distortion is typically used to avoid coping with past events. For example, if a child is mistreated by his or her father, the child may not only attach the fear and anger towards the father but will also relate this fear and anger to other men that look, talk or act like the father. The human mind keeps track of situations that we have encountered in the past to help us deal with future situations. The unconscious memory, without our knowing, helps us understand and deal with situations in the present that we have dealt with in the past. Parataxic distortion and our unconscious mind make us act the same way in current situations as we did in the past, even without realising it.

Defence Mechanism

As a defence mechanism, parataxic distortion protects one from the emotional consequences of a past event. A person may not remember a certain event, or be acting on it consciously, but will act a certain way to protect themselves from an outcome with the use of parataxic distortion. This behaviour is a pathological attempt to cope with reality by using unreality.

Parataxic distortion is a commonly used psychological defence mechanism. It is not an illness or a disease, but a part of everyday, normal human psychology that can become maladaptive in certain situations. The cognitive abilities used to generate internal models of others are useful in interaction. As we can never truly internalise the full reality of another, we must interact with a shorthand version of them. It is only when we believe that the shorthand version is their reality that this ability can become maladaptive. One may also attempt to coerce or force another to ‘fit the mould’ and act more according to expectations, more like the idealised version they dream the other as being. This is also pathological.

However, all humans engage in parataxic distortion to one extent or another, in one realm or another. It may be to manage emotions within their family, to facilitate communication between them and their spouse, or to imagine a relationship between them and their nation-state.

On This Day … 13 February

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People (Deaths)

  • 1964 – Werner Heyde, German psychiatrist and academic (b. 1902).

Werner Heyde

Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 to 13 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organisers of Nazi Germany’s T-4 Euthanasia Programme.

Early Life

Heyde was born in Forst (Lausitz) on 25 May in 1902 and completed his Abitur in 1920. From 1922-1925, he studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, Marburg, Rostock and Würzburg and after short placements at the General Hospital in Cottbus and the sanatorium Berlin-Wittenau became assistant doctor at the Universitätsnervenklinik (university psychiatric hospital) in Würzburg. He obtained his licence to practice medicine in 1926, having completed all courses throughout his studies with top marks.

Career until 1945

In 1933, Heyde made the acquaintance of Theodor Eicke, and became a member of the NSDAP. One year later, he was appointed director of the polyclinic in Würzburg. In 1935, he entered the SS as medical officer with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, and became commander of the medical unit in the SS-Totenkopfverbände. There he was responsible for establishing a system of psychiatric and eugenic examinations and research in concentration camps, and for the organisation of the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Additionally, he also worked as a psychiatric consultant for the Gestapo. He also was leader of the Rassenpolitisches Amt in Würzburg, Seelbergstraße 8, 97080 Würzburg. Later he was accompanied by his Rassenpolitisches Amt assistant, Mr. Johannes Riedmiller aka Kurt Riethmüller aka Hans Riedmüller/Hans Riedmiller.

In 1938, he was appointed chief of staff of the medical department in the SS-Hauptamt (headquarters); in 1939, he became professor for psychiatry and neurology at the University of Würzburg, and from 1940 on he also was director of the psychiatric hospital.

He was replaced as head of the T4 program by Paul Nitsche in 1941, but continued his involvement as member of the “department Brack”[clarification needed] (after the end of World War II, it was never found out what his role there was).

He worked at Buchenwald, Dachau concentration camp and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

In 1944, he was awarded the SS-Totenkopfring, and before the end of the war reached the rank of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel).

Life after 1945; Arrest and Suicide

After World War II, Heyde was interned and imprisoned, but escaped in 1947. He went underground using the alias Fritz Sawade and continued practicing as a sports physician and psychiatrist in Flensburg. Many friends and associates knew about his real identity, but remained silent even as he was an expert witness in court cases.

His true identity was revealed in the course of a private quarrel, and on 11 November 1959 Heyde surrendered to police in Frankfurt after 13 years as a fugitive. On 13 February 1964, five days before his trial was to start, Heyde hanged himself at the prison in Butzbach.

Who was Martti Olavi Siirala?

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Introduction

Martti Olavi Siirala (24 November 1922 to 18 August 2008) was a Finnish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and philosopher.

He was inspired by psychoanalysis, the anthropological medicine of Viktor von Weizsäcker and the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The outcome was a unique synthesis theory that Siirala called social pathology.

Siirala studied psychoanalysis in Zürich under the guidance of Medard Boss and Gustav Bally. There he met also colleague and lifetime friend Gaetano Benedetti. Siirala was also the founding member of Finnish Therapeia-foundation, an alternative psychoanalytic training institute established 1958. Especially in the early years Siirala was actually the principal of the foundation, both at a theoretical and practical level.

Anthropological Basis

In the tradition of philosophical anthropology man is seen as a unity. No sharp distinction is to be seen between body and soul. Also man is seen as member of his society, believing that one needs contacts to others for his own welfare. Siirala accepted these theses, mostly under the influence of von Weiszäcker.

Siirala saw human illness as meaningful reactions to the patient’s life situations, both present and past. Also Siirala considered bodily and mental illnesses as alternative reactions. Mentally ill people he described as placeless, meaning that they have no real place among other men, their acceptance or respect. The origins of problems of this kind Siirala saw as mostly social.

Handling children with problems in speech development in Medicine in Metamorphosis, Siirala’s attitude comes clear. Here we can think about the symptom of stuttering. From traditional point of view there is child who tries to speak, but some, probably neurological problem disturbs this process. From Siirala’s point it is just that this child stutters, speak this way, and he does this as a total reaction of his whole life situation: ‘A child is born into a family and a national and human network that extends across the generations’.

Social Pathology

In modern psychiatry there is a tradition of returning patient’s illness back to one specific reason. Sometimes this cause is to be found in genetics, sometimes elsewhere. From Siirala’s point of view there is not a single cause but rather a net of causes: hence his opposition to what he called ‘the delusion that we have reduced diseases to mere object-things, entities that can be studied in isolation…the delusion of reductive reification’. Tracking these causes starts from man, but leads to his social environment, in the end to the whole society.

Freud thought psychological symptoms to be overdetermined. It can be said that Siirala took the idea but expanded it to social field. For some patient we may think maybe of genetic fault or traumatic childhood. But we must think also patients parents childhood, the phenomena of transgenerational transmission, the teachers and social workers who have ignored the problem and so on.

Siirala distinguishes two major factors in this collective pathology. The first is the delusional possession of reality. By that Siirala means an attitude where one’s own assumptions are considered the only one, a position where things are already known – so there seems to be no real need to orient towards the subject. Thus for Siirala ‘a central feature of the delusions of the healthy seems to be the unconscious assumption that they possess reality, the criteria of what is worth notice’.

The second is often latent despair, a hopelessness attitude. These factors can be seen for example in the history of psychiatry. Some decades ago it was already known that schizophrenia is an incurable state or condition. Therefore no real therapeutic actions were done, and patients stayed ill: a Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Siirala wrote here about transfer, a social pathological formation of non-articulated life. When there is no room to people to react to problems they encounter, it has effects that harm the whole society. However, these transfers or burdens are not delivered equally. On the contrary, they often fall on the shoulders of this or that particular person, who then becomes ill. Here, Siirala maintains, the mentally or physically ill one – the Identified patient – gets ill for his society. In Siirala’s view, then, ‘many symptoms of schizophrenia may be precipitated by…the people around him, in an attempt to overcome tendencies in him which disturb their view of reality. This, as with many of Siirala’s writings, is disturbing and provocative…[but] can never be healthily ignored’.[4] The corollary is that the real subject of illness is not therefore the particular individual who is driven into isolation – “placelessness” – but the society that has driven him there.

Siirala has accordingly been linked with figures like Harold Searles or Harry Stack Sullivan in his belief that the delusions of patients are ‘expressions that reflect what has been dissociated, hidden, and overlooked in life’. A similar link appears in ‘the psychological literature on Invisible Loyalties (Boszormenyi-Nagi & Spark 1973) and anonymous social burdens (Siirala, M. 1983)’.

Psychotherapy

Siirala calls therapy the new, sharing transfer of social burden. The so-called transference of psychoanalysis is seen not only as projecting feelings to the therapist, but also as the sharing of this burden. Thus ‘in order to be creative, the therapist must identify himself with the patient, share his sufferings so that he attains his goal’. This may also cause some pain to the therapist, but can at the same time make things happen that are at first sight impossible. Epistemologically Siirala stresses that therapist must keep all possibilities open, and not hang on to some preconceived theory like the oedipal theory of psychoanalysis.

In many points Siirala comes close to Ronald David Laing, a famous anti-psychiatrist from the 1960s. Indeed the work, ‘Medicine in Metamorphosis’ was published originally in a series edited by Laing. Both were interested in social origins of schizophrenia. On the other hand, Siirala never stops considering his patients as ill. Also he sees that they need the right kind of psychiatric treatment to gain again some kind of place among other men.

On This Day … 08 February

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People (Deaths)

  • 1964 – Ernst Kretschmer, German psychiatrist and author (b. 1888).
  • 2007 – Ian Stevenson, Canadian-American psychiatrist and academic (b. 1918).

Ernst Kretschmer

Ernst Kretschmer (08 October 1888 to 08 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist who researched the human constitution and established a typology.

Kretschmer was born in Wüstenrot near Heilbronn. He attended Cannstatt Gymnasium, one of the oldest Latin schools in Stuttgart area. From 1906 to 1912 he studied theology, medicine, and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Munich and Hamburg. From 1913 he was assistant of Robert Gaupp in Tübingen, where he received his habilitation in 1918. He continued as assistant medical director until 1926.

In 1926 he became the director of the psychiatric clinic at Marburg University.

Kretschmer was a founding member of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (AÄGP) which was founded on 12 January 1927. He was the president of AÄGP from 1929. In 1933 he resigned from the AÄGP for political reasons.

From 1946 until 1959, Kretschmer was the director of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Tübingen. He died, aged 75, in Tübingen.

Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson (31 October 1918 to 08 February 2007) was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist. He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.

As founder and director of the university’s Division of Perceptual Studies, which investigates the paranormal, Stevenson became known for his research into cases he considered suggestive of reincarnation, the idea that emotions, memories, and even physical bodily features can be transferred from one life to another. Over a period of forty years in international fieldwork, he investigated three thousand cases of children who claimed to remember past lives. His position was that certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be fully explained by heredity or the environment. He believed that, in addition to genetics and the environment, reincarnation might possibly provide a third, contributing factor.

Stevenson helped found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982 and was the author of around three hundred papers and fourteen books on reincarnation, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966), Cases of the Reincarnation Type (four volumes, 1975-1983) and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003). His most ambitious work was the 2,268-page, two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). This reported two hundred cases in which birthmarks and birth defects seemed to correspond in some way to a wound on the deceased person whose life the child recalled. He wrote a shorter version of the same research for the general reader, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997).

Reaction to his work was mixed. In an obituary for Stevenson in The New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that Stevenson’s supporters saw him as a misunderstood genius but that most scientists had simply ignored his research and that his detractors regarded him as earnest but gullible. His life and work became the subject of three supportive books, Old Souls: The Scientific Search for Proof of Past Lives (1999) by Tom Shroder, a Washington Post journalist, Life Before Life (2005) by Jim B. Tucker, a psychiatrist and colleague at the University of Virginia, and Science, the Self, and Survival after Death (2012), by Emily Williams Kelly. Critics, particularly the philosophers C.T.K. Chari (1909-1993) and Paul Edwards (1923-2004), raised a number of issues, including claims that the children or parents interviewed by Stevenson had deceived him, that he had asked them leading questions, that he had often worked through translators who believed what the interviewees were saying, and that his conclusions were undermined by confirmation bias, where cases not supportive of his hypothesis were not presented as counting against it.

On This Day … 06 February

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People (Births)

  • 1839 – Eduard Hitzig, German neurologist and psychiatrist (d. 1907).
  • 1852 – C. Lloyd Morgan, English zoologist and psychologist (d. 1936).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – David Rosenhan, American psychologist and academic (b. 1929).

Eduard Hitzig

Eduard Hitzig (06 February 1838 to 20 August 1907) was a German neurologist and neuropsychiatrist of Jewish ancestry born in Berlin.

He studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin and Würzburg under the instruction of famous men such as Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), Moritz Heinrich Romberg (1795-1873), and Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890). He received his doctorate in 1862 and subsequently worked in Berlin and Würzburg. In 1875, he became director of the Burghölzli asylum, as well as professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich. In 1885, Hitzig became a professor at the University of Halle where he remained until his retirement in 1903.

Hitzig is remembered for his work concerning the interaction between electric current and the brain. In 1870, Hitzig, assisted by anatomist Gustav Fritsch (1837-1927), applied electricity via a thin probe to the exposed cerebral cortex of a dog without anaesthesia. They performed these studies at the home of Fritsch because the University of Berlin would not allow such experimentation in their laboratories. What Hitzig and Fritsch had discovered is that electrical stimulation of different areas of the cerebrum caused involuntary muscular contractions of specific parts of the dog’s body. They identified the brain’s “motor strip”, a vertical strip of brain tissue on the cerebrum in the back of the frontal lobe, which controls different muscles in the body. In 1870, Hitzig published his findings in an essay called Ueber die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns (On the Electrical Excitability of the Cerebrum). This experimentation was considered the first time anyone had done any localized study regarding the brain and electric current.

However this was not the first time Hitzig had experienced the interaction between the brain and electricity; earlier in his career as a physician working with the Prussian Army, he experimented on wounded soldiers whose skulls were fractured by bullets. Hitzig noticed that applying a small electric current to the brains of these soldiers caused involuntary muscular movement.

Hitzig and Fritsch’s work opened the door to further localised testing of the brain by many others including Scottish neurologist, David Ferrier.

C. Lloyd Morgan

Conwy Lloyd Morgan, FRS (06 February 1852 to 06 March 1936) was a British ethologist and psychologist.

He is remembered for his theory of emergent evolution, and for the experimental approach to animal psychology now known as Morgan’s Canon, a principle that played a major role in behaviourism, insisting that higher mental faculties should only be considered as explanations if lower faculties could not explain a behaviour.

David Rosenhan

David L. Rosenhan (22 November 1929 to 06 February 2012) was an American psychologist.

He is best known for the Rosenhan experiment, a study challenging the validity of psychiatry diagnoses.

On This Day … 24 January

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People (Births)

  • 1850 – Hermann Ebbinghaus, German psychologist (d. 1909).
  • 1853 – Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser, German psychiatrist (d. 1931).

People (Deaths)

  • 1971 – Bill W., American activist, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (b. 1895).

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 to 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect.

He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.

Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser

Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser (24 January 1853 to 04 January 1931) was a German psychiatrist born in Rhaunen.

He earned his medical doctorate in 1876 from the University of Munich. Afterwards he worked briefly at a psychiatric clinic in Würzburg, and later as an assistant to neuroanatomist Bernhard von Gudden (1824-1886) in Munich. In 1886, he became head of the psychiatric department at Dresden General Hospital. Among his students was neurologist Hans Queckenstedt (1876-1918).

Sigbert Ganser is remembered for a hysterical disorder that he first described in 1898. He identified the disorder in three prisoners while working at a prison in Halle. The features included approximate or nonsensical answers to simple questions, perceptual abnormalities, and clouding of consciousness. Ganser believed that these symptoms were an associative reaction caused by an unconscious attempt by the patient to escape from an intolerable mental situation. The disorder was to become known as Ganser syndrome.

Bill W.

William Griffith Wilson (26 November 1895 to 24 January 1971), also known as Bill Wilson or Bill W., was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

AA is an international mutual aid fellowship with about 2 million members worldwide belonging to approximately 10,000 groups, associations, organisations, cooperatives, and fellowships of alcoholics helping other alcoholics achieve and maintain sobriety. Following AA’s Twelfth Tradition of anonymity, Wilson is commonly known as “Bill W.” or “Bill.” In order to identify each other, members of AA will sometimes ask others if they are “friends of Bill”. Although this question can be confusing, because “Bill” is a common name, it does provide a means of establishing the common experience of AA membership. After Wilson’s death in 1971, and amidst much controversy within the fellowship, his full name was included in obituaries by journalists who were unaware of the significance of maintaining anonymity within the organisation.

Wilson’s sobriety from alcohol, which he maintained until his death, began 11 December 1934. In 1955 Wilson turned over control of AA to a board of trustees. Wilson died of emphysema complicated by pneumonia from smoking tobacco in 1971. In 1999 Time listed him as “Bill W.: The Healer” in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.

On This Day … 22 January

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People (Births)

  • 1913 – Henry Bauchau, Belgian psychoanalyst and author (d. 2012).
  • 1932 – Berthold Grünfeld, Norwegian psychiatrist and academic (d. 2007).

Henry Bauchau

Henry Bauchau (22 January 1913 to 21 September 2012) was a Belgian psychoanalyst, lawyer, and author of French prose and poetry.

Henry Bauchau was born in Mechelen, Belgium on 22 January 1913. He became a trial lawyer in Brussels in 1936 and was a member of the Belgian Resistance in the Ardennes during World War II.

From 1945 to 1951 he worked in publishing. In 1946, he moved to Paris. He was a friend of Albert Camus, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida.

He was married to Mary Kozyrev; their son is the actor Patrick Bauchau. They lived for a time in Gstaad, Switzerland.

Bauchau died in Paris, France on 21 September 2012, aged 99.

Berthold Grunfeld

Berthold Grünfeld (22 January 1932 to 20 August 2007) was a Norwegian psychiatrist, sexologist, and professor of social medicine at the University of Oslo. He was also a recognised expert in forensic psychiatry, often employed by Norwegian courts to examine insanity defence pleas.

Grünfeld was born in Bratislava in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1939, when he was seven, he and 34 other Jewish children were separated from their families in an attempt by Nansenhjelpen to rescue them from the early manifestations of the Holocaust. The group of children was sent by train to Norway via Berlin, after having been told they would never again see their parents.

Once in Norway, Grünfeld was first placed at the Jewish children’s home in Oslo, then lived as a foster child with a Jewish family in Trondheim before returning to the orphanage. During the occupation of Norway, Grünfeld avoided capture and deportation by fleeing with members of the Norwegian Resistance in 1942 to neutral Sweden, where he stayed until the war ended. He returned to the children’s home in 1946. The Jewish community funded his education.

Berthold Grünfeld earned his medical degree in 1960, when he also met his future wife Gunhild. He was awarded his doctorate in medicine in 1973 based on a dissertation on abortion. In 1993, he was made professor of social medicine at the University of Oslo.

Grünfeld was noted for his academic contributions within sexology, on the issues of abortion and euthanasia, and within forensic psychology. In addition to his advocacy and teaching, he acted as an expert witness in criminal cases, and as a consultant on human relations and sexology for Oslo Helseråd. His dissertation influenced the reform of abortion laws in Norway.

Grünfeld and his wife had three children and six grandchildren. In 2005, his daughter Nina Grünfeld made a film, Origin Unknown, about her efforts to research her father’s background and heritage. Among other things, she found that his mother had worked as a prostitute and was murdered in the death camp at Sobibor.

On This Day … 20 January

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1944 – James McKeen Cattell, American psychologist and academic (b. 1860).
  • 2012 – Alejandro Rodriguez, Venezuelan-American paediatrician and psychiatrist (b. 1918).

Nikos Sideris

Nikos Sideris (Greek: Νίκος Σιδέρης; born 20 January 1952), is a Greek psychiatrist, translator, poet and writer.

Sideris studied medicine at the University of Athens. He then settled in Paris for his postgraduate studies (specialising in Psychiatry, History and Neuropsychology-Neurolinguistics). He is a PhD of Panteion University Psychology Department and teaching psychoanalyst, member of the Strasbourg School of Psychoanalysis (E.P.S.) and the European Federation of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic School of Strasburg (FEDEPSY). He works as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and family therapist in Athens.

His book “Children do not need psychologists. They need parents!” (Τα παιδιά δεν θέλουν ψυχολόγο. Γονείς θέλουν) became a non-fiction best-seller in Greece.

James McKeen Cattell

James McKeen Cattell (25 May 1860 to 20 January 1944), American psychologist, was the first professor of psychology in the United States, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and long-time editor and publisher of scientific journals and publications, most notably the journal Science. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public (or SSP), from 1921-1944.

At the beginning of Cattell’s career, many scientists regarded psychology as, at best, a minor field of study, or at worst a pseudoscience such as phrenology. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Cattell helped establish psychology as a legitimate science, worthy of study at the highest levels of the academy. At the time of his death, The New York Times hailed him as “the dean of American science.” Yet Cattell may be best remembered for his uncompromising opposition to American involvement in World War I. His public opposition to the draft led to his dismissal from his position at Columbia University, a move that later led many American universities to establish tenure as a means of protecting unpopular beliefs.

Alejandro Rodriguez

Alejandro Rodriguez (February 1918 to 20 January 2012) was a Venezuelan-American paediatrician and psychiatrist, known for his pioneering work in child psychiatry. He was the director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children.

On This Day … 15 January

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People (Births)

  • 1842 – Josef Breuer, Austrian physician and psychiatrist (d. 1925).
  • 1877 – Lewis Terman, American psychologist, eugenicist, and academic (d. 1956).
  • 1958 – Boris Tadić, Serbian psychologist and politician, 16th President of Serbia.

Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer (15 January 1842 to 20 June 1925) was a distinguished physician who made key discoveries in neurophysiology, and whose work in the 1880s with his patient Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., developed the talking cure (cathartic method) and laid the foundation to psychoanalysis as developed by his protégé Sigmund Freud.

Lewis Terman

Lewis Madison Terman (15 January 1877 to 21 December 1956) was an American psychologist and author. He was noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

He is best known for his revision of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and for initiating the longitudinal study of children with high IQs called the Genetic Studies of Genius. He was a prominent eugenicist and was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Terman as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with G. Stanley Hall.

Boris Tadic

Boris Tadić (born 15 January 1958) is a Serbian politician who served as the president of Serbia from 2004 to 2012.

Tadić was a member of the Democratic Party since its establishment in 1990, and has been their president from 2004 until 2012. After the downfall of Milošević, he was appointed in the government as the Minister of Telecommunications of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and would later serve as the first Minister of Defence of Serbia and Montenegro before being elected as the president in 2004. He was re-elected for his second term in 2008. Following his defeat in the 2012 presidential election and poor party ratings, he stepped down in November 2012, to take the position of the party’s Honorary President. After a split with the new leadership in January 2014, Tadić left the Democratic Party and formed his own New Democratic Party (later renamed Social Democratic Party) for the 2014 parliamentary election.

Tadić strongly advocates close ties with the European Union (EU) and Serbia’s European integration. During his presidency, the EU has abolished visas for Serbian citizens traveling to the Schengen Area countries, Serbian government signed the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) and received an EU candidate status, as well as, Serbia has completed obligations to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He became the first Serbian head of state or head of government to visit the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial and he launched an initiative for the Serbian parliament to adopt a resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacre. The period of a coalition government led by the Tadić’s Democratic Party was characterized by the challenges of the Kosovo declaration of independence and the global financial crisis, leading to low rates of economic growth. He is widely regarded as a pro-Western leader, who also favours balanced relations with Russia, the United States and the EU.

On This Day … 14 January

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People (Deaths)

Harry Stack Sullivan

Herbert “Harry” Stack Sullivan (21 February 1892 to 14 January 1949) was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that “personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives” and that “[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist”.

Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.