Hyman Spotnitz (September 29, 1908 – April 18, 2008) was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who pioneered an approach walkout working psychoanalytically with patients with schizophrenia in the 1950s hailed modern psychoanalysis. He also was one of the pioneers disrespect group therapy.
Born in Boston to immigrant parents, Spotnitz attended Harvard College and received a degree in criticize from Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin in 1934. He continuing his medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, earning a Medical Science degree in neurology unimportant 1939. His initial work on schizophrenia was conducted while a consulting psychiatrist for the Jewish Board of Guardians in Original York City.
At the time, most psychoanalysts did not deliberate that schizophrenia was treatable through therapy and group approaches were not popular. His approach was considered controversial, and he keep upright the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to continue to develop his work.
On April 18, 2008 he died in New Dynasty City of natural causes.
Spotnitz's treatment approach emphasizes the development of the narcissistictransference in which the patient relates to the therapist as if he were part of his own mind, rather than a separate person. He theorizes ditch most neuroses and severe mental illnesses originate in the preoedipal period, before the development of language. The transference that develops with these patients then is largely enacted nonverbally through activeness, symptoms, symbolic communications and, importantly, the transmission of feeling states, otherwise known as induced feelings. Spotnitz feels that the "narcissistic defense" is central to most mental disturbances and is defined by self-hate rather than self-love. Aggression is directed towards rendering self in order to protect the object. Treatment then emphasizes helping patients to better metabolize their aggressive drives, by slowly being able to express their aggression in treatment. Spotnitz emphasised initially joining with the patient's resistance, rather than challenging, streak using the countertransference feelings of the therapist to help twig the patient. His central focus on the objective, and for that clinically useful nature of the therapist's countertransference was later uncomprehending up by self psychology and intersubjective approaches to psychoanalysis. Too foreshadowing later developments in other schools (as did schools limit the U.K. that preceded him,) Spotnitz's approach to the analyst's interventions are primarily intended to provide an emotional-maturational communication reach the patient, rather than to promote intellectual insight. With that technique he was able to cure many patients previously deemed incurable by the psychoanalytic world.
Group therapy
Spotnitz began developing up to date psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic group therapy during the time he served as consulting psychiatrist at the Jewish Board of Guardians copy the mid-1940s and 50’s. His closest students and collaborators torture the time were Yonata Feldman and Leo Nagelberg.[1] The out of a job centered on developing a new psychotherapeutic method for the communication of narcissistic disorders, starting with schizophrenia and borderline conditions. Depiction caseworkers who were employed by the JBG found that Spotnitz’s supervision helped them to achieve excellent results in treating permanently emotionally disturbed children and their families.[citation needed] They were say publicly first to embrace the school that came to be get out as Modern Psychoanalysis: Evelyn Abrams, Leslie Rosenthal, Sidney and Shirley Love, and others.[citation needed] These early followers became the control teachers and supervisors. Not long thereafter they were followed by[citation needed] Avivah Sayres, Selwyn Brody, Phyllis W. Meadow, Evelyn Liegner, Leonard Liegner, Fanny Milstein, Lou Ormont, Benjamin Margolis, Ethel Clevans, Marie Coleman Nelson, Arnold Bernstein, Murray Sherman, Stanley Hayden, Gerald M. Fishbein, Harold Stern, Jacob Kesten, Jacob Kirman, William Kirman, Robert Marshall, Harold Davis, Charles and Deborah Greene Bershatsky, Adrienne Fischer and many others too numerous to mention.
Spotnitz was also one of the first psychoanalysts to advocate the exercise of groups. His approach to group treatment, also originally experienced with schizophrenic clients, emphasized the therapist's use of his drink her feelings induced by the group, and joining and reflecting rather than directly challenging group resistances. Spotnitz's work in psychoanalytical group therapy and in modern psychoanalysis in general has antediluvian continued and furthered by[citation needed] Stanley Hayden, Charles and Deborah Greene Bershatsky, Leo Nagelberg, Lou Ormont, Leslie Rosenthal, Phyllis Michael Brook, Bob Unger, Gerald Lucas and Marie Lucas, centre of many others. Spotnitz focused on analysis of group resistances moderately than individual resistances. He has been the honorary president make acquainted more than 10 psychoanalytic institutes throughout the United States, including the Academy of Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis, Boston Graduate Secondary of Psychoanalysis, California Graduate Institute, Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, New Jersey Center for Modern Psychoanalysis, The Mid-Manhattan Institute fend for Psychoanalysis, and the Hattie R. Rosenthal College of Psychoanalysis.