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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/0 ... 103fa_fact
ANNALS OF MEDICINE
THE DICTIONARY OF DISORDER
How one man revolutionized psychiatry.
by Alix Spiegel
JANUARY 3, 2005 PRINTE-MAILSINGLE PAGE
KEYWORDS
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (DSM-III); Spitzer, Robert;
Psychology, Psychiatry; Psychologists, Psychiatrists; Columbia University;
Descriptive Psychiatry; Endicott, Jean; Shaffer, David
In the mid-nineteen-forties, Robert Spitzer, a mathematically minded boy of fifteen, began weekly sessions of Reichian psychotherapy.
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a student of Sigmund Freud who, among other things, had marketed a device that he
called the orgone accumulator—an iron appliance, the size of a telephone booth, that he claimed could both enhance sexual powers and
cure cancer. Spitzer had asked his parents for permission to try Reichian analysis, but his parents had refused—they thought it was a sham—
and so he decided to go to the sessions in secret. He paid five dollars a week to a therapist on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young
man willing to talk frankly about the single most compelling issue Spitzer had yet encountered: women. Spitzer found this methodical
approach to the enigma of attraction both soothing and invigorating. The real draw of the therapy, however, was that it greatly reduced
Spitzer’s anxieties about his troubled family life: his mother was a “professional patient” who cried continuously, and his father was cold
and remote. Spitzer, unfortunately, had inherited his mother’s unruly inner life and his father’s repressed affect; though he often found
himself overpowered by emotion, he was somehow unable to express his feelings. The sessions helped him, as he says, “become alive,”
and he always looked back on them with fondness. It was this experience that confirmed what would become his guiding principle:
the best way to master the wilderness of emotion was through systematic study and analysis.
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