Austen Fox Riggs: His Significance to American Psychiatry of Today
JOHN A. P. MILLET M.D.1
1 45 East End Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10028, honorary consultant psychoanalyst, the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research
As early as 1913—ten years before Freud turned his attention to this field—Austen Fox Riggs had developed a fully integrated conceptual system of ego psychology. Between 1913 and 1940 at Stockbridge, Mass., he laid the groundwork for the reeducational treatment of the psychoneuroses and allied states in a tightly organized therapeutic community. As a by-product of his work he developed specialized services which are today recognizable in the fields of student mental health, child guidance, and community psychiatry and in the teaching of psychosomatic medicine.
