Silvano Arieti

Silvano Arieti (June 28, 1914 in Pisa, Italy – August 7, 1981 in New York City) was a psychiatrist regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia. He received his M.D. from the University of Pisa and left Italy soon after, due to the increasingly anti-Semitic racial policies of Benito Mussolini.

Arieti was professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College. He was also training analyst in the Division of Psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute, and editor of the six-volume American Handbook of Psychiatry. His Interpretation of Schizophrenia won the 1975 National Book Award in Science. His The Will to be Human won the 1973 National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion category.

Arieti undertook psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients, an unusual approach that few of his colleagues chose to pursue. The book was considered in his time as a major revision of concept of schizophrenia after Kraeplin and Bleuler. The views he expressed in Interpretation of Schizophrenia are now professionally called the trauma model of mental disorders and constitute one alternative to the mainstream medical model of mental disorders. Childhood anxieties and psychological experiences by the child were considered as primary causes of later-age development of schizophrenia. He advanced the ideas from psychodynamic school, and his contributions became the foundations of much of the later work in psychotherapy of schizophrenia.

Arieti's book The Will to Be Human (signed copy)

See also

• Interpretation of Schizophrenia

External links

• The Silvano Arieti Association
• Silvano Arieti at Find a Grave