Selected Papers of Robert P. Knight

In the evolution of man’s self-awareness Robert P. Knight remains one of a handful of American psychoanalysts who applied the humanistic discoveries formulated by Sigmund Freud to the practice of psychiatry in this country.

The values he drew from an early involvement with literature, poetry, and drama formed an invaluable basis for making his own life experience intelligible and allowed him to transcend the conventional techniques of psychoanalysis. The alcoholics, paranoid schizophrenics, and even the „borderlines“ – patients previously regarded as outside the province of psychoanalysis – found in Kinght’s work innovative approaches to the resolution of deep-seated disturbances. Knight eschewed the orthodox techniques which maintained an impersonal, passive attitude for the realization that the analyst must meet some of the patient’s needs, rather than simply analyze and interpret them.

It was in the case reports of his work with schizophrenics and alcoholics that Knight built a solid body of psychoanalytic work on etiology, diagnostic appraisal, and care of the patienty. He was one of the first American psychiatrists to recognize the immense usefulness of diagnostic testing in such an evaluation. Where long-term therapy was not possible or appeared unwise, it became his special province to make insightful overall assessments of the person in his care, not simply of his pathology but of his „real abilities and potentialities“ as well.

Here, in one comprehensive volume, are collected the principal writings of this great American clinician and therapist, who was for many years the Medical Director of the Austen Riggs Center. Commencing with anecdotes and personal reminiscences of Robert Knight, Stuart Miller’s judicious selection of writings gives the reader access to case studies, comments, treatments, and conclusions of this extraordinary forerunner of modern psychiatric thought.