Silvano Arieti

Who was Silvano Arieti?

Silvano Arieti was a psychiatrist regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on schizophrenia. He received his M.D. from the University of Pisa but left Italy soon after, due to the increasingly 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.

Arieti undertook psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients, an unusual approach that few of his colleagues chose to pursue. 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.