Nathan Ackerman

Nathan Ward Ackerman (born November 22, 1908 in Bessarabia , Russian Empire , † June 12, 1971 in New York ) was an American psychiatrist , psychoanalyst and professor at Columbia University . He is considered a pioneer in family therapy .

Short biography

Raised up in the United States since he was four, Ackerman received American citizenship in 1920. In 1933 he completed his medical degree at Columbia University in New York, after which he worked at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka , Kansas, as a psychiatrist. In 1937 he became chief psychiatrist at the Child Guidance Clinic there.

Back in New York he became involved and worked for the Jewish Board of Guardians . In 1957, he founded the Family Mental Health Clinic and began teaching at Columbia Medical School . In 1960 he founded the Family Institute and in 1962 - together with Don D. Jackson - the now renowned trade journal Family Process .

Family Therapy Pioneer

Ackerman developed early on the ability to look beyond the conventional boundaries of his profession. His strong will and provocative style of conversation quickly became characteristic. Through a theatrical appearance, mental agility and direct questions, including on intimate areas, he succeeded in overcoming the families' defense mechanisms and creating space for feelings, wishes and hopes. Ackerman could not hide his analytical training in his work with families and their theoretical foundation. He got to the bottom of things. He worked mostly with emotionally disturbed children. Ackerman postulated that beneath the apparently ideal world of the family there is an abundance of intra- and interpsychic ones that lead to the formation of factions within the family.

While Ackerman initially followed the principle of the Child Guidance movement and treated the child as a psychiatrist while a social worker talked to the mother, after the first year at the clinic in Topeka he started working with the entire family work. This resulted in his conviction that family therapy is useful and applicable in the field of all work with children and young people. In 1938 he published two basic texts on family therapy, and in 1955 he initiated the first discussion on family diagnosis at a meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association

Ackerman Institute for the Family

In 1960 Ackerman founded the Family Institute in New York , which was to quickly take on a leading role in the development of systemic therapy - parallel to the Mental Research Institute founded in Palo Alto in 1959 and Salvador Minuchin in Philadelphia . It was well received internationally and had three functions from the start:

• Basic services for the population
• research
• Teaching

The connection between family constellations and clinical pictures, but also ways of efficient therapy, have been and are being researched. The focus is on mental illness, violence in the family, developmental problems of children, sexual abuse, substance use and problems due to divorce, adoption or care. The institute trained in family therapy several hundred social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists now working throughout New York State and throughout the United States. After Ackerman's death in 1971, the institute was renamed and has borne his name ever since.

Important works

• The Unity of the Family. 1938
• Family diagnosis. An Approach to the Preschool Child. 1938
• Family therapy in transition. With Lieb / Pearce. Boston 1970
• Expanding theory and practice in family therapy. With Beatman / Sherman. New York 1967
• Treating the troubled family. New York 1966
• The psychodynamic of family life. New York 1958
• Antisemitism and emotional disorder. With Marie Jahoda . New York 1950

Contributions in German-language publications

• Contribution to the handbook of child psychotherapy. Edited by Gerd Biermann. 2 vol. Munich, Basel 1976 (4th edition). ISBN 3-497-00209-7
• Contribution to group psychotherapy. Edited by Günter Ammon. Munich 1976, Eschborn near Frankfurt am Main 1998 (3rd edition). ISBN 3-88074-616-8
• Family dynamics and the reversibility of delusional formations. Together with JF Franklin. In: family therapy. Theory and Fraxis. Edited by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy a . James L. Framo . Reinek near Hamburg 1975. Volume 2, 9-52. ISBN 3-499-21081-9
• Contribution to The Authoritarian Character. Volume 2: Studies on Authority and Prejudice. Edited by Nathan W. Ackermann, Theodor W. Adorno , Bruno Bettelheim , Else Frenkel-Brunswik , Marie Jahoda , Morris Janowitz , Daniel J. Levinson , Nevitt R. Sanford . 1st edition 1969, ISBN 3-88535-341-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Nathan Ackerman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on Family Therapy
• Ackerman Institute for the Family

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gerhard Stumm et al. (Ed.): Personal dictionary of psychotherapy. Springer, Vienna 2005, p. 3 f.
2. ↑ Michael P. Nichols, Richard C. Schwartz: Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. 4th edition. Allyn & Bacon, Boston 1998.