Created by Andrea C.

Altarejos

1891 1964

y Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1891 y Father: Bernard Alexander, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Budapest, and well-known for his writings on philosophy and Shakespeare y Studied medicine in the Universities of Budapest and Gottingen and in the Physiological Institute in Cambridge, England y He studied under Professor Franz Tangl, well-known physiologist, and Professor Leo Lieberman, physiological chemist. y In 1912, He received his degree in medicine in Budapest

y He worked at the Institute for Experimental Pathology under the guidance of Professor Tangl y He published three experimental studies on the metabolism of the brain y Military service as a physician through the first World War y Serves as an assistant in the psychiatric clinic at the University of Budapest

y He became acquainted with the works of Sigmund Freud and

was soon convinced that the method of psychoanalysis was the key for the future study of mental and biological processes, both in psychiatry and in medicine as a whole.
y He had a training analysis with Dr. Hanns Sachs, and became one of the first students in the Psychoanalytic Institute at Berlin y In 1924, he became a lecturer at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where he gave courses in psychoanalysis, chiefly for medical students and physicians

y In 1929, he published a psychoanalytic study on criminology Der Verbecher und sein Richter (published in English as The Criminal, the Judge, and the Public, Macmillan, 1931; republished in 1957 by The Free Press). y In 1930, he was invited to come to the University of Chicago as visiting professor of psychoanalysis. He gave introductory courses in psychoanalysis in the medical school, in the department of social sciences, in the law school, and in the school of social service administration. y In these early years, Alexander was much interested in the application of psychoanalysis to criminology such as the understanding and the diagnosis of criminal personalities.

y In 1931, he was invited by the Judge Baker Foundation in Boston to undertake a research project in criminal psychology in collaboration with William Healy. y The results of this study were published as Roots of Crime (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1935) y In 1932, he returned to Chicago to become the first director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. y First major research project which Alexander organized at the Institute for Psychoanalysis was a psychoanalytic study of emotional factors contributing to the causation of peptic ulcers and other gastrointestinal disturbances.

y The results of these investigations were published under the title of The Influence of Psychologic Factors Upon Gastrointestinal Disturbances: A Symposium, first in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1934, and later in book form (Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1935). y In 1939, he played a leading role in the organization of this Journal. He continued, until the time of his death, to be one of the editors of PSYCHOSOMATIC MEDICINE. y In 1950, he summed up the results of much of this research in a comprehensive work on psychosomatic medicine (Psychosomatic Medicine, W. W. Norton & Co., New York).

y In 1953, he organized an extended research, aiming to test by statistical methods the validity of the concept that the emotional patterns associated with a number of different psychosomatic diseases are to a considerable degree specific for the disease. y Finally, after he moved to California and until the time of his death, he was conducting a collaborative study in which the psychophysiological correlations described in Psychosomatic Medicine were subjected to further experimental validation.

y He wrote extensively about the association between specific personality traits and certain psychosomatic ailments, a point of view that came to be known as the specificity hypothesis. y He suggested that an analyst must deliberately adopt a particular mode of relatedness with a patient to counteract noxious childhood influences from the patient's parents. y He believed that the trusting, supportive relationship between patient and analyst enabled the patient to master childhood traumas and to grow from the experience.

y In 1946, Franz Alexander and Thomas French identified the basic characteristics of brief psychodynamic psychotherapy. They described a therapeutic experience designed to put patients at ease, to manipulate the transference, and to use trial interpretations flexibly. y Alexander and French conceived psychotherapy as a corrective emotional experience capable of repairing traumatic events of the past and convincing patients that new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving are possible.

Corrective Emotional Experience

y The relationship between therapist and patient gives a therapist an opportunity to display behavior different from the destructive or unproductive behavior of a patient's parent y It draws on elements of both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Insight-Oriented (Expressive) Strong motivation to understand Significant suffering Ability to regress in the service of the ego Tolerance for frustration Capacity for insight (psychologicalmindedness) Intact reality testing Meaningful object relations Good impulse control Ability to sustain work Capacity to think in terms of analogy and metaphor Reflective responses to trial interpretations

Supportive Significant ego defects of a longterm nature Severe life crisis

Poor frustration tolerance Lack of psychological-mindedness Poor reality testing Severely impaired object relations Poor impulse control Low intelligence Little capacity for self-observation Organically based cognitive dysfunction Tenuous ability to form a therapeutic alliance

Neurological Basis of Development Theories

y He added the goal of allowing the patient to relive them in a less pathological environment, a process known as a corrective emotional experience. y In addition, he was a major proponent of the theory that specific unconscious conflicts are associated with specific psychosomatic disorders.