Kubie, Lawrence

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KUBIE, LAWRENCE

KUBIE, LAWRENCE (1896–1973), U.S. psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Kubie graduated from Harvard in 1916 and received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1921. Later he received a National Council research fellowship in neurology in London. From 1930 to 1959 he practiced psychoanalysis in New York, at the same time serving on the faculties of various institutions, including the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Columbia University, the Yale School of Medicine, the Neurological Institute, and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. At the time of his death he was emeritus lecturer in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant in psychiatric research and training at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson.

Kubie's first published work was Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis (1936) and his later studies include Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process. In addition, he served for a period as editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders and published a large number of papers dealing with the employment of hypnotic trance as a treatment and diagnostic method (with Milton H. Erickson) and (with S.G. Margolin) with psychotherapy aided by sedative drugs. In 1965, he called for a total reversal of the training of psychiatry, which should begin with the study of the child. Kubie was described by his colleagues as an orthodox Freudian analyst who constantly challenged orthodoxies, including his own. It was conceded, nevertheless, that his heterodox views, originally scorned, have now been incorporated into analytic theory. However, he deplored trends in psychiatry that distracted the psychiatrist from direct therapeutic care of the patient.

bibliography:

O. Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945), 609, 633.

[Louis Miller (2nd ed.)]