Ruth Cohn

Dr. Ruth C. Cohn, born in 1912 in Berlin, is a psychotherapist, educator, and poet. She is best known as the creator of a communication method called theme-centered interaction (TCI). She is the founder of the Workshop Institute for Living Learning (WILL), which is known today as the Ruth Cohn Institut for TCI.

Biography
Born in Berlin in 1912, Cohn grew up in Germany. In 1933, during the Third Reich, she fled to Zürich, Switzerland where she was admitted into the University of Zürich. At Zürich, she studied psychology and minored in pre-clinical medicine and psychiatrics. She completed additional studies in education, theology, literature and philosophy. She passed her training as psychoanalyst at the International Association for Psychoanalysis, during a period overshadowed by the events in Germany and their consequences in Switzerland. Her training analyst was Hans Behn-Eschenburg und Medard Boss (1934-1939), and her control analyst was Gustav Bally.

In 1940, Dr. Cohn emigrated to the United States, where she opened a private practice in psychotherapy in New York City, migrating her practice from classic psychoanalysis toward experiential therapy.

In 1955, she developed a workshop with the theme of counter transference. Its methodical approach established the basis for the development of experiential therapy and theme-centered interaction. Theme-Centered Interaction, or TCI, is a professional concept employed to reflect and manage group interaction.

In the first years after the development of TCI, its use grew rapidly in the United States. However, today TCI is virtually unknown in the US, although it continues to be well-known and an important concept for educators, therapists, supervisors and managers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, and India.