Silvano Arieti

Overview
Silvano Arieti (born in Pisa, Italy on June 28, 1914 and died in New York on August 7, 1981) was a psychiatrist regarded in his time 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 because of Mussolini's increasingly fascist racial policies. He found refuge in the United States.

Arieti was professor of psychiatry at New York Medical School. 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 National Book Award in 1975.

Arieti undertook psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients, an unusual approach that few of his colleagues chose to pursue. His views in Interpretation of Schizophrenia, presently called the trauma model of mental disorders in the profession, represent the counter-hypothesis to the mainstream medical model of mental disorders.