Boris Sidis

Boris Sidis ( born October 12, 1867 in Berdychiv, Ukraine, † October 24, 1923 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States) was an American psychologist, psychiatrist and psycho- pathologist Jewish- Russian origin.

Life and work

Already imprisoned as a 17 -year-old by the tsarist police because he campaigned for the education of Russian peasants emigrated Sidis 1887 in the USA, where he succeeded after five years a precarious life, take a degree in philosophy at Harvard University. Another five years later he received his doctorate there. He won the support of William James, who wrote a preface to his first book, The Psychology of Suggestion (1898 ).

From 1896 to 1901, he Sidis associated psychologist and psycho- pathologist at the newly founded Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospital, where he experimented with hypnosis and developed his view that psychoses are due to " mental dissociation ". In 1902 he published Psychopathological Researches. Studies in Mental Dissociation, 1905 based on a case history of Multiple Personality.

In 1904 he took at Harvard University to study medicine, which he also in 1908 with a PhD. At the same time he worked as a psychotherapist and researcher. In 1907, he published Studies in Psychopathology, 1909 An Experimental Study of Sleep on the sofa as a protective mechanism.

In 1909 he founded with the support of a patron, the Sidis psychotherapeutic Institute, a sanatorium in Portsmouth (New Hampshire ), where he worked until his death. After he had moved closer to The Psychology of Laughter by 1913, the Freudian conception of the unconscious, he received critical in the sequence on the other hand position. From 1914 to 1916 published three seminal works on the psychopathology: symptomatology, Psychognosis, and Diagnosis of Psychopathic Diseases (1914), The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1916 ) and The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases (1916). He also published regularly in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, edited the contributions he was. In 1922 he summarized his research in Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure together again.

Sidis fought the First World War as a social disease. He saw in the fear of a major cause of psychological distress, abrogating their evolutionary role as a survival mechanism forth.

With his wife Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, who he married in 1894, Sidis had two children, whom he raised on the basis of his psychological insights. His son William James Sidis was known as an eccentric genius.

Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage.