Former President of ICPM
An Appreciation
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Morton F Reiser M.D.
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Robert Michels, M.D., Walsh McDermott University professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, noted, “Mort Reiser was one of the giants of 20th century psychiatry, psychosomatics, and psychoanalysis. He will be sorely missed. A superb teacher and mentor, he built an outstanding Department of Psychiatry at Yale, led the American Psychoanalytic Association, and pioneered in the rapprochement of psychoanalysis and neuroscience.” An integrative thinker, Dr Reiser believed that humans were capable of understanding the brain and the mind (Kandel 2006). He sought to encourage collaborative research and break down barriers between fields of investigation. He explored the consilience of mind and body studies at the molecular level and in brain imaging.
In early papers, Dr. Reiser probed the psychology and biology of consciousness. At the time, the available technology was insufficient to answer his prescient questions about the mind-body relationship. Recent advances in neuroscience have shed light on that relationship through discoveries Dr. Reiser found exciting. As this line of investigation developed, he sought to bring psychoanalytic and cognitive neuroscience approaches together. In 2004, in collaboration with Robert G. Shulman M.D., he published “A study of the contribution of neuron-imaging to explicating Freud’s theory of mind.”
Throughout his career, Dr Reiser believed that psychoanalysis provided the most precise instrument for observing the mind at work, and that understanding the content and structure of dreams, particularly dream imagery, could serve as a link to understanding the mutual influences of mental and physical states. He stressed the importance of affect as an organizing principal in dreams and as a property of both mind and body. These convictions are reflected in his books, Mind, Brain, Body: Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology (1984), and Memory in Mind and Brain: What Dream Imagery Reveals (1991).
Dr. Reiser was born in 1919 in Cincinnati, Ohio. An only child, his father, Sigmund Reiser, was a businessman who came alone to the USA from Russia at age 12. His mother Mary Roth Reiser was a housewife.
Dr. Reiser’s interest in the doctor-patient relationship, and the effect of mental attitudes on illness began in his childhood, when he witnessed the positive effect of a trusting relationship with the family doctor on his grandmother’s experience of her last illness.
He graduated first in his medical school class at the University of Cincinnati. His early career was influenced by the pioneers of psychosomatic medicine, Drs Eugene Ferris, George Engel, John Romano, and Milton Rosenbaum. As a young internist, working with Dr Ferris, Dr Reiser studied the regulation of blood pressure by the autonomic nervous system and “stress hormones”. He felt he needed to know more about psychology in order to understand the effects of stress on illness and as a consequence he decided t o train in psychiatry and psychoanalysis as well as internal medicine. He extended the research to examine psychological factors influencing essential hypertension and other cardiovascular disorders. His interest in understanding the mind-body relationship and its importance in health and illness, a search that began in childhood, had become his life’s work.
Both his own research and as editor of the journal, Psychosomatic Medicine, he advanced an approach to medical care that linked biological, psychological and social dimensions of illness. Trained as an internist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he believed that the health care provider must pay attention, not only to the biological aspects of disease, but also to the patient’s life, the meaning of the illness to the patient, and the patient’s relationship with the caretaker. His integrative approach is reflected in a textbook for medical students and primary care providers, The Patient: Biological, Psychological and Social Dimensions of Medical Practice (1980) co authored with Hoyle Leigh M.D.
In 1950, Dr. Reiser was selected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation. In the same year he became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
After serving in the Korean War as a U.S. Army Captain and Research Psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medial Center, he joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. There he became Professor and director of research, and later Chief, Psychiatry Division at Montefiore Medical Center, New York, N.Y.
During those years, Dr Reiser obtained training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and later joined their faculty. He subsequently served as Training and Supervising Analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
In 1969, Dr. Reiser was appointed the Charles B.G. Murphy Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and headed the department until 1986.
Eric Nester, M.D., Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished Chair in Psychiatric Research, Southwestern University Medical Center, observed: “I completed my residency in psychiatry at Yale during Dr. Reiser’s last years as department chair. He was an outstanding teacher of psychotherapy. At a time when different disciplines within psychiatry were often at each others throats, Dr Reiser led efforts nationally to integrate psychiatry’s diverse dimensions, for example his laudable efforts to bridge psychoanalysis with the neuroscience of psychiatry. In retrospect, as a current department chair, it is most impressive how Dr Reiser presided over a flourishing yet very wide ranging department where faculty and trainees worked extremely well together”.
Dr Reiser’s administrative talents were highlighted b y his roles as principal investigator of both the NIMH Mental Health Clinical research Center and the NIMH Program Projects Program at Yale.
His impact on psychiatry was extended through his roles as President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, President of the American Association of Chairmen of Departments of Psychiatry, and the President of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine.
For his contributions, he received many honors and distinctions including the Seymour Vestermark Award of the American Psychiatric Association, William C. Menninger Award of the American College of Physicians, and the Laughlin Leadership Award from the American College of Psychoanalysis.
An active scholar until the time of his death, he was co leader with Elise Snyder M.D. of the Yale Faculty Seminar of Mind, Brain, Consciousness and Culture and co leader of a twice yearly workshop on Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Dr Reiser’s quest to understand the connections of the mind, brain and body was matched by his passion for fly fishing and opera. He was particularly proud of winning the prize for landing the biggest brook trout of the year (1984) at Kidney Pond Lodge at Baxter State Park Maine.
His interest in music began as a child in Cincinnati, Ohio where each summer he crawled under the fence to listen to the lions roaring in accompaniment to the arias sung at the Zoo Opera.
Upon his retirement from the practice of psychiatry, his psychiatric and musical interests converged in a series of papers and lectures about the relationship of opera, dreams and neuroscience.