Joseph Barnett, M.D.: 1926–1988—In Memoriam

RAISED IN NEW YORK DURING the Depression, Joseph Barnett worked his way through Chicago Medical School, and was graduated at 24. He completed his internship at Ottawa Civic Hospital and his residency at Rochester State and Syracuse Hospitals in 1952. After serving in the army during the Korean War in Japan and Korea, he returned to begin analytic training at the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, having been interested in psychiatry and in Horney prior to entering medical school. After three years, however, concerned that Horney's theory was applied by her disciples with the same rigidity that had disenchanted him with Freudian theory, he consulted Clara Thompson. Thompson encouraged him to transfer to the William Alanson White Institute with advanced standing, and there he continued his studies, including supervision with Harry Bone, Erich Fromm, Rose Spiegel and Meyer Maskin.

Graduating in 1962, he presented his first paper to the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society in 1965 on the analysis of the structure of psychoanalytic theories. By treating theories as special instances of language, he differentiated what he termed atomistic-essentialist, and holistic-essentialist, from experiential theories, and demonstrated how the structure of the theory determines the perceptual and conceptual set of the observer and governs, as well, the technique of clinical practice.

In the same year at the 2nd International Forum for Psychoanalysis in Switzerland, he spoke "On Cognitive Disorders in the Obsessional." Consistent with Sullivanian theory, he defined cognition as experiential knowing, on a continuum from apprehension to comprehension, from sensate to linguistically organized experience, thereby encompassing affect and thought in a dynamic relation to each other as cognitive systems of knowing. He theorized that obstruction to thought by the implosion of affect for the