In Memoriam: Alberta Szalita, M.D.: 1910-2010

Alberta Szalita, M.D., who died on November 10, 2010 at the age of 100, was one of the great psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. She received her M.D. from the University of Warsaw and practiced at first as a neurologist. After losing most of her family during the Holocaust, Szalita came to the United States, met Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and embarked on analytic training. She worked at Chestnut Lodge from 1949 to 1953, where she demonstrated an extraordinary ability to communicate with psychotic patients. Clara Thompson invited her to join the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute, where she taught for five decades, as well as at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. Fluent in many languages, she also pioneered psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programs in Israel and Norway.

Szalita's influence was profound. She was the master of the one-liner. Both patients and supervisees were astonished at her ability to sum up the clinical situation in a short sentence and then pursue that insight until it was understood and integrated. Her papers were laconic and to the point. She was often far ahead of her time in developing highly original ideas. For example, she argued that dissociation between “ego islands” was central to psychopathology, and that a clinician could help a patient by reconnecting those split-off ego islands through a process that she called “psychointegration.” In recent decades, that approach to treatment has become widely adopted (e.g., Davies & Frawley, 1992; Bromberg, 1998). She also argued strongly for integrating family interviewing with individual treatment (Szalita, 1968, 1970) and for an “epistemological approach” to delusions and hallucinations that prefigured the approach of Kernberg (1984). During the time that some psychoanalysts were attributing schizophrenia to faulty mothering, Szalita (1964, 1968) argued that schizophrenia is not caused by family dynamics.