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Roy Grinker was a major figure of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. He collaborated with Frank Alexander in the ground-breaking exploration of the psychodynamics of psychosomatic medicine. Men Under Stress (Grinker & Spiegel 1963) was the major American work to come out of World War II psychiatry. His research on borderline patients, little remembered now, was an attempt to identify different groups of patients within the borderline spectrum, ranging from the neurotic to the psychotic with the ‘true’ borderline patient well-delineated.
I met Roy Grinker on one occasion when I was lecturing on borderline patients at Michael Rees Hospital, Chicago, where Grinker was head of psychiatry. I remember that he came, listened attentively and kindly, discussed my views on group psychotherapy with borderline patients. I was pleased to have met so distinguished a figure in American psychoanalysis and psychiatry who had published the first major research study of a large group of borderline patients and their treatment in the in-patient unit of his hospital (Grinker & Werble 1977).
Grinker is mentioned several times in John A.P. Millet's ‘Psychoanalysis in the United States, (in eds. Alexander et al. ). He was a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, a self-appointed group of psychiatrists—many of the leaders were psychoanalysts—who had been disillusioned by the failure of organized psychiatry to realize the significance of the advances made by the emerging science of psychodynamics or to appreciate changes in the concepts of care for the mentally ill that war experience had helped develop. Roy Grinker's work on battle fatigue helped create a whole new understanding