The psychoanalytic career of Dr. Rene Spitz is unique. His 61 years of active involvement span almost the entire history of psychoanalysis, and for over 35 years he has been actively engaged in psychoanalytic investigation.
Dr. Spitz was born in Vienna in 1887, studied at Lausanne and Berlin, and obtained his M.D. degree in 1910 from the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. While pursuing his medical studies he became interested in psychoanalysis and had his first analytic referral of a hysterical patient from Dr. Sandor Ferenczi. Dr. Spitz early decided on the importance of personal analysis for a future analyst and returned to Vienna in 1910 for analysis with Freud, thus becoming perhaps the first analyst to undergo a training analysis.
After serving at the front in World War I, he resumed his psychoanalytic work and by 1924 published his first paper, dealing with the unconscious meaning and origin of the number three. He left Vienna for Berlin and in 1930 became a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society; in 1932 he moved to Paris where he became a faculty member of the Institute Psychoanalytique de Paris. Here Spitz's teaching began to involve the psychogenic disturbances of childhood and infancy.
In 1938 Dr. Spitz emigrated to New York and served from 1940 to 1956 as a faculty member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He was on the staff of the Mount Sinai Hospital, and from 1947 to 1950 he was a visiting professor in the graduate faculty of the City College of New York.
In 1956 Dr. Spitz was appointed Visiting Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and moved to Denver in 1957. Since 1963 he has been Visiting Professor Emeritus and Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry there. He is a life member and fellow of numerous scientific societies including, of course, the American Psychoanalytic Association. He was president of the Denver Psychoanalytic Society from 1962–1963.
Rene Spitz has been the recipient of numerous scientific honors, degrees, and awards. In 1958 he delivered the Freud Lecture for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and in 1965 received the C. F. Menninger Award for outstanding scientific contributions to psychoanalysis. In 1966 he also received the Heintz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for the book “The First Year of Life.” The year 1966 also saw the dedication of the Rene Spitz Children's Treatment Center and the Rene Spitz Psychiatric Library in Denver.
In his analytic research, Dr. Spitz has made use of interdisciplinary scientific exchange, careful observation and creative inference, and the interweaving of analytic data with data derived from other scientific modalities, as well as the extensive use of direct and photographic observation. He has made outstanding contributions to the science of psychoanalysis with investigations and insights ranging from the psychoanalytic treatment of adults to the observation of infants in the experimental situation and in the hospital. He introduced psychoanalysts to the syndrome of “hospitalism” in infants. A pioneer psychoanalytic researcher and thinker, Dr. Spitz has systematically expanded our knowledge of infantile psychic development, the formation of psychic structure and object relations, and the expansion of the ego.
His work, which spans all of psychoanalytic developmental psychology, includes important studies of the mother-child relationship, the establishment of dialogue, the genesis of communication, and the study of psychic processes during the preverbal period as well as later childhood. This work includes the comparison of development during early infancy with reconstructions from psychoanalyses in later life. The pre-disposition to psychopathology and the prerequisites of normal development are both considered in his continuing and cohesive studies of growth and development.
A connoisseur of life and art, at eighty-four Dr. Spitz pursues his ongoing scientific research into ego formation. He recently published (Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1970) his team investigation of infantile endogenous and exogenous smiling. The progression from an endogenous form of tension discharge to exogenous smiling represents growing awareness with active exploration and anticipation. Exogenous smiling at three months of age, an “organizer” of the psyche, is correlated with the disappearance of undifferentiated REM states and the replacement of sleep-onset REM with mature sleep onset N-REM. Spitz views the innate physiological prototypes for emerging psychic structures as an epigenetic unfolding, a forward moving and irreversible growth and differentiation.
His May 1 plenary address made it clear that he continues to be actively engaged in the forward movement of analytic research and child development.