Radó, Sándor

   (1890–1972). Born in Kisvarda, Hungary, Radó first earned a Ph.D. in political science before graduating with an M.D. from the University of Budapest in 1915. After a residency in psychiatry and some psychoanalytic training (in 1913 he was a founding member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society), in 1923 he left Hungary for Berlin and taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. From this base he became a movement insider. In 1926, Freud appointed him editor of two psychoanalytic journals, Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and Imago. In 1931, Abraham Brill (1874–1948) asked him to come to New York and organize training at the justfounded New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Radó left the psychoanalytic institute in 1941 after some disagreements with the more orthodox members, part of the tumult known as the "New York psychoanalytic civil wars." In 1944, he was appointed professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and early in 1945 he became head of the newly opened Columbia University Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Clinic for Training and Research, the first such training institute within a university (and for that reason much opposed by the analytic community, who disliked the idea of university control of psychoanalytic training). In 1957, he retired from Columbia and became professor of psychiatry and dean of the New York School of Psychiatry, from which he retired as dean emeritus in 1967. Radó’s name is associated with a number of concepts in psychiatry, including depression (see Depression: Emergence: depressive neurosis [1927]); schizotypal personality (see Schizoid Personality [1953]); and "adaptational psychodynamics," a term he coined in 1956. He explained it as follows in 1959 in Silvano Arieti’s (1914–1981) psychiatry textbook: "Freud attributed irrational thought to the influence of instincts, with emotions implied; we attribute irrational thought to the influence of emotions, with nothing implied but the organism which has them. We place emotions in the forefront of investigative interest" (Arieti, Handbook, I, pp. 327–328).