Edward Robert Shapiro

1941 -

Ed Shapiro graduated from Yale College in Russian Language and Literature in 1962. After traveling in the Soviet Union and Europe for a year, he received a Master's degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University. He did fieldwork in Tobago, West Indies, studying the delivery of health care in a primitive society by working in the government clinic and learning from the local witch doctor.

Returning to Boston, Ed graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1968, receiving an International Fellowship to Israel where he studied the epidemiology of suicide in Israeli and Arab villages. After an internship in internal medicine, Ed did a residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Trained in psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, he served as Clinical Associate at the National Institutes of Mental Health and worked with Roger Shapiro studying the relationship of family experience to adolescent personality development. Roger introduced Ed to group relations thinking and he attended residential conferences in the United States and England, joining the Washington Center of the A.K. Rice Institute. During this period, Ed began writing a series of papers on adolescent development in the context of the family, using group relations and psychoanalytic ideas.

Returning to Boston, he founded the Adolescent and Family Treatment and Study Center at McLean Hospital and joined the faculty at Harvard. While serving on the staff of group relations conferences in Washington and elsewhere, Ed first met Wesley Carr, then a young canon at Chelmsford Cathedral (subsequently Dean of Westminster). This began a long working relationship, culminating in their jointly authored book, Lost in Familiar Places (Yale, 1991). Wesley and Ed consulted to each other in their various settings and did several pieces of joint consultancy to law firms and businesses.

In 1982, Margaret Rioch invited Ed to help found the Boston Center of the A. K. Rice Institute, which began to do conferences in the Tavistock tradition. Ed felt strongly that the future of both psychoanalysis and group relations work was not in formal psychoanalytic treatment or increasing numbers of group relations conferences, but in the application of these powerful ideas to the larger society. Serving on staff and directing over 30 conferences between 1980 and 2006, Ed increasingly developed his thinking, applying his ideas in over fifty papers and two books to the study of family, group, organizational and societal dynamics. He served as Director of the AKRI National Conference for two years.

In 1991, Ed was appointed Medical Director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospital and residential treatment center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He helped develop the clinical program and the institution in a changing health care environment and founded Riggs' Erik Erikson Institute for Education and Research. In addition to clinical research and education, the Institute has engaged in application of these ideas through college counseling center conferences, creativity conferences, a study of relations between Islam and the West and consultation to human service agencies. Ed and others at Riggs described this work in a series of papers and books.

Ed is married to Donna Elmendorf and has two sons and a stepson.

Selected Publications:

Shafer A.T. 'Hate Your Neighbour as You Hate Yourself: prejudice and the psycho-politics of divisiveness', ADC SPECIAL REPORT No. 35, A periodic publication of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission Inc. (September 2007).

Shafer A.T. 'Multi-level Application of Group Relations Conference Learning: staff, members, and sponsoring organisation', chapter in Sher M., Nutkevich A., and Brunner L.D., Group Relations Conferences: reviewing and exploring theory, design, role-taking, and application, Karnac Books (2006).

Shafer A.T. 'Group Relations and the Politics of Engagement', chapter in Mathur A. (Editor), Dare to think the unthought known? International Perspectives on Group Relations (Festschrift for Gouranga Chattopadhyay), Finland: Aivoairut Oy (2006).

Shafer A.T. 'Developing the "Socio-Analytic Mind" in Australia: a socio-analytic exploration of the key themes of major group relations programmes of the Australian Institute of Socio-Analysis: 1987-2003', Organisational & Social Dynamics 3(2): 267±276 (2003).

Shafer A.T. 'Colonial Domination and the Struggle for Identity: a socio-analytic perspective', Socio-Analysis, 1999, vol. 1, 1, pp 34-47.

Shafer A.T. 'Grappling with Change and Development in a Zoo Culture', AISA Occasional Paper, 1997.

Some professional presentations:

Shapiro ER, ed. The Inner World in the Outer World: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997.

Shapiro ER, Carr AW. Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections between the Individual and Society. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1991.

Shapiro, ER, Plakun EM. Residential psychiatric treatment: A national referral center for treatment resistant patients. In Sharfstein, S. editor. The textbook of hospital psychiatry. Washington: American Psychiatric Press. 2008.

Shapiro ER and Carr, AW. "Those people were some kind of solution:" Can society in any sense be understood? Organizational and Social Dynamics. 2006; 6 (2): 241-257.

Shapiro, ER. Joining a group's task: the discovery of hope and respect. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. 2005; 55 (2): 211-227.

Shapiro, ER. Task: a transcendent notion. In: Percey M, editor. The character of wisdom: essays in honor of A.W. Carr. 2004; London: Ashgate.

Shapiro, ER. The maturation of American identity: a study of the elections of 1996 and 2000 and the war against terrorism. Organizational and Social Dynamics, 3(1), 121-133, 2003.

Shapiro, ER. Institutional learning as chief executive. In: Gould, L. Stapley, L., and Stein, M. (eds) The Systems Psychodynamics of Organizations: Integrating the Group Relations Approach, Psychoanalytic and Open Systems Theory. London: Other Press, 2001.

Shapiro, ER. The effect of social changes on the doctor-patient relationship. Organizational and Social Dynamics 2:1-11, 2001.

Shapiro ER. The changing role of the CEO. Organizational and Social Dynamics. 1 (1), 2001.

Carr AW, Shapiro ER. What is a 'Tavistock' interpretation?. In: Carr AW, Gabelnick F, editors. Proceedings of the international symposium. 1989; Washington: A.K. Rice Institute.

Shapiro ER, Carr AW. Disguised countertransference in institutions. Psychiatry. 1987; 50:72-82.

Shapiro ER. Unconscious process in an organization: a serendipitous investigation. In: Coleman AD, Geller MH, editors. Group Relations Reader II. 1985; Washington, A.K.Rice Institute.

Shapiro ER. On curiosity: intrapsychic and interpersonal boundary formation in family life. Int J Family Psychiat. 1982; 3:69-89.

Shapiro ER. The holding environment and family therapy with acting out adolescents. Int J Psychoanal Psychother. 1982; 9:209-226.

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