Albert Scheflen

Scheflen was born in Camden County, New Jersey, in November 1920.^[4] He earned an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and completed psychoanalytic training at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute.^[2] During the Second World War, he served as a medical officer in the United States Navy.^[4]

After demobilization Scheflen joined the psychiatry faculty at Temple University Medical Center, where from 1956 he led a team that used filmed psychotherapy sessions to pioneer a “natural history method” for analysing interaction.^[5] His early papers on communicational structure, published in American Behavioral Scientist, attracted the attention of Ray Birdwhistell and Adam Kendon,^[2] and in 1966–1967 he held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) to refine the approach.^[6]

In the late 1960s, Scheflen became professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, directing research on human communication at the Bronx Psychiatric Center.^[2] Over the next decade, he expanded context analysis in the books Communicational Structure (1973) and How Behavior Means (1974).^[7][8]