Eli Robins
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Eli Robins (1921 Texas – 1994 Washington) was an American psychiatrist who played a pivotal role in establishing the way mental disorders are researched and diagnosed today.
Robins finished his medical training and residencies at Harvard Medical School, where he worked under biologically-oriented psychiatrist Mandel E. Cohen who would greatly influence his career and with whom he first developed ideas about operational definitions for psychiatric conditions (the theory of operationalization having been recently advanced by Harvard University physicist and philosopher of science Percy Williams Bridgman). Robins rejected the then-dominant psychoanalysis.[1] He had personally undergone psychoanalysis for a year, as was the norm in psychiatric training at the time, but he described it as "silly" and did not learn to provide it.[1] He had also seen some of its weaknesses: one of his relatives had killed himself while being treated with psychoanalytic methods for severe depression at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, and Robins himself had been misdiagnosed as having hysteria a few years before, when he actually had polio.[1]