In Honor of Richard Fisch, M.D.: A Founding Father of Brief Therapy

Abstract

On Sunday October 23, after enjoying breakfast and with a gentle smile on his face, Dick Fisch laid down for a nap and died peacefully in his sleep. In accordance with Dick’s wishes, no public ceremony was held and his ashes were dispersed in the Pacific Ocean in a private family gathering. Just shy of his 85th birthday, his death followed that of his two closest colleagues and co-creators of the MRI Brief Therapy approach, John Weakland, who passed away in 1995, and Paul Watzlawick, in 2007. A central figure in the work of a group that began in early 1950s with Gregory Bateson and Don D. Jackson’s Palo Alto research group, the death of Richard Fisch marks the end of one of the most productive eras in the history of psychotherapy. Richard Fisch was born in December 1926 in Brooklyn, New York. From 1945 to 1946 Dick served as a medic in the U. S. Navy. Returning to civilian life, he graduated from Colby College, then spent a year studying at Columbia University School of Anthropology before entering New York Medical College, where he graduated in 1954. Dr. Fisch completed a year rotating internship at the Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. In 1958 he completed a Psychiatric Residency at the Sheppard Pratt Health System, Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center, where Harry Stack Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory of Behavior was still central in the teaching of the faculty. That same year Dick moved to California, where he became Assistant Director for the San Mateo County Hospital. He held a number of other positions in traditional hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, but was disillusioned with the traditional medical treatment that dominated psychiatry, so he began exploring alternatives. This is how he found Don Jackson, Founding Director of the Mental Research Institute (MRI), and in 1959 joined the family therapy research and training then being pioneered at MRI in Palo Alto. Six years of interaction with other MRI research associates culminated with publication of Fisch’s first significant contribution to the literature, “Resistance to