Jurgen Ruesch

Jurgen Ruesch (1910/11 – July 8, 1995) was an American psychiatrist.

Jurgen James Ruesch was born in Naples, Italy, to Swiss parents. He studied at the University of Zurich, and moved to San Francisco in 1943 to head a project at the newly opened Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He remained as professor at the University of California until his retirement in 1977; he also maintained a private psychiatric practice.

A 1948 study of his cataloged ways in which sick patients were poorly adapted to their social environments. This had an influence on the study of psychosomatic illness and stress, emphasizing the role of patients' inability to adapt to environmental situations, rather than focusing on internal psychic conflict, as had been the approach of Franz Alexander.

In the 1950s, he wrote two major works on communication theory: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951, with Gregory Bateson), and Nonverbal Communication (1956, with Weldon Kees). He later took a more semiotic approach, collected in the volume Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (1972).

1. Ruesch, J.; Bateson, G., Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. W.W. Norton & Co, Inc.: 1951.

2. Ruesch MD, J., Social Psychiatry: An Overview. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1965, 12 (5), 501-509.

3. Ruesch, J.; Kees, W., Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations. University of California Press, 1956: Berkeley, 1956; p 205.

4. Ruesch, J., Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations. De Gruyter: 1972.

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