Robert M. Lindner

Robert M. Lindner (May 14, 1914 – February 27, 1956) was an American author and psychologist, best known as the author of the 1944 book Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Criminal Psychopath, from which the title of Nicholas Ray's 1955 film was adapted. His book described a psychopath as someone who is "incapable of exertions for the sake of others". Lindner's arguments on gambling psychology are well regarded and have been noted as "definitive statements" by the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Robert Mitchell Lindner was born in New York City on May 14, 1914 to Charles and Sadie (née Schwartz) Lindner. He was educated in the public schools of New York and earned a BA at Bucknell University in 1935. In 1937 he married Eleanor Johnson (1910-1996) while a graduate student at Cornell University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology in 1938. In the ensuing years, while working as a consulting psychologist for the state mental health authority in New Jersey, he studied psychoanalysis in New York City and Philadelphia, while also undergoing his own analysis with Theodore Reik.

In 1941 Lindner was appointed chief of the combined psychiatric-psychological services of the United States Public Health Service. In 1943 he was commissioned an officer of the Public Health Service, with the naval rank of lieutenant junior grade. He also served as a staff psychiatrist at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he compiled the case history he published as Rebel Without a Cause. He left the service in 1945 and settled in Baltimore, where for ten years he was chief of psychological services for the Maryland Department of Correction, while simultaneously maintaining a large private practice in psychoanalysis, sometimes analyzing his patients under hypnosis.

Among the large number of patients he treated during this period, the best known to have been publicly identified was the author Philip Wylie, who settled in Baltimore in 1952 to undergo a full analysis with Lindner, whom he had been seeing intermittently since meeting him while serving as a Navy officer during World War II.

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