Saul Rosenzweig

Saul Rosenzweig (1907–2004) was an American psychologist and therapist who studied subjects such as repression, psychotherapy, and aggression. Rosenzweig, who, with a co-author, has been credited with being the first to attempt to "elicit repression" in a laboratory setting, became well known after publishing a paper discussing "common factors" underlying competing approaches to psychotherapy.

Rosenzweig, a friend and classmate of B.F. Skinner, earned his doctorate from Harvard College in 1932. He worked at Worcester State Hospital and Clark University before becoming the chief psychologist at the Western State Psychiatric Institute.

Rosenzweig taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1948 until he retired in 1975. He died on August 9, 2004, at the age of 97.

In the 1930s, Rosenzweig studied repression. With G. Mason, Rosenzweig criticized H. Meltzer's survey of studies of repression in an article published in the British Journal of Psychology. Rosenzweig and Mason argued that the studies reviewed by Meltzer worked with sensory stimuli unrelated to the theory of repression, and "failed to develop under laboratory control the experiences which are subsequently to be tested for recall." Donald W. MacKinnon and William F. Dukes credit Rosenzweig and Mason with being "the first to make an explicit attempt to elicit repression under conditions of laboratory control and observation." Sigmund Freud was sent reprints of Rosenzweig's attempts to study repression, but replied to Rosenzweig that while he had examined his "experimental studies for the verification of the psychoanalytic assertions with interest" he could not "put much value on these confirmations because the wealth of reliable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification."

Rosenzweig became well known after publishing a paper discussing "common factors" underlying competing approaches to psychotherapy. He argued that all models of therapy could be equally successful, due to competent therapists sharing common factors that aided their patients. His premise became known as the Dodo Bird Verdict or Dodo Bird Hypothesis — a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which a dodo bird declares at the end of a race designed to dry everyone off: "Everybody has won and all must have prizes."

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