René Spitz
René Árpád Spitz (January 29, 1887 – September 14, 1974) was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst best known for studying babies in hospitals. He showed that being without a mother and receiving little emotional warmth can harm infants. He also helped develop ideas in ego psychology.
Spitz was born in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family and spent much of his childhood in Hungary. He finished medical school in 1910 and soon learned about Sigmund Freud’s work. In 1932 he left Austria and lived in Paris for six years, teaching psychoanalysis. He moved to the United States in 1939 and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital. From 1940 to 1943 he taught at several universities and later settled in Colorado, where he taught at the University of Denver.
Starting in 1935, Spitz began direct observation of infants, studying both healthy and unhealthy babies. He introduced two key ideas: anaclitic depression, which is emotional deprivation, and hospitalism, the harm from living in a hospital or foundling home without a mother. He believed that if a mother or loving care returned within about three to five months, a child could recover; longer deprivation could cause serious decline.
In 1945 he studied orphanages in South America and found that poor social conditions could cause lasting developmental damage, sometimes more than bad physical conditions. He also filmed his work, creating Grief: A Peril in Infancy (1947) and Psychogenic Disease in Infancy (1952).
Spitz identified three early signs of healthy development: a smiling response to a caregiver around three months, anxiety around strangers around eight months, and the growth of communication and stubborn behavior that relates to later patterns of thinking.
His research helped people understand how important emotional care is for babies and influenced the field of psychoanalysis and child development.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 13:14 (CET).