Daniel Harold Casriel

Daniel Harold Casriel
Dan Casriel talking about his 1972 book A Scream Away From Happiness.
Born	March 1, 1924(1924-03-01) New York City
Died	June 7, 1983(1983-06-07) (aged 59) Manhattan
Occupation	Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst & Author

Daniel Harold Casriel was an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author. He was born in New York City on 1 Mar, 1924 and died at his home in Manhattan on 7 June 1983 age 59 from a form of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). He is survived by his wife, the former Olivia Cohen; two sons, Seth and Lyle, both of Manhattan, and a brother, Carl Casriel, of Deal, New Jersey.^[1]

Life & Career

Education

Casriel graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1949 at age twenty-five. In 1950, he began his residency at the Kingsbridge Veterans' Administration Hospital in the Bronx. Eight months into his residency he was drafted by the military and sent to Okinawa where he served as an Army psychiatrist for a year and a half.^[2]

Professional training

Casriel was a trainee at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute for Training and Research between 1949 and 1953 and spent 7½ years in analysis Dr. Abram Kardiner,^[3] the founder of the first psychoanalytic institute in the United States and a former analysand of Sigmund Freud. Dr. Casriel was also a past president of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians.

Private practice

In the winter of 1953 Casriel began private practice as a psychiatrist in New York City. Shortly thereafter he was appointed as a psychiatric consultant to the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem and the Court of Special Sessions in Manhattan where he became active in the treatment drug addicts.

Author

In July 1962 Casriel visited the famous Synanon therapeutic community on the US East coast. So impressed with what he saw there, he moved into the community for a “closer look” and wrote a book about the experience ( "So Fair A House: The story of Synanon"). In February 1963, Casriel gave $2000 to seven members of Synanon to start a community on the West Coast. The result was a house on Greens Farm Road, Westport, Connecticut directed by Jack Hurst, former president of Synanon in Santa Monica ^[4]

Consultancy

In the summer of the same year, Casriel became the psychiatric consultant for the Daytop Lodge project on Staten Island, a kind of half-way house for the rehabilitation of convicted felons who were addicts. Later, he became cofounder, psychiatric director and medical superintendent of Daytop Village, now one of the world’s largest therapeutic communities^[5][6]

Group Therapy devised by Dr. Daniel Casriel includes a session on floor mats to "work out" the individual's feeling of pain and anger, top. Below, left, Dr. Casriel, assists a patient in expressing his anger and feeling of pain The New Identity Process, 1973.

Experiments

In the fall of 1963, Casriel, now age 39, began experimenting with group therapy in his private practice in New York. He began leading groups alone and with peer group leaders like David A. Deitch, the Synanon director at Westport.^[7] In 1972 he released his findings to the public in a book titled "A Scream Away From Happiness" where he describes The New Identity Process, a group psychotherapy that uses screaming, hugging and affirmations of basic needs.

Methods

By the late 1960s, Dr Casriel had extended his private practice to include a small therapeutic community on the top four floors of his office building. This program he called AREBA, short for Accelerated Re-education of The Emotions, Behavior and Attitudes. It consisted of about a dozen beds for young addicts who came to live, "work" and participate in the "New Identity Process". When Casriel died in 1983, former patient Steven Yohay expanded the program and became president of AREBA Casriel, Inc., today the oldest surviving private addiction treatment centre in the United States.

In the late 1970s, Casriel began teaching his method in several European centers. The German psychiatrist, Dr. Walther H. Lechler, became one of his students and later employed the ideas extensively in the development of the Herrenalb Model [1] of psychotherapy used at the hospital of the same name in South Germany. Another trainee was the Danish psychoanalyst, Osho sanyassin and mystic, Shanti Kristian Dahl-Madsen. [2]. He incorporated the new identity process into a life-affirmative approach to spirituality he called 'Spiritual Hedonism',

Dan Casriel's method of group psychotherapy is continued today through the efforts of the International Society of Bonding Psychotherapy [3] which has members in 8 European cities as well as North and South America.

Quotes

"Screaming is an emotional exercise that frees the individual from symptomatic pain and leads to the deeper feelings he has disguised" ^[8]

Books

• "So Fair A House: The story of Synanon" New York: Prentice-Hall. 1963
• "Daytop: Three Addicts and Their Cure". New York: Hill & Wang. 1971
• "A Scream Away From Happiness". New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 1972

See also

• Human bonding
• Attachment Theory

References

1. ^ The New York Times; Obituary June 10, 1983, Friday Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 19
2. ^ Psychiatry In The U.S. Army: Lessons for Community Psychiatry By Albert Julius Glass, Franklin D. Jones, p.189 http://www.lrc.usuhs.mil/Archivex/pdf/CombatPsych.pdf
3. ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/kardiner-abram
4. ^ Sunday Herald; Oct 6, 1963, Page 25 "Synanon Work Extolled by Mag"
5. ^ http://www.daytop.org/history.html
6. ^ November 21, 1968, Vol. XIV, No. 6 Schism on 14th Street: The Daytop Explosion by Joe Pilati. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/06/drug_rehab_in_t.php
7. ^ http://psychiatry.ucsd.edu/faculty/ddeitch.html
8. ^ The Free-Lance Star,, Virginia, 6 Feb 1973 Page 25. "Psychiatrist Says Women In Touch With Emotions"

External links

• International Society of Bonding Psychotherapy
• Asociacion Argentina de Terapia de Bonding
• A.R.E.B.A. Casriel Institute
• Dan Casriel Institute (German)
• Casriel's Influence on PAIRS family therapy

Persondata
Name	Casriel, Daniel Harold
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1924
Place of birth	New York City
Date of death	1983
Place of death	Manhattan