Joseph Wortis

Joseph Wortis (October 2, 1906 – February 22, 1995) was an American psychiatrist, longtime editor of the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry, and a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is remembered today for his book Fragments of an Analysis with Freud.

Early life Joseph Wortis was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of five children of Jewish immigrant parents (his father Russian-Jewish, his mother French Alsatian-Jewish). He said that he was raised as an "orthodox atheist" and "had no religious identification ... and very little ethnic identification". He attended New York University, where he majored in English literature before switching to pre-med. He graduated in 1927. Accepted into Yale medical school, he went instead to Europe and studied medicine in Vienna (1927-32), Munich and Paris. He published a book about this experience, titled Fragments of an Analysis with Freud, in 1954. "Fragments got mixed reviews, but was mostly neglected".

While in Vienna, he observed Manfred Sakel perform insulin shock therapy of schizophrenia and introduced this treatment subsequently in the United States. Wortis visited the Soviet Union and taught himself Russian. Wortis died in 1995 at the age of 88. A year before he died, he was interviewed by Todd Dufresne, who found Wortis at age 87 "active, lucid, and intellectually engaging".