Louis Sass


Louis A. Sass is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University who specializes in severe psychopathology, philosophy and psychology, and psychology and the arts. Sass has served on the faculty of Rutgers University since 1983 and has been a visiting professor at a wide range of institutions both in the United States and abroad. He has been published widely, and his book Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought has been called "a new landmark in the study of the modern era."

Life

Sass obtained his B.A. at Harvard University in 1970 and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. He completed his clinical internship in psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Center-New York Hospital, Westchester Division, in 1982. After serving as an assistant professor at the faculty Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, he joined the faculty of Rutgers University. He has been a visiting professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of Chicago, the University of Michoacan of San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico, at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, and at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Paris. He has collaborated on research and writing projects with collaborators in Denmark, Spain, England, Mexico, Australia, Italy and the United States and has been a featured lecturer in these countries and elsewhere. He has also featured in a number of films on the subject of Schizophrenia.
From 1998 to 1999, Sass was president of the Division of Psychology and the Arts of the American Psychological Association, and from 2006 to 2007 he was president of their Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. In 2010, he was awarded the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychiatric Association "in recognition of his longstanding commitment to using philosophy to advance psychology research and scholarship". He has also twice served as a Forum Fellow and speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Sass is both a full member of the graduate faculty of psychology and an affiliate of the comparative literature program. His interests include "the intersection of clinical psychology with philosophy, the arts, and literary studies." He is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Family

Sass lives with his wife and children in Highland Park, New Jersey.

Books