Theodore Isaac Rubin
American writer and psychoanalyst
Theodore Isaac Rubin (April 11, 1923 – February 16, 2019) was an American psychiatrist and author. Rubin was a past president of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Karen Horney Institute for Psychoanalysis. He lived in New York City and was married to Eleanor Katz.
Life and career
Rubin served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was a long-time contributing columnist to the Ladies' Home Journal (1972-?), and the author of more than 25 works of fiction and non-fiction. In 1962, director Frank Perry made the acclaimed film David and Lisa from Rubin's novel "Lisa and David". The film was remade by entertainer Oprah Winfrey in 1998. His book Shrink: The Diary of a Psychiatrist, was written in the times of his residences in different psychiatric hospitals in the West Coast of the United States until his decision to move to New York.
For a clinician who rose to prominence within psychoanalysis during the heyday of what is known as "ego psychology" (a movement often criticized for its equation of mental health and conformity to normative American cultural values, exemplified by the pathologizing of homosexuality), Rubin was iconoclastic with regard to psychoanalytic and cultural orthodoxy. Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair (1975), while espousing traditional psychoanalytic notions of repression and defense, emphasizes the centrality of covert self-hate in the phenomenology of neurotic suffering, recommending consciously invoked compassion, a self-help approach which more closely resembles Tibetan Buddhism than psychoanalysis. This dichotomy can be seen in at least one of two ways: as an opening of the psychoanalytic model to existential and spiritual phenomenology (see Epstein's "Thoughts Without a Thinker" for a recent exposition of the idea that psychoanalysis and Buddhist thought can be productively synchronized), or as an unacknowledged radical interrogation of core psychoanalytic assumptions (see DuQuesne's "Killing Freud" for a thorough discussion of this trend in analytic writing).
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3523698. VIAF identifies the subject as 117907842. The Library of Congress control number is n80046360. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 2019, 1972 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Theodore Isaac Rubin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.