[1] Austen Fox Riggs, a New York City internist who retired to Stockbridge while suffering from tuberculosis, developed a treatment approach integrating talk therapy with a daily routine, carefully balancing work, leisure, rest, and physical activity.

He developed his residential model after observing a physician in Bethel, Maine named John George Gehring, who treated patients through strict daily regimens and suggestions.

Though he denounced what he called Sigmund Freud's's "mental gymnastics," and criticized the Vienna doctor’s emphasis on sexual conflicts as the root of neurosis, Riggs's practices had commonalities with the emerging field of psychoanalysis.

A friend of Anna Freud[6] and well-known in American psychoanalysis, Knight emphasized talk therapy and rehabilitation and avoided common practices in psychiatric hospitals of the time, including electroshock, insulin coma, and lobotomy.

By 1948, Knight had brought with him what the scholar Lawrence J. Friedman has called "the creative core of Menninger's clinical psychology department and its research staff," including David Rapaport, Roy Schafer, and Merton Gill (who wrote the text Diagnostic Psychological Testing) and Margaret Brenman-Gibson, the first non-physician to receive full clinical and research psychoanalytic training in the United States.

[8] In 1951, Erik Erikson joined the staff at Riggs, completing a team that, according to an article in the Harvard Gazette, "turned the grand experiment of treating very troubled patients in an open therapeutic community into a Golden Age of conceptual and clinical inventiveness.

While in Stockbridge, Gibson wrote a novel called The Cobweb, set at a psychiatric hospital, which was turned into a film starring Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall.

In 1967, after Knight's death, Dr. Otto Allen Will, Jr., formerly of Chestnut Lodge, became director of Austen Riggs and brought his understanding of early attachment problems and psychotic vulnerability to the treatment program.

According to his New York Times obituary, "Dr. Will was one of a small number of psychoanalysts who devoted their careers to trying to understand psychotic patients through long, intensive, therapeutic relationships with them."

Dr. Sacksteder wrote over twenty articles and book chapters on the treatment of anorexia nervosa, long-term psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy of severely disturbed patients, narcissism, object relations theory, and ego psychology.

During his tenure at Austen Riggs, Dr. Gerber established several initiatives in areas including human development, suicide research and education.

[20] Marilyn Charles, 2014–2015 President of the American Psychological Association's Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) is a member of the therapy staff at Austen Riggs.

Following the reorganization of the Menninger Foundation in 2003, The New York Times described Riggs as one of the last "elite private hospitals," where patients can spend "months or years sorting out their lives" with treatment including intensive, long-term psychotherapy.

[24] The Austen Riggs Center focuses its attention on individuals with serious mental illnesses for whom repeated treatments in outpatient settings have proved ineffective.

The Erikson Institute hosts scholars in residence, holds conferences and lectures, supports clinical research, and helps to facilitate community engagement (such as film screenings and roundtable discussions[25]) and organizational partnerships.

[26] The Erikson Institute also offers a four-year fellowship in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and manages the Austen Fox Riggs Library, a collection of 18,000 items of scholarly interest.