Norman Earl Zinberg (1922 – April 2, 1989[1]) was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose research into addiction is seen as a great influence[weasel words] on current[when?]
[citation needed] He was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and a psychiatrist at Cambridge Hospital.
One of his early studies in the area concerned a number of American soldiers who became addicted to heroin during the Vietnam War as what Zinberg viewed as an attempt to "blot out" the intensity of their environment.
Howard Shaffer, a colleague at Harvard and at Cambridge Hospital, said about Zinberg "He had a remarkable impact on our understanding that drug effects are not simply a consequence of biochemistry.
He showed that an individual's expectations, his psychological set and his social milieu interact to produce the effects on behavior that we observe.