Richard Fisch

Dr. Fisch completed a Psychiatric Residency at the Sheppard Pratt Health System, Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center in 1958.

While at Sheppard Pratt, he was heavily influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan's Interpersonal Theory of Behavior and had his first indirect contact with Don D. Jackson who would later bring him to the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, CA.

Fostering a climate of almost untrammeled experimentalism, MRI started the first formal training program in family therapy, produced some of the seminal early papers and books in the field, and became a place where some of the field's leading figures - Paul Watzlawick, Richard Fisch, Jules Riskin, Virginia Satir, Salvador Minuchin, R.D.

[3] In 1965, in a memo to Don Jackson, dated September 15, 1965, Fisch proposed creation of a research project that would "provide imaginative, well planned, brief therapy and at the same time permit a more thorough study if the effectiveness of this approach.

[4] With the backing of Don Jackson, MRI's Brief Therapy Center as founded by Fisch, John Weakland, Paul Watzlawick, and Art Bodin.