David Rapaport

David Rapaport (1911 to 1960) was a Hungarian clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic ego psychologist. Born in Budapest, he took his doctorate there in 1938, emigrated to the United States, and worked at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, where he became chief psychologist and research director, and later at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His first notable work was in diagnostic psychological testing, where he built a comprehensive battery of cognitive and personality methods, set out with Merton Gill and Roy Schafer in Diagnostic Psychological Testing (1945 to 1946). His later monograph The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory (1960) organized ego psychology into a systematic theory that could generate testable hypotheses. He died of a heart attack at forty-nine.