Salvador Minuchin was born in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina on October 13, 1921. He received a medical degree from the National University of Córdoba in Argentina and then enlisted in the Israeli Army during the 1948 war for independence. He studied child psychiatry in the United States. He returned to Israel to treat Holocaust orphans and children displaced by wars, then came back to New York to train in psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute.
He went on to work as a child psychiatrist at the Wiltwyck School for delinquent boys in the Hudson Valley, where he developed his theory of structural family therapy. He co-wrote several books including Families of the Slums, Family Healing: Tales of Hope and Renewal from Family Therapy, and Institutionalizing Madness: Families, Therapy and Society. In the mid-1960s, he was the director of psychiatry at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He retired as the clinic's director in 1975 and served as director emeritus and head of training until 1983.
He moved to New York to establish the Family Studies Institute (now the Minuchin Center for the Family), a nonprofit training center for therapists. He also joined the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine as a research professor. He retired in 1996. He died from heart disease on October 30, 2017 at the age of 96.
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