Jurgen Ruesch (born Jürgen Rüsch; November 9, 1909 – July 8, 1995) was an American psychiatrist. Life Jurgen Ruesch was born in Naples, Italy, to Swiss parents. He studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and moved to San Francisco in 1943 to head a project at the newly opened Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He remained as professor at the University of California until his retirement in 1977; he also maintained a private psychiatric practice. Work A 1948 study of his cataloged ways in which sick patients were poorly adapted to their social environments. This had an influence on the study of psychosomatic illness and stress, emphasizing the role of patients' inability to adapt to environmental situations, rather than focusing on internal psychic conflict, as had been the approach of Franz Alexander. Ruesch's work continued around the general concept of environmental adaptation and it remained consistent in this respect throughout his career. The early volume Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951, with Gregory Bateson) situates his work alongside and in some senses intertwined with his coauthor, a well known anthropologist who also focused upon systems and adaptation. Ruesch's own work in psychiatry was already quite advanced in this area—his essays from 1953 and on were focused upon (1)the child's need to adapt in the family of upbringing, (2) the idea that this adaptation to others was at the same time the organizing of personality and identity as performance habits and then (3) the consequence of applying this habitual performance system in the broader social milieu—consequences that in some cases were favorable and in others disastrous. Ruesch was also aware that the broader social milieu was composed of a great number of sub-systems to which one must adapt including (1) the schoolhouse (2) the sports field (3) the dating scene (4) the romantic relationship, (5) the employment site, (6) the Church, to name a few. In the book Therapeutic Communication, Ruesch largely explained his general theory of how prior training could create either hazard for people in terms of how they interpret and respond to new environments and then his primary clinical contribution: the notion that treatment of this inadequacy of "social techniques", in particular those associated with communication could resolve pathology expressed in terms of physical (e.g., ulcers), intrapsychic (e.g., anxiety), and interpersonal (e.g., unstable relationships) problems. This "therapeutic" counseling focused on