William Glasser

William Glasser (Cleveland, 1925 – Los Angeles, 2013) was an American psychiatrist who offered an alternative to the medical and Freudian approach that dominated his profession. His work, built around choice and personal responsibility, belongs to the psychotherapy of the twentieth century, though its reach went well beyond the clinic into schools and management.

He studied at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and trained in psychiatry at UCLA and at the Los Angeles veterans hospital, where he was pushed off the staff because of his opposition to Freud. He then worked with delinquent young people and developed the ideas that became reality therapy. In 1967 he founded the Institute for Reality Therapy, which changed its name several times before becoming the William Glasser Institute.

His central claim is that much of what we do is chosen, and that people act to meet their needs in their relationships with others rather than simply as a symptom of brain disease. For that reason he questioned the labeling of psychiatric syndromes and the routine prescription of drugs. Among his best-known books are Reality Therapy and Choice Theory. His influence lives on in counseling and education, and to a lesser degree in clinical practice.