Josephine Rohrs Hilgard

Josephine Rohrs Hilgard (12 March 1906 – 16 May 1989) was an American developmental psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. She was a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She conducted research on mental health and developed the theory of "anniversary reactions", which described how psychiatric issues might be triggered at anniversaries of significant events in a patient's life. She also specialized in hypnotherapy, and published research on the theory and practice of hypnosis. Biography Josephine "Josie" Rohrs was born and raised in the community of Napoleon, Ohio. She graduated from Smith College in 1928, and earned her PhD in child psychology from Yale University in 1933. She married Ernest Hilgard, a fellow psychologist whom she had met at Yale, in 1931. They had a son, Henry, in 1936, and a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in 1944. Hilgard earned an M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1940. She completed psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D.C., and at the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. Hilgard held various clinical positions across the country over the subsequent years: she was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, where she worked with Franz Alexander; she treated adolescents with mental health issues at Chestnut Lodge in Maryland, under the supervision of Frieda Fromm-Reichman and Harry Stack Sullivan; and later she would become director of the Child Guidance Clinic at a children's hospital in San Francisco. Finally, she accepted a position as clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She conducted clinical work throughout her career as a psychiatrist and later as a psychoanalyst, and had a therapy office attached to her home.