Paul C. Holinger

Paul C. Holinger, MD, MPH, is Faculty and former Dean of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, Training and Supervising Analyst, and Child and Adolescent Supervising Analyst. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center, Board Certified in Psychiatry and Board Certified in Child/Adolescent and Adult Psychoanalysis, and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is also co-founder of The Center for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

Following his medical and psychiatric training in Chicago, Dr. Holinger did a Fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology in Boston, where he received a Masters of Public Health from the Harvard University School of Public Health. He then did a Fellowship in Psychosocial Public Health at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Subsequently, he obtained adult and child/adolescent psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

Dr. Holinger has authored numerous articles and books in and infant and child development, psychoanalysis, psychiatric epidemiology, including "What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use To Express Their Feelings (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003), "Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development" (UK, Routledge, 2024), "Violent Deaths in the United States: An Epidemiologic Study of Suicide, Homicide, and Accidents" (NY: Guilford, 1987) and "Suicide and Homicide Among Adolescents" (NY: Guilford, 1994).

With respect to infant/child development and psychoanalysis, his book "What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use To Express Their Feelings" (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003), was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.

Through a series of papers and two books on psychiatric epidemiology and violence, Dr. Holinger made two significant advances in our knowledge. First, he showed that over time, suicide, homicide, and motor-vehicle accident death rates ran parallel. This overturned the long-held assumption that suicide and homicide rates were inversely related. He proposed that violent deaths have a common thread similar to the self-destructiveness and depression evident in suicide, but which is manifested as risk-taking behaviors in other forms of violent death. Second, he linked population variables with violent deaths. He documented that as older-age cohorts increased in population, their suicide and homicide rates decreased. When younger-age cohorts increased in population, their suicide and homicide rates increased. In as much as one knows in advance what shifts will occur in the population cohorts, this association can be used predictively to initiate proactive prevention strategies.

Among the awards Dr. Holinger has received are the George Mohr Award in Child Psychoanalysis (1995, The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis), the Michael Franz Basch Award (2010, The Tomkins Institute), the Distinguished Service Award (2010, The American Psychoanalytic Association), and the Distinguished Alumnus Award (2011, McCormick Theological Seminary), the Philanthropic Vision Award (2021, Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute).