Victor Vance Anderson

Background

Victor Vance Anderson was born on December 28, 1878 in Barbourville, Kentucky, United States, the son of William Ballinger Anderson and Flora Herndon.

Education

He earned the B. A. from Union College in Barbourville in 1898 and moved on to the Hospital College in Medicine, now part of the University of Louisville, where he received the M. D. in 1903.

Career

Like many physicians of this era, Anderson's interests became increasingly specialized. In 1912 he received training in psychiatry at Boston's Psychopathic Hospital, and by 1913 he had become the psychiatrist and medical director of the City of Boston's Municipal Court, a post that he retained until 1918. Anderson's subsequent career mirrored a significant shift in the concerns of the psychiatric profession toward applying the knowledge gained from treating the mentally ill to the problems and realities of society at large.

In 1919 Anderson moved to New York City. From 1918 to 1919 Anderson served as scientific advisor to the New York State Prison Commission, directing surveys and formulating recommendations that led to greatly needed prison reforms. In 1919 he became associate medical director of the federal government's National Committee for Mental Hygiene and retained this post until 1924. During his association with the group, Anderson established child guidance clinics in many communities throughout the United States. He also directed and wrote mental health reports for Cincinnati and St. Louis and for Georgia, West Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri.

He was a founder of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (1924), serving as its first president, and a charter member of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. Anderson's move to New York also reflected another departure from a psychiatrist's conventional spheres of activity. From 1924 to 1930 he was psychiatrist and director of medical research for R. H. Macy and Co. In this capacity, he applied psychiatric theories and techniques to such problems as the selection of executives, the appropriate reaction to employees with problems of mental health, the screening of potential employees, and the application of psychiatric insights to the entire field of industrial management.

In 1930, two years after the death of his first wife, Anderson married Margaret Cavender. Two of Anderson's books, Psychiatry in Industry (1929) and Psychiatry in Education (1932), achieved large sales during the 1930's. They supplied specific recommendations in nontechnical language, applying psychiatric principles to the employment interview and to the problems of the elementary and secondary schoolteacher. Standard texts in many colleges and universities, these works were translated into several languages including Chinese.

Anderson's writings were bound to the period in which they were published. They reveal an almost total lack of awareness of the clinical findings of psychoanalysis, dynamic psychology, and post-Freudian ego psychologies as well as of the research of academic and educational psychologists who were then making seminal contributions to both psychiatric medicine and applied psychology.

In 1924 he founded the Anderson School in Staatsburg, New York, and remained director until his death.

Achievements

• Anderson became a pioneer in the founding of America's first child guidance clinics, supported by public funds and devoted to the prevention and treatment of mental and emotional illness, and in helping to establish what is now known as the community mental health movement.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Report of the South Carolina Mental Hygiene Survey with Recommendations: Survey Authorized by the Honorable Robert A. Cooper, Governor of South ... Under the Auspices of the South Carolina Men

    (Excerpt from A Report of the South Carolina Mental Hygien...)

Views

As an educator and educational administrator, Anderson had long been interested in creating a controlled environment for the study of exceptional children in which his principles of child psychiatry could be tested and applied. He hoped to modify behavior patterns and personalities, the goal implicit in all psychotherapies.

Connections

In 1906 he married Clara Beaumont. They had one daughter.

Father:

William Ballinger Anderson

Mother:

Flora (Herndon) Anderson

Spouse:

Clara (Beaumont) Anderson