Mental Research Institute

The Mental Research Institute, based in Palo Alto, California, was founded in 1958 by the psychiatrist Don D. Jackson to study human behavior through an interactional lens, treating problems as arising between people rather than only inside an individual mind. Applying this approach from the family unit up to wider social groups, MRI became one of the founding institutions of family therapy, running the first formal training program in the field and publishing many of its earliest influential papers and books. Its Brief Therapy Center, founded by Dick Fisch, John Weakland and Paul Watzlawick, introduced in 1967 an influential short-term model of psychotherapy that shaped brief therapy practice worldwide. The institute drew a roster of prominent clinicians, among them Virginia Satir, Salvador Minuchin and R. D. Laing, and continues research, training and clinical work today.