Life

Ruesch was born in Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, to Swiss parents. He studied at the University of Zurich

University of Zurich

The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....

, and moved to San Francisco in 1943 to head a project at the newly opened Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute

Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute

The Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute is part of the Psychiatry Department at UCSF, one of the most highly regarded medical universities in the United States. Langley Porter is the oldest facility in the Psychiatry Department, and was the first psychiatric institute in California.It was...

 of the University of California, San Francisco

University of California, San Francisco

The University of California, San Francisco is one of the world's leading centers of health sciences research, patient care, and education. UCSF's medical, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, and graduate schools are among the top health science professional schools in the world...

. He remained as professor at the University of California until his retirement in 1977; he also maintained a private psychiatric practice.

Work

A 1948 study of his catalogued ways in which sick patients were poorly adapted to their social environments. This had an influence on the study of psychosomatic illness

Psychosomatic illness

Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field studying the relationships of social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and well-being in humans and animals...

 and stress

Stress (biology)

Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...

, emphasizing the role of patients' inability to adapt to environmental situations, rather than focusing on internal psychic conflict, as had been the approach of Franz Alexander

Franz Alexander

Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.- Life :...

.

In the 1950s, he wrote two major works on communication theory

Communication theory

Communication theory is a field of information and mathematics that studies the technical process of information and the human process of human communication.- History :- Origins :...

: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951, with Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe...

), and Nonverbal Communication (1956, with Weldon Kees

Weldon Kees

Harry Weldon Kees was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, jazz pianist, and short story writer...

). He later took a more semiotic approach, collected in the volume Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (1972).