Philip S. Holzman, a psychologist and researcher at Harvard University whose studies of schizophrenia led to a more detailed understanding of mental illness, has died in Boston. He was 82.
Mr. Holzman died June 1 of a stroke after surgery, said a son, Carl Holzman of Chicago.
In a career that meshed clinical psychology with laboratory neuroscience, Mr. Holzman founded the McLean Hospital Psychology Research Laboratory in Belmont, Mass., in 1977. He was director of the laboratory affiliated with Harvard.
Building on earlier observations of eye movements in schizophrenic patients, Mr. Holzman noted that some patients and their healthy relatives exhibited troubles in following moving objects within their vision. He developed random-dot tests and other methods to measure the dysfunction, called eye tracking, as an entry to examine the broader genetic causes underlying mental illness.
Steven Matthysse, emeritus professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said Mr. Holzman’s findings were “a research tool more than a diagnostic tool, but eye tracking as a phenomenon, before Phil Holzman, had been totally ignored.”
“He was a gifted interpreter of data and saw patterns that other people often failed to see,” Matthysse said.
In other work, Mr. Holzman studied the misuse of language that is characteristic of schizophrenics and the accompanying disorder in their thoughts. Collaborating with other scientists, he further found that schizophrenic patients exhibited a lack of short-term memory, especially in recalling spatial relationships between objects.
In an interview with the American Psychological Association last year, Mr. Holzman spoke of his “conviction that schizophrenia is broader than the psychotic phenomena and includes many behaviors that occur in unaffected relatives of the patients.” He added that he “would continue our search for the genetic roots” of the disease.
Mr. Holzman was an instructor at the Menninger Foundation School of Clinical Psychology before joining the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was a supervisory psychoanalyst in 1963-68. He was appointed a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of psychiatry, a position he held until moving to Harvard in 1977.
