author
Marie Nyswander Robinson
1919–1986
A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who helped change how heroin addiction was understood and treated, she became one of the key pioneers of methadone maintenance. Her work pushed addiction medicine toward a more humane, medical approach that still shapes care today.
1 Audiobook
The Power of Sexual Surrender
by Marie Nyswander Robinson
About the author
Born in Reno, Nevada, in 1919, Marie Nyswander trained at Sarah Lawrence College and Cornell University Medical College before serving in the U.S. Navy. She later became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at a time when addiction was often treated as a moral failing rather than a medical condition.
Nyswander is best remembered for her groundbreaking work on heroin addiction. In the 1950s she organized an early research program for people with narcotic addiction, and in the 1960s, working with Vincent Dole and later Mary Jeanne Kreek, she helped develop and popularize methadone maintenance treatment. That work offered a new way to think about opioid dependence: as a chronic medical disorder that could be treated, not simply punished.
She also wrote about addiction for both professional and general readers, including The Drug Addict as a Patient. By the time of her death in 1986, her ideas had helped reshape addiction treatment in the United States and beyond, and she remains an important figure in the history of psychiatry and public health.