Rosalind Dymond Cartwright (1922-2021)

Memorializes Rosalind Dymond Cartwright (1922-2021). She was a pioneer in the fields of empathy and psychotherapy research and one of the first women to make significant contributions to the science of sleep and dreams and the field of sleep medicine. Upon receiving her PhD in 1949, she took a position at Mount Holyoke College. After 2 years, she moved to the University of Chicago where Carl Rogers hired her to oversee the many studies of audiotaped psychotherapy sessions that he was conducting to test the effectiveness of client-centered therapy. In 1954, she and Rogers coedited the landmark book, . She also held positions at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, University of Chicago, and Rush University Medical Center. From 1971 to 1993 she was a grant reviewer for the National Institute of Mental Health, a role that allowed her to advocate anonymously for the support of research and training programs that greatly influenced the course of sleep research in the United States. Beginning in 1990, Roz served pro bono as an expert witness for the defense in several murder cases that involved a defense of sleepwalking, a non-REM parasomnia. At age 90 she immersed herself in the technology of spectral analysis scoring of polysomnogram data to argue that recent laboratory-based discoveries about sleepwalkers could be used to determine whether an alleged crime might have been committed during an arousal from sleep in which consciousness was impaired. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).