Our founder:

Martin A. Shaw, Ph.D.

(1944-2019)

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Dr. Shaw was a dedicated psychoanalytic psychologist who worked with children and adults in private practice in New York for over 40 years. He was concurrently the staff psychologist at the Trinity Pawling School, in Pawling, N.Y., for 27 years, where he specialized in working with male adolescents and their families.

He dedicated much of his career to the Object Relations Technique, a projective technique for personality assessment, which was first developed at Tavistock Institute by Herbert Phillipson in the 1950s. Dr. Shaw worked with Mr. Phillipson and Dr. James Bagby on development of the Technique throughout the 1980s, and went on to evolve the O.R.T. into a fully operationalized system. He employed the technique clinically over most of his career, and founded the charitable O.R.T. Institute in 1995 to support its ongoing worldwide development.

Dr. Shaw was born in the Bronx in 1944, where he graduated from The Bronx High School of Science. He studied art and education at New York University, where he received the Founder’s Day Award, and taught in the New York City public schools. He went on to establish an art therapy clinic at the Bronx Veterans Hospital, where he worked with Vietnam veterans (1968-71), earning a Veterans Administration (V.A.) Commendation. He earned his Master of Science from Dalhousie University (1973), then studied developmental psychology, perception, research design, and ethology at the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1977, with Pi Lambda Theta honors). He subsequently completed five years of postdoctoral study and clinical training at the Advanced Institute for Analytic Psychotherapy (A.I.A.P., 1982).

In recognition of his work with the Object Relations Technique, Dr. Shaw was named a Fellow of the Society for Personality Assessment (S.P.A.), and an Honorary Fellow of the British Society for Projective Psychology.

Paul M. Lerner, Ed.D., a past President of the S.P.A., wrote of Dr. Shaw’s work, “[His] key concept is perception and, accordingly, a perceptual approach to the study of personality,” and praised the “highly refined and sophisticated system” which he developed.

Dr. Shaw wrote: “Perception — like all of intelligence and all of action — is a function of the total subject, in humans the total person, and the study of perception thus becomes an approach in its own right to personality.”

James S. Grotstein, M.D., a past Professor of Psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, wrote that Dr. Shaw’s adaptation of the O.R.T. “seems to offer the patient a sense of participant experience with the therapist lacking in regular psychotherapy and in psychoanalysis.”

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