The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery

The Austen Fox Riggs Library and Archives is a unique resource, offering clinicians, scholars, and researchers access to specialized psychological texts and medical archives.

The Austen Fox Riggs Library and Archives is an invaluable resource for Austen Riggs staff members, scholars, and mental health professionals. The library houses over 18,000 items, including books, journals, special collections, and archives. The journal collection includes psychiatry, social work, psychiatric nursing, and psychoanalytic journals. The monograph section is a comprehensive assembly of the history and current study of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, and reflects the research and clinical interests of the Riggs staff since 1919.

As one of the largest dedicated psychoanalytic libraries in the United States, the library provides the international, national, and local communities with access to unique materials. In addition, the special collections and archives house unique materials in the history of the Austen Riggs Center and the history of mental health. The Austen Riggs Center Archives reflect our more than 100-year history of providing evidence-based mental health care. We are actively collecting archival materials related to the Center and the history of psychoanalysis.

Select Library Collections

David Rapaport Memorial Library

This group of more than 2,600 books was donated by Mrs. Elvira Rapaport and contains primary works in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, drama, and poetry. Many volumes are inscribed to Rapaport by friends, including Otto Fenichel, Karl Menninger, Robert Knight, and Erik Erikson.

Chestnut Lodge Library

In 2014, the Riggs library received the contents of the former Chestnut Lodge Library, which contains some 1,400 items. The Lodge, which closed in 2001, was a psychiatric hospital providing long-term psychoanalytically oriented treatment in Maryland.

Martin Cooperman, MD, Collection

These 70 texts feature works primarily on psychoanalytic technique and social psychology.

Otto Allen Will, MD, Collection

This collection contains 440 books as well as an extensive archive of Otto Will’s writing and administrative files.

Erikson Collection

This collection contains correspondence, publications and manuscripts created by Erikson while he was on the staff of the Austen Riggs Center. The archives also contain a complementary collection of Joan Erikson’s work on the Riggs Activities Program.

Robert Knight Papers

These papers contain correspondence, administrative records, publications and scholarship from Robert Knight’s tenure as the Medical Director at the Austen Riggs Center.

Special Collections

Rare books and personal books from the collections of Margaret Brenman Gibson, Erik Erikson, Austen Fox Riggs, Alice Riggs, and other members of the Riggs Community.

Audio/Visual Materials

Photographs, video, and audio materials from the Austen Riggs Center make up a large portion of the collection and reflect changes in the Center and the town of Stockbridge over the last 100 years.