Hyman Spotnitz, who died Friday at 99, was a psychiatrist who sought to broaden psychoanalysis into a treatment for schizophrenia.

The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in Greenwich Village was founded in 1970 as a teaching institution dedicated to the propagation of Spotnitz’s ideas, which he dubbed “Modern Psychoanalysis.” Among its distinctive ideas was an emphasis on the role of aggression in schizophrenia.

The son of Eastern European immigrants who ran a candy store in Boston’s North End, Spotnitz graduated from Harvard in 1929. As a Jew, he had trouble gaining admission into medical school in America, and so he took the somewhat unexpected step of matriculating at Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. He got his medical degree in 1934. He witnessed plenty of anti-Semitism while in Germany, Spotnitz’s son, Henry Spotnitz, said.

He became a research neurologist at Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in medical science in 1941. He did research into the neurophysiology of vision and also the possibility of curing mental disease by inducing insulin shock. “Patients with organic mental disorders manifested unusual improvement,” he told a meeting of the New York State medical society in 1942.

He held positions at the Jewish Board of Guardians, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, among others. As a psychiatrist in private practice, he did research on schizophrenic children and began experimenting with group therapy, a relatively new practice in a discipline that had primarily been about the doctor-patient relationship. In 1961, Spotnitz published “The Couch and the Circle” introducing group therapy to a general audience. He later published “The Wandering Husband,” billed as a “Candid analysis of the American husband’s love-hate relationship with his wife.” Other titles included “How to Be Happy though Pregnant” (1969) and “Psychotherapy of Preoedipal Conditions” (1976).

Spotnitz also published 100 articles in professional journals and in 1969, the culmination of several decades next to the couch, “Modern Psychoanalysis of the Schizophrenic Patient.” The following year, the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies was opened, and in 1972, it was chartered by the State University of New York to train psychoanalysts. Spotnitz was honorary president at his death.

“He set out to cure schizophrenia as a young man,” an official of the Center, June Bernstein, said. “And he really did it.”

A hallmark of Spotnitz’s modern psychoanalysis is its rejection of “reality therapy,” essentially suggestions or ideas for behavioral change. Instead, said Dr. Bernstein, the technique stipulates that the analyst join in the patient’s statements. This might even include joining in with suicidal thoughts.

“Spotnitz once said to a famous skater, ‘Well, would you leave me your ice skates?'” recalls Dr. Bernstein. “There is a kind of humorous quality to it all.”

A Festschrift published by Spotnitz’s patients was titled “Say Everything.”

He was awarded the Sigmund Freud Award of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association honored him for a half-century’s service. He continued to judge and bestow the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies’ annual best student paper award.

He is survived by three sons, Henry, Alan, and William, each of them a cardiac surgeon, and seven grandchildren.