Phyllis Meadow, who died Wednesday at age 80, was a peripatetic psychoanalyst who founded and led several training institutes and helped get psychoanalysis accepted by educational authorities as a separate academic discipline.

Until a few months before her death, Meadow split her time between the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York, where she taught and served as director, and the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, in Brookline, Mass., where she was president. She a founder of both institutes, as well as of the Cyril Z. Meadow Institute in Dummerston, Vt., and the Institute for the Study of Violence, an autonomous degree-granting division of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

Meadow operated under a model of analysis known as “Modern Psychoanalysis,” which built on Freudian techniques and attempted to apply them in a modern clinical setting. Where traditional analysis would require several sessions a week, Modern Psychoanalysis could proceed with fewer. Unlike traditional Freudian analysis, Modern Psychoanalysis could be applied to schizophrenia and narcissistic disorders, according to Meadow’s daughter, Dena Reed, an analyst who teaches at the Boston school. The stress was on resolving unconscious conflicts within, rather than in integrating dysfunctional people into society, Ms. Reed said.

Meadow was raised in Boston and attended the University of Maryland. She credited her intellectual awakening to classes with the sociologist C. Wright Mills. Meadow moved to New York, and fell in with a Greenwich Village crowd of bohemians and journalists. After a few years spent working in journalism, including a stint syndicating articles on modern “career women,” Meadow began attending classes at the Theodor Reik Institute. There, she studied under Hyman Spotnitz, a well-known analytic educator.

In 1970, Meadow, her husband, Cyril Meadow, and a number of Reik Institute analysts formed the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. They founded the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in 1973.

Meadow published several books, including “Treatment of the Narcissistic Neuroses” (1976, with Spotnitz), “Emotional Education” (1988), and “The New Psychoanalysis” (2003). Meadow also founded the journal Modern Psychoanalysis, in 1976.

“She spent her life defining analysis as a separate specialty,” including preventing analysis from being defined as a subspecialty of psychiatric medicine, Ms. Reed said.

Phyllis Whitcomb Meadow

Born April 12, 1924, in Boston; died January 19 in New York, of cancer; survived by her daughter, Dena Reed.