Specialist in mental health research

Robert A. Cohen, 99, who founded a clinical research program at the National Institute of Mental Health and was director of psychotherapy at Rockville's Chestnut Lodge psychiatric hospital, died of heart disease Oct. 9 at the Casey House hospice in Rockville.

Dr. Cohen, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, joined the private hospital in 1946 and two years later became clinical director of the lodge, which was a major center for psychoanalysis.

"It was a great time," he told a reporter for The Washington Post in 1989. "We thought we were on the cutting edge and felt sure we'd unravel the mysteries of the mind."

He became a training and supervising psychoanalyst for the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in 1950, a role he filled through 1983. He also served as its director from 1959 to 1962. He was recruited into the newly formed NIMH in 1952 and became director of the division of clinical and behavioral research and deputy director of intramural research.

Dr. Cohen helped assemble research teams that did groundbreaking research in biological psychiatry, and scientists were encouraged to research broadly, without worrying about grant writing or teaching. One of the scientists he recruited, Julius Axelrod, did work there that led to his 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In 1980, he was asked by the State Department to perform psychological evaluations of the U.S. hostages in Iran before their anticipated release. Dr. Cohen agreed, and for eight months wore a beeper so that he could leave at the moment the hostages were freed. He was summoned in 1981 to a U.S. military hospital in Germany, where he treated three of the hostages. One died soon after release; he kept in touch with the other two for many years.

Dr. Cohen returned to Chestnut Lodge in 1981 as director of psychotherapy and retired from that position in 1991. In retirement, he continued to work as a training analyst and helped several groups document the history of NIMH and Chestnut Lodge.

He was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago, where he also received a medical degree and a doctorate in physiology in 1935, as did his first wife, Dr. Mabel Blake Cohen.

Robert Cohen interned at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago and did his psychiatric residency at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He began working as a physician at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson. During World War II, he served in the Navy's Medical Corps, working in Navy psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States.

His first wife died in 1972. Survivors include his wife of 35 years, Alice Leona Muth Cohen of Bethesda; two children from his first marriage, Donald E. Cohen of Emmaus, Pa., and Margery C. Beinfield of Cambridge, Mass.; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.