The Austen Riggs Center is a psychiatric treatment facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1913 as the Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of Psychoneuroses, it was renamed the Austen Fox Riggs Foundation in 1919.

Austen Fox Riggs was a New York City internist who retired to Stockbridge while suffering from tuberculosis. He developed a treatment approach with a purpose to "integrate talk therapy with a structured daily routine, carefully balancing work, leisure, rest, and physical activity."

The treatment approach was influenced by the mental hygiene movement (also known as the social hygiene movement). He developed his residential model after observing a physician in Bethel, Maine named John George Gehring, who treated patients through strict daily regimens and suggestions.

Opened in 1913 as The Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of the Psychoneuroses, the Institute was incorporated in 1919 as the Austen Riggs Foundation. By 1924 the Riggs Foundation had 100 patients with an average stay of four to six weeks. The staff consisted of doctors handling no more than 10 patients each. Physicians-in-training joined regular staff meetings and conferences. Patients were encouraged to be "a valuable member of a united team." Patients included figures such as Ruth Wales du Pont, who spent three weeks at the institution in 1924.

A colleague described Riggs as having a "deep and almost Puritanic conviction that feeling must be kept under constant surveillance and control by doing." His hospital had an occupational therapy shop that included weaving, carpentry, painting, and other handicrafts, as well as rooms for games and recreation. Riggs also developed a "10 Commandments" for successful living.

Though he denounced what he called Sigmund Freud's "mental gymnastics" and criticized the Viennese doctor’s emphasis on sexual conflicts as the root of neurosis, Riggs's practices had commonalities with the emerging field of psychoanalysis. He believed neurotics to be troubled by the "residues of past experience" and that they would heal in part by self-knowledge and adaptation to practical realities. Where Freud spoke of defense mechanisms, Riggs once said that a patient "cannot be deprived of the protection of his neuroses." Where Freud spoke of coming to grips with the ordinary unhappiness of the world, Riggs studied the problem of "magnifying suffering by making a personal quarrel with pain." The American Journal of Psychiatry has called Riggs' system "a fully integrated conceptual system of ego psychology" that preceded Sigmund Freud's attention to the field by ten years. Riggs also read Freud in the original German, as well as Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot in French.

Riggs authored several notable works, including Play: Recreation in a Balanced Life, Intelligent Living, and Just Nerves. The New York Times described him as an "internationally known psychiatrist" who "gained widespread public recognition through his writings."

In 1947, Dr. Robert P. Knight, the former chief of staff of the Menninger Foundation, became the medical director at Riggs. A friend of Anna Freud and well-known in American psychoanalysis, Knight emphasized talk therapy and rehabilitation and avoided more extreme therapies widely used in psychiatric hospitals of the time, for example electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, and lobotomy.