Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

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Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (October 23, 1889 - April 28, 1957) was a German psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud who emigrated to America during World War II.

She was born to Alfred and Klara Reichmann in Karlsruhe, German Empire. She was raised in an Orthodox middle-class German Jewish family. She was the eldest daughter in a family of all girls. Because Alfred Reichmann had no son, Frieda was granted privileges other Orthodox Jewish women were not allowed. Her father Alfred encouraged her to go to medical school and become a doctor. Frieda attended the medical school in Königsberg in 1908. She completed her psychiatric residency in 1911.

During World War I she ran a clinic treating brain-injured German soldiers.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and Jews began to be persecuted, Frieda moved to France and then later to the United States where her husband Erich Fromm, from whom she had long been separated, got her a job as a psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge, a mental hospital in Maryland.

Her most famous patient was Joanne Greenberg, who wrote a fictionalized autobiography of her time at the mental hospital entitled I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

The founders of the William Alanson White Institute, famed psychoanalytic institute in New York City, were Fromm and Clara Thompson, joined by Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm-Reichmann, David Rioch and Janet Rioch.

[edit] Sources

"Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy" by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Publisher: University Of Chicago Press, 1960, ISBN 0-226-26599-4
Hornstein, Gail A. (2000). To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. New York: Other Press.