Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was born on October 23, 1889 in Karlsruhe, Germany and died of a heart attack on April 28, 1957 at age 67 in Rockville, Maryland. She was a German psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud who emigrated to America during World War II.

Fromm-Reichmann was born to Adolf and Klara Reichmann in Karlsruhe, German Empire. She was raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family and was the oldest of three daughters. She came from a large, supportive and impactful family. Her great grandfather (on her father's side) had 93 grandchildren and her extended family played an important role in her life. Her mother was part of a group that established a preparatory school for girls in 1908 to prepare them for going off to university. One of her aunts was instrumental in the establishment of kindergartens in Germany and one of her uncles, who owned the bank her father worked at, financed Frieda's college education.

Because Adolf Reichmann had no sons, Frieda was granted privileges other Orthodox Jewish women were not allowed. Her mother, who was trained as a teacher, strongly encouraged higher education for women. Her father, who was a merchant and bank director, encouraged her to go to medical school and become a doctor. Frieda attended medical school in Königsberg in 1908. She was one of the first women to study medicine. She received her medical degree in 1913 and began a residency in neurology studying brain injuries with Kurt Goldstein, a neurologist and psychiatrist. During World War I she was a Major in the German Army and ran a clinic for brain-injured German soldiers. She worked under Kurt Goldstein, who was her most influential teacher and mentor. Her work led to a better understanding of the physiology and pathology of brain functions. She studied the soldiers' anxieties and panic issues and this knowledge was later applied to her work with schizophrenic patients. She learned two important principles: the impact of brain trauma on healthy men and the adaptive capacity of the brain. She also studied neurology and dementia praecox.

Fromm-Reichmann continued to have an interest in psychiatry and discovered Freud's writings. Her approach to treatment emerged from her research with Kurt Goldstein. To further her psychotherapy skills, she pursued psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Institute. Her understanding of anxiety in soldiers helped her understand schizophrenia later and was the "hallmark of her life's work". She used "whatever worked with each individual" and relied "on the patients own inherent capacity for healing to guide the treatment". She also recognized the role of trauma in mental illness and started to understand the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship.

Following World War I, she worked in a sanitarium near Dresden, was a visiting physician at a psychiatric clinic in 1923, and established a small private psychoanalytic sanitarium in 1924 in Heidelberg that combined therapy with Jewish dietary rules and Sabbath observance (it later closed in 1928). She helped found the Frankfurt Chapter of the German Psychoanalytic Society and established the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of Southwestern Germany. While working at Schultz's Sanatorium she became reacquainted with Erich Seligmann Fromm, a psychoanalyst and social psychologist. He was one of her patients, as well as co-worker. They fell in love, stopped their analysis and married in 1926. Together they helped found the Frankfurt chapter of the German Psychoanalytic Society and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Southern Germany. Frieda and Erich separated shortly after marrying and divorced in 1942.

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. She was a resident psychiatrist for 22 years and spent her entire American career at the Chestnut Lodge. She focused on early life experiences that affected her patients and their ability to understand the world. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann viewed her patients as people who need help overcoming an illness. She believed a psychiatric hospital could be a therapeutic institution.

During her time at the Lodge she emphasized communicating understanding in her work with individuals with schizophrenia and that psychotic communication contained meaning. She collaborated with other doctors at the Lodge to make the hospital a psychoanalytic benchmark for the treatment of psychosis. She stressed the importance of the therapist respecting the patient and continuing to try to reach them. She utilized the concepts of transference and resistance, as well as the unconscious and the importance of early childhood experiences when examining personality.

She suffered from a hereditary deafness and died from a heart attack in 1957.

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, which offers a very attractive portrayal of her as "Dr Fried": 'She is brainy...but after you know her a while, you'll find out that with little Clara Fried, brains are only the beginning'. Other famous clients include Rollo May.

Fromm-Reichmann also treated Karl Hermann Brunck. His wife was told, "No one really knows (why he was suffering from this mental illness)... All we can say for sure about his sort of illness is that it has its roots in the failure of the parents - commonly the mother figure - to provide emotional security in infancy. This causes a weak ego organization, inability to give and receive love on an adult level."

Brunck made several attempts to kill himself. Hope Hale Davis wrote that in 1937 "the most elementary routine precautions had been neglected, and Hermann had used a belt to hang himself."

She is described as one of the few notable exceptions to Freud's maxim of charging for missed appointments:'"I feel that it is not the psychiatrist's privilege to be exempt from the generally accepted custom of our culture in which one is not paid for services not rendered", she wrote in her book Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy'.

She published articles on Migraine, Stereotypies, and Domineering Mothers, as well as on work with psychotics. On migraine, 'Fromm-Reichmann [1937] is of the opinion that the symptom is produced when an unconscious hostile tendency is directed in particular at the destruction of an object's intelligence ("mental castration") and guilt feelings turn this tendency instead against one's own head'. With psychotics, 'Fromm-Reichmann sees in stereotypies a compromise between a tendency to express certain (tender or hostile) object impulses and the tendency to repress these impulses for fear of rebuff'. She also noted 'the increasing presence of "domineering" mothers'.

Fromm-Reichmann joined Fromm, Clara Thompson, Harry Stack Sullivan, David Rioch, and Janet Rioch to found the William Alanson White Institute, a famed psychoanalytic institute in New York City.