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It took Gail Hornstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College, ten years of hard work to produce this biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, the only one in existence. When Hornstein began her researches, she intended to write a history of the psychotherapeutic treatment of schizophrenia. She soon found that this subject was inextricably connected to the life of its perhaps most famous advocate and practitioner. The author has done a yeoman's job in piecing together Fromm-Reichmann's life and work. Very little is known of her early life in Germany, and all of her personal papers have remained inaccessible; yet Hornstein did have access to “an extraordinarily rich archive of her clinical work, including dozens of tape recordings and verbatim transcripts of her therapy hours with schizophrenic patients,” which “offer a rare glimpse of an artful therapist hard at work” (p. xxv). Hornstein obtained, as well, hundreds of interviews with people who knew, or had been treated by, Fromm-Reichmann. This lucid and well-written book is at one and the same time a biography, an insightful psychological profile of its subject, and a very inclusive history of the complex (and often bitter) psychiatric and psychoanalytic controversies surrounding the treatment of severe mental disorders in the twentieth century.
In the strongest part of this biography, Hornstein carefully elaborates the development of Fromm-Reichmann's ideas and methods of treatment with psychotic patients at Chestnut Lodge, the unique mental hospital with which she was associated from the mid 1930s (after escaping to the United States from Nazi Germany) to her death in 1957. Further, the author includes a very intelligent discussion of the impact of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg 1964), the novel