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Ann Silver has done all of us a service by bringing new information on Frieda Fromm-Reichmann to our attention. It is too bad that others before her have kept information of this important woman away from us.
Although Ann-Louise Silver and I work in close contact with each other, we now and then interpret Fromm-Reichmann's theories and therapies differently. Silver's background is American culture and psychiatry, mine is European. Silver lives and works close to where Fromm-Reichmann lived and worked at Chestnut Lodge. I live and work in Germany, at the Lake of Constance, next to the place where Ludwig Binswanger worked and lived.
About ten years separate us in age — and all these factors together may perhaps show in our different concerns for psychoanalysis and social psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, psychoanalysis and psychosocial nursing and psychoanalysis and philosophy and literature. Thus, in a sense, I am in the spirit just as near to Fromm-Reichmann's husband Erich as to her.
To give just one example: Our institute studies and discusses Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy thoroughly, as many of our members and candidates work in institutions with severely disturbed patients, and Hedi Haffner and I presented this book and its implications at the Conference of the Erich-Fromm-Society in Ascona in May 1997. The present paper does not present this book to the reader (perhaps the editors and we ourselves are motivated by Ann-Louise Silver's remarks to publish this paper in the International Forum as well).
I am grateful for our exchange, since both Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm were very serious workers in the field of mental health. They both deserve thorough study and research.