You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a tiny woman. At 4 feet 10 inches tall she was dwarfed by her colleagues and her patients. Her stature as a psychotherapist was immense; her two books, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, brought her ideas to a wide professional audience and became part of the standard curriculum in psychiatry, clinical psychology and social work. Her work, especially with psychotic patients at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, was renowned and broke new ground, particularly in the climate of psychiatry as practised in the USA during the forties and fifties. Nevertheless, the work that brought Frieda's ideas to the notice of the general public was Hannah Green's fictionalized account of her therapy with Frieda, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
Gail Hornstein has written a definitive biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, based on intensive research and newly-discovered family records and documents from across Europe and the United States. She also had unprecedented access to the archive of Frieda's clinical work at Chestnut Lodge.
Fromm-Reichmann is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in twentieth-century psychiatry. Hornstein's biography traces the story of her life and education in pre-World War II Germany, where her close friends and colleagues included such visionary intellectuals and therapists as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Georg Groddeck and Karen Horney.
Frieda Reichmann was born in 1889, the eldest of three daughters of middle-class Orthodox German Jews living in Karlsruhe near the French border. When she was 6 years old the family moved some 600 miles to Königsberg, one of the centres of Jewish enlightenment on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where the population was swelled by immigrant Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia. The family had few social contacts beyond their relatives and their strictly Orthodox co-religionists, and the girls led a disciplined an