Herbert A Rosenfeld

On 29 November 1986, Dr H A Rosenfeld died in London, after a short illness. He leaves a widow, Lottie, two daughters, a son and several grandchildren.

Dr Rosenfeld was born in Nuremberg on 2 July 1910. He came from a middle-class Jewish family. From his early adolescence Dr Rosenfeld was interested in psychology and human sciences. He studied medicine in several German universities, becoming interested in psychiatry especially in Munich where he graduated in 1934. Due to the Nazi laws issued at Nuremberg, he was not allowed to practise medicine in Germany and he emigrated to England in 1935, escaping the Nazi persecution and the concentration camps.

He had to take all his examinations again in Glasgow in 1936, as was common practice in Britain for the immigrants at that time. Having worked in several hospitals, and married Lottie in 1939, Dr Rosenfeld qualified as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock in 1942. During his first period in England, Dr Rosenfeld had the chance to observe many psychotic patients in the hospitals where he worked and had been already able to make good contact with them, although his knowledge of psychoanalysis was practically nil at that time. He nevertheless became more and more convinced of the importance of psychological factors in psychosis and that even extremely regressed patients could be contacted and improve. At that time-very few of his colleagues shared this view. Having heard of the work of Melanie Klein when working at the Tavistock Clinic, Dr Rosenfeld applied to the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in 1942 and became her pupil.

He graduated as a psychoanalyst in 1945, soon becoming a training psychoanalyst. In 1972 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatry. In 1947, using his clinical material from his training case, Dr Rosenfeld published his first psychoanalytical contribution, called ‘Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalization’. The case became one of the landmarks in the history of the psychoanalytical t