VII. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, MD: Her Impact on American Psychiatry.

Abstract

When Frieda Fromm-Reichmann left Germany in 1933, she characteristically went at first only across the border to Alsace in order to finish her therapy with her patients. She and Erich Fromm had established a private psychiatric sanitarium in Heidelberg in the late 1920s, and although they closed it after four years, she continued to practice as a psychoanalyst in Heidelberg for several years. She brought with her out ot Germany an especially varied and useful psychiatric experience--including her work during World War I with brain-injured soldiers, under Kurt Goldstein; the study of "relaxation training" as a treatment under Schulz; and work in 1923 in Kraepelin's Munich clinic, where she also continued to expand her reading of Freud, whom she had discovered only recently. After her psychoanalytic training in Munich and Berlin, she moved to Heidelberg, where she treated some schizophrenic patients. These various experiences later contributed to her fully developed belief before she emigrated that the personal relations of schizophrenic patients were the touchstone to therapy.