Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (* 23. October 1889 in Karlsruhe , † 28. April 1957 in Rockville , Maryland ) was a German - American doctor and psychoanalyst . She is considered a pioneer of the analytically oriented psychotherapy of psychoses and a representative of neo-psychoanalysis .

Life

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was born as the eldest daughter of a Jewish banking family, her maternal aunt was the social reformer Helene Simon . Her parents were Alfred Reichmann and Klara Sara Reichmann (née Simon). Since these had no sons, they allowed their elders more than other Orthodox Jewish women were allowed to do at the time. Apparently Frieda had already practiced a kind of “ protective attitude” as a child , which later appeared through her as a therapist. In many descriptions of the young Frieda, an incident with an animal attack is cited, which was directed against a younger sibling. Young Frieda intervened and said to her sister:

"You do not have to be scared!"

- Frieda to her sister

Her father encouraged her to study medicine. Frieda enrolled at the Medical Faculty of Königsberg in 1908 , where she passed the state examination and doctorate in 1911. med. duration. In 1914 she received her license to practice medicine . During the First World War she treated brain-injured German soldiers as an assistant to the neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein at the mental hospital of the University of Königsberg. This was a position that a woman would never have formally approved at the time - the Prussian army did not employ women. She was therefore employed as the unofficial head of the clinic and paid by the university. Since she was still of the Orthodox Jewish faith at the time, she did not treat any patients on the Sabbath (Saturday).

From 1918 to 1920 she worked in Frankfurt am Main , until 1923 in the private sanatorium “Weißer Hirsch” in Dresden and then in Berlin . During an internship with Emil Kraepelin in Munich, she began a psychoanalysis, which she converted in 1923 into a training analysis with Hanns Sachs at the Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute .

The following year, she opened a private sanatorium in Heidelberg , which was sometimes ironically referred to as “Thorapeuticum” due to its Jewish-Orthodox orientation and the corresponding selection of patients . Here she also treated psychotic patients. The institute had to close in 1928, not least for financial reasons.

During her time in Heidelberg in 1926 she married Erich Fromm , who had previously been her analysand. The two fell in love with each other in the course of the analysis and, according to Frieda, were at least smart enough to stop. Together with him she founded the Frankfurt Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1929 . Around 1930 she belonged to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association with Franz Alexander , Otto Fenichel , Erich Fromm, Georg Groddeck , Karen Horney , Melanie Klein , Sándor Radó , Hanns Sachs and René A. Spitz . In 1931 he separated from Erich Fromm. The marriage ended in divorce in the United States in 1942.

In 1933 Frieda Fromm-Reichmann emigrated to the USA via Strasbourg and Palestine , where she worked as a psychotherapist in the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric clinic in Rockville, Maryland, headed by Dexter M. Bullard . There she met Harry Stack Sullivan , from whose interpersonal theory she was strongly influenced. In 1943 she founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology with Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Clara Thompson and Janet Rioch . She taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry and served as Director of Psychotherapy at Chestnut Lodge until her death. It was reported that she had a German shepherd named "Moni" who was allowed to stay in the consulting room and was a topic of conversation on a few occasions. At the end of January 1957, only a few months before her own death, her dog, which had been with her for ten years, died.

Her last project was a research group she conceived on the subject of "Language and Psychotherapy" in Buffalo, in which Gregory Bateson also participated. An interdisciplinary exchange between psychiatrists and linguists should take place here, which dealt comprehensively with the verbal and non-verbal aspects of schizophrenic states in order to explore their co-conditioning through family communication.

In the spring of 1957, she contracted a viral infection from which she was not expected to fully recover. When she was invited by her friend Edith Weigert , Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who was usually punctual, did not come to the agreed meeting. Alarmed by this, she had her friend's front door broken open. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann died at the age of 67 on April 28, 1957 in Chestnut Lodge; Coronary thrombosis was given as the official cause of death.

Her best-known patient was the later writer Joanne Greenberg , who wrote the autobiographical book I never promised you a rose garden about her illness and therapeutic healing with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann under the pseudonym Hannah Green . The book was made into a film in 1977, and a play of the same name was created in 2004.

Fromm-Reichmann's student Hilde Bruch became known worldwide as a specialist in eating disorders.

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General

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann is considered a pioneer in the therapy of schizophrenia and is one of the defining figures in neo-psychoanalysis. Influenced by the theories of Sullivan, Fromm and Horney and her own therapeutic experiences, she moved away in the 1930s from Freud's view that psychoses are insurmountable for psychoanalysis, and from the views of traditional psychiatry that schizophrenia is genetically determined and incurable was. She thus approached Alfred Adler's individual psychology , which saw people and their psyche as an indivisible whole and therefore as treatable. Your concept of the schizophrenogenic mother indicates that Fromm-Reichmann did not explain the cause of psychosis with the theory of biological heredity, but with psychosocial factors in the family environment, especially the early mother-child relationship.

She wrote numerous writings on neurology and psychotherapy: In her essay on loneliness , she pointed out the importance of loneliness for the development of mental disorders and mental illnesses. She contrasted this loneliness with the doctor-patient relationship as a healing interpersonal encounter: The therapist should build a bridge for the patient, over which he can go from the great loneliness of his own world to reality and human warmth. As part of her research on the development and therapy of schizophrenia, she also dealt with manic-depressive psychosis . While she suspected the disorders in schizophrenics in infancy, when the infant could not yet distinguish between themselves and the mother, she pinpointed the emergence of the difficulties of the manic-depressive in connection with mothers who experience the growing independence of the child as a threat.

Intensive therapy

Fromm-Reichmann dealt in depth with the psychotherapeutic process and the personality of the therapist. In 1950 she described the form of intensive therapy she had developed in the Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy . She was of the opinion that therapy can only succeed if the therapist believes in the possibility of psychological change in himself and in others. According to Fromm-Reichmann, psychotherapy must convey general values ​​such as growth, the ability to love and work, etc. to people in order to enable them to achieve self-realization. For Fromm-Reichmann, the aim of therapy with schizophrenics was to research the dynamics of fear, which plays a central role in schizophrenia.

“The therapist should know that his role is over when these people are able to find their own sources of satisfaction and safety for themselves, without harming others, regardless of the approval of their neighbors, families and public opinion. Such an attitude is necessary because usually the healing of a schizophrenic does not consist in transforming the pre-illness personality into another type of personality. In this sense, schizophrenia is not a disease, but a specific personality status with its own way of life. I am convinced that many schizophrenics could get well if the goal of treatment was understood in terms of the needs of the schizoid personality [...] and not in terms of the non-schizophrenic, conformist "good citizen" , the psychiatrist. "

- Fromm-Reichmann : Intensive psychotherapy

It was her concern to enable the patient to integrate the psychosis into his life, as Joanne Greenberg has impressively described in her book on the rose garden . This becomes particularly clear in the dialogues between the patient and the therapist, even if they are implemented in a novel-like manner.

Special features of the therapy method are:

• The analysands sat across from her (and did not lie on the couch facing away)
• the meetings were not too frequent, but about once a week
• the therapist is very present as a person, d. H. no “mirror” as in classical analysis.
• Emotions and fears are addressed as authentically and openly as possible
• also the non-verbal utterances and z. B. Apparent " gibberish " of the patient may have meaning
• Psychotherapy in the sense of intensive psychotherapy is fundamentally characterized by the mediation of existence and human encounters.
• an extreme degree of patience and high authenticity on the part of the therapist. Psychotic patients take a long time to build trust in their therapist.
• the qualities of the analyst are based on an intensive knowledge and acceptance of one's own existence (“real self-being”). The following examples are mentioned:
  • own standards of values ​​and cultural influences, but also
  • own weaknesses and fears

Fonts (selection)

• Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1950. ISBN 0-226-26599-4
  • Intensive psychotherapy. Basics and technology . Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1959.
• Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Selected papers . Edited by Dexter M. Bullard. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1959.
  • Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. A selection from the scriptures . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1978.

literature

• Ursula Engel: From the “Thorapeutikum” to Chestnut Lodge. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann 1889–1957. In: Tomas Plänkers (Ed.): Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt am Main. Destroyed beginnings, rapprochement, developments. Diskord, Tübingen 1996, pp. 141-152.
• Klaus Hoffmann, Hedi Haffner-Marti: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's principles of intensive psychotherapy . 1998 (PDF 114 KB. Accessed February 15, 2018). Abbreviated lecture text on the homepage of the Fromm Society.
• Gail A. Hornstein: To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World. The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann . Other Press, New York 2000. ISBN 978-1590511831
• Josef Rattner : Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. In: Josef Rattner: Classics of Psychoanalysis. 2nd Edition. Beltz, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-621-27285-2 , pp. 441-463.
• Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy . In: Josef Rattner, Gerhard Danzer : Hundred masterpieces of depth psychology . Special edition 2012, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 978-3534248193 , pp. 168–170.
• Gerda Siebenhüner: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann - pioneer of the analytically oriented psychotherapy of psychoses . Psychosocial, Giessen 2005, ISBN 3-89806-404-2 .
• Clara Thompson : The Psychoanalysis. Their creation and development . German first edition. Pan, Zurich 1952, ISBN 3-85999-011-X .
• Angelika Klotschke (née Schönhagen): Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Life and work. Medical dissertation, University of Mainz 1980
• Hannah Green : I never promised you a rose garden . Report of a cure. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-499-22776-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann , Psychoanalytikerinnen.de
• Ansgar Fabri: Biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann , Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY)

• Overview of life and work (English)
• Article on the 50th anniversary of death in 2007 in Deutsches Ärzteblatt
• William Alanson White Institute

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ansgar Fabri (2015): Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda In: Biographisches Archiv der Psychiatrie. (accessed on: June 4, 2018)
2. ↑ J. Rattner, 1995: p. 441 ( introduction ). No name of the younger sister is given here, according to this source the animal was a dog.
3. ^ Susan K. Hochman: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann : Early Years and Education . To citability Note also the local reference ; here, however, tolerable, since the source is given in the text section as "Weigert, EV (1959)". Here the protected sister is called Grete, the animal was a dog. Retrieved February 18, 2018.
4. ^ GA Hornstein, 2000: p. 7 ( The Daughter ). Here the sister is called Anna; two different versions are indicated (two goats or one dog).
5. ^ GA Hornstein, 2000: p. 21ff ( The Student )
6. ↑ cf. Klaus Hoffmann, Hedi Haffner-Marti: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's principles of intensive psychotherapy. 1998, p. 2.
7. ↑ A. Klotschke, 1980, about Moni: p. 28f
8. ↑ GA Hornstein, 2000: p. 330f. Here he is called "Mounie".
9. ^ Gregory Bateson: Language and Psychotherapy. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's Last Project. In: Gregory Bateson: A Sacred Unity. Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. HarperCollins , New York 1991.
10. ↑ Chiara Zamboni: How presence is sparked. In honor of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. ( Memento from February 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
11. ↑ Klotschke, 1980, p. 32f
12. ↑ GA Hornstein, 2000: p. 332f
13. ↑ Original from: Fromm-Reichmann, Intensive Psychotherapie ; Here is a quote from: J. Rattner, Klassiker der Psychoanalyse , 1995, p. 449.
14. ↑ J. Rattner, G. Danzer, 2012: pp. 168–170.
15. ↑ J. Rattner, 1995: pp. 441–463 (section Frieda Fromm-Reichmann )
16. ↑ Note in the attached curriculum vitae of the dissertation.