Frieda Fromm-Reichmann - Her Years in Germany 1889-1933

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann became famous with her intensive psychotherapy of psychotic patients which she developed in Chestnut Lodge where she worked, after having left Nazi Germany, from 1935 until her death in 1957. The paper outlines her life and work in Germany. Studying medicine in Königsberg (East Prussia), she wrote her dissertation about pupillary changes in schizophrenia and worked during World War 1 under the famous neurologist Kurt Goldstein with brain injured soldiers. They both differentiated between somatic and psychic factors in neurologic patients and published articles about neurotraumatology including aphasia. Between 1920 and 1923, she worked in the psychotherapeutic sanatorium Weisser Hirsch in Dresden under J.H. Schultz where she treated neurotic and psychotic patients. In these years, she started her training analysis and her psychoanalytic teaching and publishing. From 1924 to 1933 she led a kosher psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg, co-founded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Society and gave university lectures in psychoanalysis in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. She became a close friend of Georg Groddeck who treated also somatically ill patients with psychoanalysis. ? Her great promoters furthered different important attitudes which got very important for Fromm-Reichmann later: Goldstein the natural scientific discipline, Fromm the political view, Groddeck the therapeutic optimism.