Gail Hornstein, MHC professor of psychology, is the author of To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Photo by Ellen Augarten.

Like many of her peers coming of age in the 1960s, Gail Hornstein read with fascination Joanne Greenberg's best-selling novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the story of an institutionalized teen's successful treatment for mental illness. The novel's memorable therapist, Dr. Fried, later surfaced as the real-life Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, whose acclaimed Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy was required reading for Hornstein in graduate school.

Today, Hornstein, Mount Holyoke professor of psychology and director of the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, is the author of the first biography of Fromm-Reichmann, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, to be published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster next month. Hornstein will read from her book Thursday, November 30, at 7:30 pm, at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center (in the meeting room at 83 College Street). The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a book signing and reception, cosponsored by the Odyssey Bookshop.

Hornstein's fascination with the German-born pioneering psychotherapist's methods inspired years of research. Hornstein discovered that Fromm-Reichmann had, in real life, treated novelist Greenberg at the renowned Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland. The famous clinician, it turned out, was only thinly disguised in Greenberg's novel and the subsequent film adaptation in 1977. Upon rereading the novel, Hornstein became “intrigued to find that the fictionalized account conveyed better than most nonfiction what psychotherapy with a seriously disturbed patient was actually like.” Greenberg willingly agreed to be interviewed for the Fromm-Reichmann biography, and also provided access to the scores of letters readers of Rose Garden had sent to her describing their own experiences with psychotherapy. Greenberg describes Hornstein's resulting book as inspiring and “thrillingly honest.” A reviewer in this month's Publisher's Weekly writes that Hornstein's biography is “as thrilling and moving as Greenberg's now classic book,” and further describes it as “dazzling and provocative…. a major biography.”

Fromm-Reichmann, a maverick psychiatrist who accomplished what Freud and almost everyone else deemed impossible—the successful treatment of schizophrenics and other psychotic patients through psychotherapy—descended from a distinguished Orthodox Jewish family in Germany. Born in 1889, she built a successful career in Heidelberg, married and separated from Erich Fromm, the German-born psychotherapist and author (and her former patient), and was then forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. After two years of exile in France and Palestine, she came to the United States, where she was quickly recognized for her work in helping to establish Chestnut Lodge. She died in 1957, a legend in the psychiatric world.

For eleven years Hornstein pursued the painstaking task of unearthing information about Fromm-Reichmann's life. The executor of the psychotherapist's will had kept most of her correspondence and other records away from researchers; they remain sealed today. Erich Fromm rebuffed requests for information from a dozen other would-be biographers before his own death in 1980. Even the many friends, colleagues, and patients Hornstein interviewed politely withheld details about the elusive Fromm-Reichmann. “Forty years after her death, she continues to exert a powerful influence over those she knew,” says Hornstein. But Hornstein succeeded in obtaining access to documents from Chestnut Lodge, including invaluable taped recordings of Fromm-Reichmann's therapy sessions with several schizophrenic patients. She also corresponded extensively with Fromm-Reichmann's niece, who lives in Israel, and who provided crucial assistance in reconstructing the clinician's early life in Germany before the war.

During World War I, Fromm-Reichmann transformed a German military hospital into a pioneering center for the treatment of brain injuries. Her expertise in neurology, says Hornstein, gave her a special perspective on mental illness. Eschewing traditional treatment methods, such as shock treatment and lobotomy, Fromm-Reichmann put her faith in the reparative nature of long-term therapy, which had been shown to help even those suffering from disorders long considered incurable.

The notion of repair relates directly to Hornstein's book title, which is a translation of “tikkun,” a core principle of Jewish ethics. This emphasis on the value of every human life was to guide Fromm-Reichmann, who “took it as her responsibility to preserve and respect each patient's humanity.” Hornstein emphasizes, however, that the celebrated clinician had “no omnipotent fantasy”; despite her successes, she never expected to cure patients whose illness had reached the chronic stage. Nonetheless, she has been mythologized as the heroic healer of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and is accurately recognized as courageously pioneering a new methodology.

While Hornstein succeeded in gaining enough information to support a substantial biography, she had actually set out to write a very different book—an account of the use of psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients, “a piece of psychiatric history that was curiously absent.” But ten years into the project, she realized that she could best realize that goal by “bringing back the person who embodied” that approach. Fromm-Reichmann's work at Chestnut Lodge documented the “purest” form of this treatment, and Fromm-Reichmann, it seemed to Hornstein, was the rightful protagonist of the tale. To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World pays homage to Fromm-Reichmann's achievements, while turning the icon back into a real person and restoring an important chapter to the history of psychiatry.