Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and First-Person Narratives of Madness: Dialogue and Dialectic

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann stands out in the history of psychoanalysis for her deep respect for patients and her insistence that even those with the most serious diagnoses—schizophrenia and other psychoses—understood the meanings of their thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, even when they could not communicate these meanings to others. In her own work with patients, as well as her teaching and supervision, Fromm-Reichmann emphasized the "assets" of even the most disturbed people, and the importance of their poetry, writing, and musical compositions, both as evidence of such assets and as sources of psychological insight in themselves. Yet however much she respected these works, she did not see them as offering a challenge or alternative to her own psychoanalytic framework. In this article, I consider whether Fromm-Reichmann's embrace of patients' "assets" created a dialogue (a process of mutual sharing, on an equal basis) or a dialectic (a means of arriving at a single synthesized truth) between her perspective and theirs.