Frieda Fromm-Reichmann: a seminar in the history of psychiatry. VI. Freida Fromm-Reichmann, the early years.

As other panelists have indicated, Frieda Reichmann was born on October 23, 1889, in the German town of Karlsruhe, which lies just north of the Black Forest and only a few miles east of the Rhine. Her parents' circumstances were modest but, as they would have said, "gut bürgerlich," solidly rooted in middle-class respectability. On her fathers' side, the family traced its origins back to the 16th century, when all Jews were expelled from a small town in central Germany called Feuchtwanger. Some of the refugees settled in Fürth, where they found a lively and prosperous Jewish community. Frieda's great-grandfather, Seligman Feuchtwanger, was born there in 1986. He became a silver merchant whose wife, Fanny Wassermann, was to bear him eighteen children.