Redlich, Frederick C.
REDLICH, FREDERICK C.
REDLICH, FREDERICK C. (1910–2004), U.S. psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Redlich was born in Vienna. Raised as a Catholic, he discovered his Jewish ancestry at age 24. After working at a psychiatric hospital in Vienna, he left for the United States in 1938. In 1940 he joined the staff of the New Haven Hospital and in 1948 was appointed its chief psychiatrist. From 1942 he taught at Yale University, where in 1950 he became professor of psychiatry. He served as head of the department of psychology from 1950 to 1967 and was dean of the Yale School of Medicine from 1967 to 1972. During that time, he helped to establish a new department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and to create a new program of medical education. In 1972 he returned to Yale's department of psychiatry for five more years before retiring. He subsequently taught for five years at the University of California, Los Angeles. He returned to New Haven in 1999.
Redlich was the co-founder and first director of the Yale-Connecticut Mental Health Center. He was also instrumental in inspiring the founders of the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis to locate in New Haven, and was president of the foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry throughout its existence.
Redlich published Psychotherapy with Schizophrenics (1952, joint ed.), The Inside Story (1953, 19552, compiler, written by J. Bingham), Social Class and Mental Illness (1958, with August B. Hollingshead), and Theory and Practice of Psychiatry (with Daniel Freedman, 1966). Social Class and Mental Illness is a report on research conducted in 1957 by Redlich and Yale sociologist August Hollingshead into the relation of social class and the distribution of mental illness and its relation to the ways mentally ill persons are treated by psychiatrists. Redlich also wrote Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (1998), in which he attempts to determine whether Hitler's actions were the result of physical and mental illnesses. It is novel in that it may well be the first book in which these questions were examined by a practicing psychiatrist.
[Louis Miller /
Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]