Frederick (Fritz) Redlich, the psychiatrist who was the catalyst in the transformation of a moribund Yale department of psychiatry of the early 40's into one of its present eminence and whose research of the relationship between social class and psychiatric care exerted a major force in the emergence of the subdiscipline of "social psychiatry," died on New Years Day in the Yale-New Haven Hospital.
He was 93. Congestive heart failure was the immediate cause cited in the death certificate.
Dr. Redlich was born in Vienna, Austria in 1910, the son of Ludwig and Emma Redlich. Reared a Catholic, he discovered his Jewish ancestry at 24. His early education was primarily in psychology and medicine at the University of Vienna, which awarded him his M.D. in 1935. Following his internship and residency training in neuropsychiatry in Vienna, he immigrated to the United States in 1938 with his wife, Elsa, herself a former student and graduate of the Vienna medical school. His love of America originated when he was an exchange student at Wittenberg College of Ohio, in 1930-31. That attraction and the socio-political implications of the German invasion and Anschluss in Austria prompted their emigration. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943.
He completed a Residency in Neurology at the Boston City Hospital in 1942 and finished training in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1948. He started a 39-year long career on the faculty of Yale in 1942, interrupted by a year of duty in the U.S. Army Medical Service during WWII. Seventeen of those years, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and was Dean of the Medical School from 1967 to 1972. After returning to the Psychiatry Department for five more years, he retired from Yale and moved on to UCLA for five years. He returned to New Haven in 1999 for the final years of his life.
Dr. Redlich became chairman of a small, narrowly focused and floundering department under challenging circumstances. In 1947-48, when he was an Assistant Professor, the department was leaderless and the post-doctoral students were in revolt. Despite his junior academic rank, the Dean of the medical school asked him for advice on how to alleviate the emergency. Dr. Redlich's response was to work through the night and produce a visionary plan to create a department that would promote a scientific psychiatry based both on basic research and clinical work and on the disciplines of the behavioral sciences (especially psychology and sociology), psychoanalysis, and the biological sciences (especially neurology). His exposure to the broad culture of Vienna and to those various disciplines at the University converged with the underlying philosophy of Yale's then existing Institute of Human Relations to produce his vision. He was thereupon promoted to Associate Professor and named Executive Officer of the department in 1948. After succeeding to implement initial steps of his ideas, he was promoted to Professor and Chairman in 1950. His leadership extended over the next 17 years during which he adhered to that early multidisciplinary vision. The once failing department became outstanding in the country. Besides that, he was instrumental in the decision by its founders to locate the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis in New Haven, and he was president of the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry throughout its existence.
"The Yale University Psychiatry Department of today owes its preeminence to Dr. Redlich's vision and implementation of what a modern department of psychiatry should be. In thinking far ahead of his time, he saw that the interests of mentally ill patients would best be served by bringing together experts from diverse areas. Toward this end, he recruited experts from the fields of psychoanalysis, social psychiatry (which he helped found) and biological psychiatry (then in its infancy)," according to Benjamin S. Bunney, Charles B G Murphy Professor and current chairman of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. "Only a scholar with his breath of knowledge, a man with an adventurous spirit and a gifted administrator could have fulfilled this vision. Such a man was Fritz Redlich,M.D."
After he became Dean of the medical school the psychiatry department continued to flourish along the lines he started. The major events of his deanship were: the strengthening and consolidation of the basic science departments of the school and the establishment of a new Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; the creation of a new program of medical education; and the constructive survival during several years of intense community activism, which was also the time of the Vietnam War protests, the Black Panther trial in New Haven, and the related MayDay disruption of the University in 1970.
Dr. Redlich was also a serious scholar. He was the coauthor of 6 books and nearly 100 scientific articles. His most well known books were Social Class and Mental Illness (with the Yale sociologist August Hollingshead), the textbook, Theory and Practice of Psychiatry (with Daniel Freedman, M.D.), and his recent biography, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet. The first of these was a pioneering study, which showed that lower class patients received the least advanced forms of treatment. It was the lasting impact of this book that significantly influenced the establishment of "Social Psychiatry." The Yale-Connecticut Mental Health Center, of which he was a co-founder and its first director, is a practical outcome of that development.
Dr. Redlich's work elicited numerous honors and awards. To cite only a few, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received Distinguished Service Awards from both the American College of Psychiatrists and the American Psychiatric Association. He was given the Salmon Award and the Julius von Wagner-Jauregg Award.
"Fritz" was not all work. He enjoyed the outdoors, especially hiking, skiing, and sailing; also music, art, literature, and close friendship. He was a courageous and daring man. Those traits characterized all of his activities: recreation, scholarship and academic administration.
He and his first wife, Elsa, were divorced in 1953. One of their two sons, Erik, died in 2002. His wife of 49 years, Herta Glaz, the former mezzo-soprano of international acclaim, and his son, Peter, of Chester, CT, survive him.
Information contributed by George F. Mahl, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology, Yale University.
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Janet Rettig Emanuel
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