REDLICH, Frederick C(arl) 1910-2004 (Fritz Redlich)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 2, 1910, in Vienna, Austria; died of congestive heart failure, January 1, 2004, in New Haven, CT. Psychiatrist, educator, and author. One of the founders of the discipline of social psychiatry, Redlich gained wide attention late in life as the author of Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (1999). Completing his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1935, he moved to the United States, where he did his neurology residency at Boston City Hospital. Soon after joining the faculty at Yale University in 1942 and becoming a U.S. citizen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II. After the war, Redlich returned to Yale, where he would become a professor of psychiatry in 1950 and served as chair of the department from 1960 to 1967, dean of the School of Medicine from 1967 to 1972, and director of the Behavioral Sciences Study Center from 1973 to 1977. Retiring in 1977, Redlich moved to the west coast and taught at the University of California at Los Angeles for the next five years. Redlich was the author of several books, beginning with Psychotherapy with Schizophrenics (1952), and, with the publication of Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study (1958) with August B. Hollingshead, was credited with helping to create the field of social psychiatry.

Still, Redlich never received as great attention for his writings as he did for 1999's Hitler, in which he offered medical and psychological analyses of the Nazi leader's character, saying that conditions such as syphilis, spina bifida occulta, and coronary heart disease, while troubling Hitler's health, did not make him mentally incompetent or excuse his criminal acts.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2004, p. B10.

New York Times, January 17, 2004, p. B7.

Washington Post, January 22, 2004, p. B7.