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26 JANUARY 2009
NO 1392
Redl seminars
In 1959, when he returned to Detroit from his work at the National Institute of Mental Health, we asked Fritz Redl to be our consultant on milieu treatment at Hawthorn Center. For 14 years, until he and Helen moved to Massachusetts, Tuesday was a redletter day at Hawthorn. Fritz conducted seminars for multidiscipline staff and met with small groups or individuals to discuss special problems as they arose; as you would guess, they arose often.
Hawthorn Center is a large psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents located in Northville, Michigan. It is a State Department of Mental Health facility with inpatient, day treatment, outpatient, professional training and research units. When Fritz Redl was with us there were 150 inpatient beds and 100 additional children in the day treatment section. The age range was, and still is, 5 to 16 years. The living areas provide a broad range of facilities with much activity centered around the school. Fritz liked to spend time in the classrooms, the shops, the art rooms, the greenhouse, the workstudy program, as well as the living units and he brought to the seminars many observations from these visits.
Fritz' first visit to Hawthorn Center was memorable. On the first Tuesday when he came to my office, my secretary mistook him for the piano tuner whom we were also expecting that morning. She asked him if he wouldn't mind starting with the piano in cottage 2. As always Fritz rose to the occasion: "You won't believe it, but I forgot my instruments." I rescued Helen Richard and from then on she and Fritz were great friends. Fritz remembered the incident for years and often referred to it with that special sparkle that we so much enjoyed.
In this appreciation I plan to review some of Fritz Redl's thoughts on milieu treatment and their impact on the program at Hawthorn Center. But as I think back, another aspect of his life's work keeps intruding and I'd like to talk about this briefly first – his prodigious advocacy for children and programs for children. He never refused requests to enter a battle for a good cause. Who could ever forget those Redl speeches with their arresting and rousing language. "How to Mangle a Soul" and "Where Children Rot" date back to 1945. Later, for many years as a member of the Advisory Board of the Michigan Association for Emotionally Disturbed Children, he gave countless talks, all carefully prepared, on a whole range of "Crisis in the Children's Field" issues. He used to say that he did not know "a cure" for all the ills but that he tried to administer "emergency injections to a catatonic community to bring about at least temporary relief." How potent – and helpful – those injections were!
From its very beginning, and through all its 35 years to date, Hawthorn Center has had the good fortune to have had the direct involvement of many superb experts. Before the first child was admitted, Lauretta Bender helped define the clinical diagnostic emphases. From the first months, William Morse guided the establishment of the school for our children and our special education teacher-training program, and he is still actively involved. A little later, Fritz Redl led us to define our milieu treatment, and over the 14 years of his participation he helped us constantly to redefine it. More recently, Peter Blos, Jr., has been leading an ongoing seminar on individual psychotherapy.
In the Redl seminars, a vast range of topics relating to milieu were discussed; I can include here only a small, representative sampling. Fritz was a great linguist. I recall his charming, amused response when a student once asked him if he was planning to conduct his seminar that day in English, German, French or Redlese. He had a remarkable knack with words and the awesome flow of Redlese made the most difficult concepts graphic. The imagery and humor were truly unique. Often we had to work hard to follow his creative genius and sometimes we couldn't quite make it. But you can be sure there was never a dull or wasted moment. I have introduced each topic that follows with a phrase that Redl used in his discussions. I hope that they will give some flavor of his thinking, his style, and his teaching with its stress on crucial real-life issues.
RALPH D. RABINOVITCH
Rabinovitch, R.D. (1991). Fritz Redl and residential
treatment at Hawthorn Center. In Morse, William C. (Ed.). Crisis
Intervention in Residential Treatment: The Clinical Innovations of Fritz
Redl. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 73-75.
