Talk:Herbert Freudenberger

Bibliography to Improve Information on Page

Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology. (1999). American Psychologist, 54(8), 578-580. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.54.8.578

• This is a bibliography of Freudenberger and his life.

Canter, M. B., & Freudenberger, L. (2001). Obituary: Herbert J. Freudenberger (1926-1999). American Psychologist, 56(12), 1171. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.56.12.1171

• This is a bibliography of Freudenberger and his life.

Herbert Freudenberger. (1993). American Psychologist, 48(4), 356-358. doi:10.1037/h0090736

• This is a bibliography of Freudenberger and his life.

The Burnout Cycle. (2006). Scientific American Mind, 17(3), 31. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

• This is an article that lists all of the phases of burnout. I will use this to describe Freudenberger's ideas and phases of burnout. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kehr47 (talk • contribs) 01:46, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Stages of Burnout

This is a lot of information that probably belongs in the article Burnout (psychology). For example, notice how the article for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross doesn't explain the Stages of grief but instead links to that article. --MTHarden (talk) 18:17, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Changes made and suggestions for further improvement

I corrected grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. I also added a link to the main article "burnout" as well as linked other pages. I changed born in "Frankfort" to "Frankfurt, Germany" which can be linked too.

Rather than having a Notes section with references, make a Reference section. An External Links or Further Reading section can be created for sources not used, but that could be helpful in further expansion of the article.

JSchaef (talk) 00:07, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The epilogue to my book The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams contains important recollections of Freudenberger, pages 156-158. (Chicago Review Press, 2021). Here is the part about Freudenberger:

The Holocaust had begun to come into focus for me years earlier

in the person of a survivor. As a resistant Jewish teenager in Frankfurt,

Herbert J. Freudenberger had fought with a gang of Nazi youths and

poked out the eye of one antagonist. That night his parents, fearing

the Nazi gang’s violent retaliation, put their son on a train alone, with

false identification papers, on his way out of Germany forever. Somehow

that terrified boy—“Herb,” as I learned to call him—made his

way from Zurich to Amsterdam to Paris and, finally, by ship to the

US, I assume with the help of a resistance network alerted by his

parents, though he recalled none of that. After many tribulations that

boy grew up to become—almost accidentally but fittingly—a psychologist

dedicated to helping victims of life’s traumas discover the best

in themselves and thrive.4

I got to know Herb around 1960 as the astute and empathetic

but challenging therapist who, after about a year of private sessions,

announced to me one day, “Your problem isn’t that you’re gay. It’s that

you don’t relate to anybody.” I blanched, of course, at his unadorned

words, but had to agree: I didn’t relate to anybody. I trusted Herb by

then, so when he declared, “I’m starting a new therapy group and you’re

in it,” I gulped in fear and anxiously complied. Joining Herb’s group

helped this longtime isolate make a break out of the protective prison

to which I had sentenced myself since childhood. Herb helped me join

the human world.

In that group, and in private sessions with me and other group

members, Herb sometimes offered relevant bits of his own childhood

experience. Group members and I sometimes compared notes on the

different bits of Herb’s story revealed to each of us. One account that

I recall was that Herb, as a boy, watched his synagogue in Frankfurt

get set on fire, burning as a lone watchman waved frantically for help

from an upper window.

One incident that I heard directly from Herb concerned his terrifying

childhood escape from the Nazis. On that night train out of

Germany, at just the slightest nod of a cooperative conductor’s head,

the boy knew he had to jump quickly off the back of the slowly moving

train into the darkness. An image of that frightened boy jumping into

the unknown haunts me still.

Another incident that Herb recounted was of waiting, fearfully, with

false identification papers, to finally cross out of Germany. Ahead of

him he watched a grand, aristocratic woman confront Nazi officers with

the imperious demand for a chair, and their scrambling to oblige. After

she received her papers and was walking passed Herb, she suddenly

winked, giving the anxious boy courage to face the same officers with

his forged papers.

When I first heard that Steven Spielberg’s newly founded Shoah

Foundation was recording video interviews with Holocaust survivors, I

urged Herb to tell his story. A number of years later, when Herb was

already ill with the kidney disease that killed him, he did sit for an

interview. Watching that video many years after Herb’s death, I learned

details of his desperate escape and troubled youth that he had not been

free to reveal to clients.5

By the end of the 1960s, Herb’s group, and Herb himself, had helped

me feel good enough about myself to start exploring the gay liberation

groups that had started up in New York City after the 1969 Stonewall

Rebellion. In the winter of 1971, I nervously attended my first meeting of

New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance. By June 1972, GAA was producing

my documentary play Coming Out! based on my first foraging for

our lost history. That play led to a first book on US homosexual history,

a collection of documents, and, over the next forty years, to three more

sexual history books and a career as a historian of sexuality and gender.

So I owe Herbert J. Freudenberger a loud, public, heartfelt thank-you for

helping me affirm a deep, good part of myself and become a historian.

Herb is certainly one of the reasons I set out to research and tell

Eve’s story. During my talks with him I had come to understand how

important he considered his own active link to a Jewish heritage so

early and so violently attacked. As I struggled for my own new links to

other humans, I knew Herb would have liked to hear of my exploring

my almost nonexistent relation to Jewish culture. As I began researching

Eve’s history, I knew Herb was looking over my shoulder, proud to see

me become a tracer of this missing Jewish woman. Jnkatz1 (talk) 12:44, 19 April 2023 (UTC)