Hilde Bruch

Hilde Bruch ( born March 11, 1904 in Dülken, Niederrhein, † December 15, 1984 in Houston, Texas) was a German - American physician, psychoanalyst and specialist in eating disorders.

Life

Hilde Bruch grew up as the third child of four brothers and two sisters. Her parents, deer and Adele ( Rath ) fracture, had a farm in a Catholic German village near the Dutch border. Hilde Bruch had the desire to become a mathematician. However, an uncle convinced that medicine offered better career opportunities for a Jewish woman. She studied at the Albert -Ludwigs- University in Freiburg, where she graduated in 1929 with a doctorate in medicine. Due to the emergence of anti-Semitism in the University, she gave up her academic career and moved from October 1932 to June 1933 in a private practice in Ratingen.

In the summer of 1933, she fled to England. After a year's stay in London, she emigrated to the United States. In New York she worked in a children's hospital. From 1937, she began to do research on childhood obesity. 1941-1943 she studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. In Baltimore, she met Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm- Reichmann, Edith Weigert and Theodore Lidz and Ruth know. Sullivan, Lawrence S. Kubie and Fromm- Reichmann were their most important teachers. The latter invited her to their weekly psychoanalytic seminars in Chestnut Lodge. She returned in 1943 to New York, opened a private psychoanalytic practice and taught at Columbia University. In 1952 she published her book Do not Be Afraid of Your Child: A Guide for Perplexed Parents. In 1964 she became a professor in psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

In addition to a thriving private practice and a professor at Columbia University, she was active in research and has written numerous technical articles that won her the reputation of an authority in schizophrenia and eating disorders.

When the book The Importance of Overweight was published in 1957, was regarded as a leading researcher Hilde Bruch already on childhood obesity. Her work was one of the first to enlightening the public about the dangers of obesity of children.

As the anorexia ( anorexia nervosa) increased rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, she worked more with the treatment of this disease and soon became one of the world's leading authorities on the field.

Hilde Bruch was also regarded as brilliant and creative psychotherapist. In her book Principles of psychotherapy it provided an accurate and thorough description of the intensive interpersonal psychotherapy process, as he and her was first practiced by Alfred Adler and then by teachers of announces Sullivan and Fromm- Reichmann developed itself in practice.

" Psychotherapy of learning is a lifelong process; it is a never- to -do task consistently creative re-orientation, an approach based on unwavering objectivity and willingness to learn study of failures as successes. The therapist can not thereby multiply that he repeated incessantly that he has not done or learned his professional expertise. Every new patient he has to deal with than the one he is, as a stranger, whose needs and problems unique are without precedent; the challenge posed by the patient, is to approach it in a special way, in a way that is tailored to their specific situation. Just wake up this sense of the novelty of each therapeutic encounter allows the fully trained therapists to use past experience as well as current ignorance in a constructive way. ( Hilde Bruch, Broad psychotherapy) "

Awards

Works (selection)

• Principles of psychotherapy. S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1977, ISBN 3-10-008402-0.
• The golden cage. The enigma of anorexia nervosa. 18th edition. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 1998, ISBN 3-596-26744-7.
• Eating disorders. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-596-26796- X.
• The starved self. Conversations with anorexics. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 1994, ISBN 3-596-10167-0.