M. Gerard (Jerry) Fromm, PhD, ABPP
Organized in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, this book is a collection of stories and reflections on the way traumatic experiences play out over time: the conditions that lead to trauma, the forms it takes, the ways it affects a person’s life and the lives of others.
“What happens to us in the face of unbearable pain? How do our efforts to manage traumatic experience shape our family life, our children’s capacities, our institutions, our society’s development? In this moving book, Dr. Fromm, a master clinician, takes us through these questions with powerfully evocative stories from his long career. He brings our psychological theories to life, illuminating for the general and professional reader aspects of human development that echo across the generations. A stunning collection.“
Edward R. Shapiro, M.D., Former Medical Director/CEO, Austen Riggs Center; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center
M. Gerard (Jerry) Fromm, PhD, ABPP
For most of my career, I was a psychotherapist at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where I worked intensively with troubled people to help them understand themselves, develop meaningful relationships and find the authority to lead their lives. Certified in psychoanalysis, I’m now Distinguished Faculty of the Erikson Institute at Riggs (austenriggs.com/erikson-institute.org).
During my time at Riggs, I was fortunate to hold two major leadership roles. I directed the Center’s Therapeutic Community Program, in which patients and staff came together on a daily basis to solve social problems and learn from that process. Rooted in the tradition of healing communities, the program lived out the Center’s commitment to its open setting and the respect for patient authority that sustains it. This experience – both ordinary in its grappling with the troubles of everyday life and extraordinary in its transformative potential – led me to a career-long interest in group dynamics and organizational consulting.
The second leadership role – a dream job really – was as the first Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of Riggs’ Erikson Institute. In this role, I led the Center’s effort to bring the learning from its clinical program into dialogue with other fields of study. My colleagues and I got to invent interesting things to do, including interdisciplinary conferences on war trauma, citizenship and other topics, an annual Creativity Seminar, an Erikson Scholar program, yearly conferences for college counseling centers, a consultation service for local organizations and a project that became the International Dialogue Initiative, of which I’m the current president.
Over the years, I’ve held positions at the Yale Child Study Center and Harvard Medical School, and done a considerable amount of teaching and presenting, both at Riggs and elsewhere. Some of those seminars and presentations are listed in the pages that follow, as are books published in recent years. One recent book (2022) is called Traveling through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself out in Families, Organizations and Society. Largely based on work at the Erikson Institute, the book is a collection of powerful stories illustrating trauma and its effects over time and across a range of contexts. Another recent book (2023) is the edited volume (with Vamik Volkan and Regine Scholz) called We Don’t Speak of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict and Collective Trauma, which collects the work of many IDI members.