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)