When Vienna-born Dr. Fredrick Carl Redlich was tapped in 1951 to head the department of psychiatry at Yale University's School of Medicine, he dreaded administrative duties. Over the years, he jokes, "they said that I ran the department like the old Austro-Hungarian empire—with absolutism mitigated by sloppiness." He improved his technique enough to suit Yale; last week University President Kingman Brewster Jr. announced the appointment of Dr. Redlich, 56, to be dean of the School of Medicine. Come July 1, he will succeed Pediatrician Vernon W. Lippard, 62, who will become a special adviser to Brewster on medical affairs.
The naming of a psychiatrist to head a medical school is unusual but not un precedented.-Dr. Redlich himself sees it as a symbol of improved status for his specialty. "A generation ago," he said, "I'm sure Yale wouldn't have considered a psychiatrist for dean. But now we are taken much more seriously."
Undogmatic, Uncommitted. Dr. Redlich was being overmodest; the appointment was as much a tribute to his personal qualities. Originally Fritz Karl Redlich, he fled Vienna and Nazism in 1938 because of his partly Jewish ancestry. During World War II, he anglicized his name after being told, "You can't be named Fritz like every prisoner of war." But he still signs letters "Fritz" and uses it on popular books.
Like his Landsmann, Freud (whom he never met), Dr. Redlich began his professional career as a neurologist, then switched to the social and analytic sides of psychiatry. He says that his approach is "basically Freudian," but of his Yale department he insists: "We are undogmatic, uncommitted to any particular point of view or school of thought. We are at the threshold of a broad new psychiatry that will use the knowledge of many disciplines."
To that end he has reorganized Yale's psychiatry department. Beginning with two professors, he drew in faculty members from sociology, biology and the behavioral sciences. The expansion associated him with Yale Sociologist August B. Hollingshead, and in 1958 they published Social Class and Mental Illness. The book made the point that a severe emotional disturbance was likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenia and lead to confinement in a state hospital if the patient was poor, but diagnosed as a "personality problem" and treated in the office by a private psychiatrist if the patient could afford it. It was a natural progression from that to the establishment of the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven, with Dr. Redlich as director and members of his psychiatry department as staff. This has now grown to a task force of 73, counting 45 psychiatrists, 13 clinical psychologists and ten social workers; much of their time is spent in treatment and research at the $5,000,000 center, which offers low-cost psychiatric care.
Patients Not Cases. In the early 1940s, psychiatry was only an elective in the Yale medical-school curriculum.