Jerry Fromm

Jerry Fromm trained as a psychoanalyst, at the Austen-Riggs psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, USA where he worked across his whole career and later became director of its therapeutic community service. He is a distinguished faculty member and a former director at Austen-Riggs. Jerry is also past president of the Boston Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems.

He has been taking forward Vamik Volkan’s inspiring foundational engagement of large group dynamics through international relations across his current presidency of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI). With IDI he arranged a series of international events exploring international conflict situations with their representatives and a cross-disciplinary group of consultants.

As a psychoanalyst, he is a member and fellow of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis and has consulted to many psychoanalytic institutes. He has served as faculty of the Yale Child Study Center and Harvard Medical School.

Across a long career, he has authored many papers and chapters. These include his editorship of a collection of papers named “Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma across generations” (Fromm, 2012). He has also written his own book on “Taking the Transference, Reaching towards Dreams: Clinical Studies in the Intermediate Area”. This work develops Winnicott’s ideas on play. He has also developed these themes through editing a collection of essays on “A Spirit that Impels: Play, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis” (Fromm, 2014). In his latest book he develops the theme of trauma across many domains: “Travelling through Time: How trauma plays itself out in families, organizations and Society” (2022)