Rose Nadler Franzblau

Background

She was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Meyer Nadler, a manufacturer, and Rachael Breitfeld. The family came to the United States in the year of her birth.

Education

She received a B. A. from Hunter College in 1926 and an M. A. and Ph. D. at Columbia University in 1931 and 1935, respectively.

Her dissertation was published by Columbia University Press in 1935 as Race Differences in Mental and Physical Traits, Studied in Different Environments.

During Franzblau's nine years as a graduate student at Columbia, she continued a career as a teacher and principal in New York City high schools.

Career

In 1935 she began a five-year period of service as a personnel specialist for the National Youth Administration in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In 1940 she was appointed director of personnel for the National Youth Administration in both Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. Three years later, Franzblau was named national director for the training of girls in the Washington, D. C. , offices of the National Youth Administration, a post she held until 1944. These positions led to several important public appointments.

Between 1944 and 1946, Franzblau served as director of placement and overseas personnel training for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She then assumed duties in 1946 at the New York City branch of the United States Office of Price Administration.

Franzblau also wrote articles for various popular magazines and professional journals. She authored a series entitled "Searchlight on Delinquency" in the New York Post Magazine from 1954 through 1955. A monthly feature initiated in 1967, "Your Family and You, " appeared for two years in Family Circle. During that two-year period she was also a columnist for Sales Management, authoring a series entitled "How to Avoid the Tyranny of Executive Tensions. "

She also contributed articles to such popular magazines as Seventeen and Cosmopolitan. Literary contributions were not Franzblau's only media activities.

Between 1965 and 1970 she hosted a daily radio program, "Dr. Franzblau's World of Children, " on WCBS in New York City. Like her popular writings, the program was an effort to present Freudian theory on various issues to the general public, including adolescence, juvenile delinquency, work-related stress, and self-image.

Her question-and-answer column "Human Relations, " which was syndicated in thirteen major newspapers between 1951 and 1976, was a sustained effort to translate for a general audience the intricacies of Freudian theory on issues ranging from sexuality and parenthood to social relations.

Her surveys of guidance techniques for youths in Sweden, France, Denmark, and Great Britain, conducted in 1958, along with research in the juvenile-court procedures of Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, and London in 1960, were also projects designed to apply Freudian precepts to contemporary issues.

Appearances on popular television talk shows--along with spots on radio programs such as "Girl Talk, " "Noonday Line, " and "Contact"--were energetic attempts to popularize Freudian theory. By the time of her death in New York City, where she lived for the final thirty years of her life at 1 Gracie Terrace, she had established herself as an intellectual whose scholarly interests never set her apart from the community at large.

Achievements

• In 1947 she was named associate director of the International Tensions Research Project for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Holding that post through 1951, she began in 1948 to work as a newspaper columnist as well. Throughout this busy period as an administrator, Franzblau wrote a number of books. In 1944 she and Otto Klineberg wrote National Youth Administration: Final Report for the War Manpower Commission and in 1950 she collaborated with Klineberg on Tensions Affecting International Understanding. She authored or coauthored eight books, including such works as The Menopause Myth, published in 1976.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A sane and happy life: A family guide

    (A family guide)

  • The middle generation

Views

Franzblau was committed to the spirit of Freud's original intent of constructing an analysis of the individual set squarely in the world producing that individual.

Her conception of the ego had its theoretical roots in such classic works of Freud as Civilization and Its Discontents. Her work was as much a social commentary as it was a focus on the individual psyche.

Connections

She married Abraham Norman Franzblau, a psychiatrist, in 1923. They had two children.

Father:

Meyer Nadler

mother Rachael Breitfeld

husband:

Abraham Norman Franzblau