Herbert Freudenberger

Herbert Freudenberger was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1926 to a Jewish family. After his grandmother was beaten and his grandfather died, the boy fled to the United States alone with a false passport. He arrived in New York, where a relative gave him shelter. He skipped high school, worked as a tool and die maker's apprentice, and attended night classes at Brooklyn College, where he studied under Abraham Maslow.1

By the early 1970s, Freudenberger maintained a successful psychology practice on New York's Upper East Side during the day. At night, he volunteered at a free clinic on the Bowery, treating drug addicts. He routinely worked past two in the morning.

Freudenberger began to notice that the clinic's most dedicated volunteers, the ones who gave the most, were collapsing. They developed physical exhaustion, emotional detachment, and a blank, hollow affect. He watched young patients hold lit cigarettes and let them burn down to the filter without noticing. His mind connected the image to a building after a fire, still standing but gutted.2

In 1974, he published "Staff Burn-Out" in the Journal of Social Issues, the first scholarly description of the phenomenon. He defined burnout as a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one's professional life, and he identified who was most vulnerable, the people who cared the most.3

In 1980, he published Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement, which became a bestseller. He appeared on Oprah and Phil Donahue. Social workers, doctors, and parents recognized the condition he described. Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley, later developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the most widely used measurement tool for the phenomenon.4

Freudenberger received the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology in 1999. He died later that year. By 2020, more than 15,000 scientific publications had been written on the subject he named.5