Frances Ring was born on New Years Day, 1910 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was the youngest child in a family that included an older sister and three brothers. When Frances was three years old, her mother claimed that Frances doesn’t play with dolls, she watches peoples’ emotions. Her mother could be volatile, whereas her father was the more stable of the two. When Frances’ mother would attempt to take liberties with the children, her father would step in and say, “The children are a sacred trust. They are not an outlet for your aggression.” When her brothers graduated from high school, their father plainly told them that if they didn’t have a career goal, they would study accounting. And soon there were three accountants in the family.
It is possible that Frances’ mother suffered from a bipolar disorder, little of which was known about at the time. Her condition deteriorated, and by the time Frances was sixteen, her mother had been committed to an institution. When Frances went to visit her, she saw her mother shackled. Up to that point, Frances’ goal was to become a medical doctor. But now her goal was to work with people in order to free them from emotional pain, phobias, psychosis, neuroses, etc.
Frances believed that anyone becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist needed to “clean house” of their own emotional garbage. The first person she worked with was her analyst’s daughter. Frances married and moved to the Los Angeles area where she continued what became a decades long career.
I met Frances when my parents learned about her from friends of theirs, one of whom Frances cured of agoraphobia, which is a mental and behavioral anxiety disorder.
She had a photographic memory, never writing anything as we talked. She used hypnosis and was able to pass the skill on to the people she worked with. Her workdays were twelve hours, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and she allowed the people she was working with to call her, at no charge, any evening until 10:00 P.M.
She had other interests and hobbies that had nothing to do with her work. She loved classical music and often travelled to Bogota, Columbia for its many musical offerings and classical music festivals. She also loved to paint, mostly with oils.
She told me that she had written a book titled How To Live A Rotten Sex Life. And soon after, she gave me a copy of the book with two pictures of her clipped onto the plastic cover; one of her smiling and the other, more serious. I originally thought that perhaps she had given me this book so that I could read it and let her know what I thought about it. She never asked me to read it. She never asked me to return it. But she knew what she was doing, in many more ways than one. I have come to realize she was hoping I could get it published and accessible to the people of the world, so that human suffering could be reduced and awareness increased. It is an honor.
