Hildegard Peplau made the case that in psychiatric care the relationship between the nurse and the patient is not the setting for the treatment. It is the treatment.
Reading, Pennsylvania
Peplau was born on September 1, 1909 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second daughter of immigrant parents who did not think girls needed educating. She was six during the 1918 influenza pandemic and later said watching whole families die in her town was what pointed her at illness as a subject.
She graduated from the Pottstown Hospital School of Nursing in 1931 and worked in operating rooms and then as a college nurse at Bennington, which let her take a degree there in interpersonal psychology in 1943. She studied with Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, whose interpersonal theory she would later rebuild for nursing.
The war
Peplau served as a first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps from 1943 to 1945, at the 312th Field Station Hospital in England, which happened to house the American School of Military Psychiatry.
She spent two years among the psychiatrists who were inventing the treatment of combat stress in real time, and came out convinced that what helped soldiers was a sustained relationship with someone who paid attention — and that nurses, who were present continuously rather than for an hour a week, were structurally best placed to provide it.
Interpersonal Relations in Nursing
She finished the book in 1948. It was not published until 1952.
The delay was not editorial. No publisher would take a work of nursing theory written by a nurse without a physician as co-author, which had not been done. Peplau refused to add one.
The book set out nursing as a deliberate, structured interpersonal process, with phases — orientation, identification, exploitation, resolution — and with the nurse moving between defined roles: stranger, resource, teacher, leader, surrogate, counsellor. The claim underneath is that a nurse's own behaviour is a clinical instrument, that it can be examined, and that it can be done badly or well.
That claim is why every nursing curriculum now includes therapeutic communication, and why psychiatric nurses are trained rather than merely assigned.
Rutgers
In 1954 Peplau started the first graduate program in the United States for clinical specialists in psychiatric nursing, at Rutgers, and ran it until 1974. It was the first advanced clinical preparation of its kind in any nursing specialty and the direct ancestor of the clinical nurse specialist role.
She was president of the American Nurses Association from 1970 to 1972, served the World Health Organization as an advisor, and taught in fourteen countries.
Later
Peplau was named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing in 1994 and given the Christiane Reimann Prize in 1997. She died on March 17, 1999 in Sherman Oaks, California, at 89.
The Second World War produced a generation of American nurses who had seen psychiatric injury at scale and had no framework for it. Peplau built them one, and then built the school to teach it.
Related
Sources
- Hildegard Peplau, for the chronology, the publication delay and the Rutgers program. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, Hildegard E. Peplau. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1952. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Hildegard Peplau papers. Rutgers University Libraries. Accessed September 9, 2026.