She was part of a team of therapists assembled by Salvador Minuchin, former director of the Child Guidance Center. Minuchin developed structural family therapy, in which the therapist focuses on structure and boundaries.
"She was very committed to the system," said Susan Bogas, a Princeton psychologist who worked with Dr. Rosman at the center. "She believed deeply that all treatment should be family oriented."
Dr. Rosman wrote, cowrote or contributed to several books and was the author of a number of scholarly papers.
She was probably best known in the field for the research she contributed to Minuchin's influential Psychosomatic Families: Anorexia Nervosa in Context, published in 1978 by Harvard University Press. The textbook has been printed in several languages. She also worked with Minuchin on Families of the Slums, published in 1967, among other projects.
In addition to working at the Child Guidance Center, which closed in April 2000, Dr. Rosman was a clinical associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 until she retired.
Outside academia, Dr. Rosman's interests ranged from anthropology to Asian art, from the Pennsylvania Ballet to the Philadelphia Orchestra, Bogas said. "We would haunt museums together," she said. "She had a real appreciation of different cultures and the arts. She had breadth."
She also had humanity. "She was someone who cared deeply about other people," Bogas said.
Dr. Rosman, who grew up in the Bronx, N.Y., earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1953, a master's degree in psychology from Yale University in 1958, and a doctorate in psychology from Yale in 1962.
She was a fellow of the American Orthopsychiatry Association, and she also belonged to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and the American Family Therapy Association, among other professional organizations.
Dr. Rosman is survived by a son, Lewis. Another son, Daniel, died in 1991. Her former husband, Abraham, also survives.
Services will be at 11 a.m. today at Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks, 6410 N. Broad St. Burial will be in King David Memorial Park, Bensalem.
Memorial donations may be made to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association, Constitution Place, Suite 1120, 325 Chestnut St., Philadelphia 19106.
Rusty Pray's e-mail address is rpray@phillynews.com.
