Alice Ricciardi-von Platen was the youngest of the four daughters of Count Carl von Platen-Hallermund (1870–1919) and Elizabeth Alten (1875–1970); she grew up on the Weissenhaus estate in Schleswig-Holstein.

After completing her medical studies in Munich in 1934 and a subsequent clinical internship in a Berlin children's hospital, she spent the years 1936-39 in Florence and 1940 in Rome.

After the war, she worked as a volunteer at the psychosomatic clinic of the Heidelberg University, with Viktor von Weizsäcker, where she continued her training in psychotherapy.

In 1949 Ricciardi-von Platen moved to London, where she worked – under the supervision of Michael Balint – in a psychotherapy and marriage counselling centre, and also in a psychiatric hospital.

When the American military government in 1946 announced that they would prosecute the perpetrators of the inhumane experiments on humans and of the deaths of about one hundred thousand mentally ill in order to hold to account those doctors who were responsible, the German Medical Association sent to Nuremberg a committee of observers headed by Alexander Mitscherlich.

She felt that the killing of mentally ill people was a systematic crime which the entire German medical establishment had known about and in which it was deeply involved.