Panel Report: Emigration from Berlin

Part Three: Emigration of education and theory toNorth America1

Daniel Jacobs, Moderator

Lilli Gast, Reporter

PD Dr. Lilli Gast, Berchtesgadener Str. 15, D-10825 Berlin, Germany, llgast@snafu.de

Erika Schmidt, from Chicago, opened the panel with her paper, The Berlin Tradi-tion in Chicago, which mainly investigated Franz Alexander’s enduring influence onthe institutional structure of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Alexanderreceived his basic medical training in his native city of Budapest and trained as ananalyst from 1920 to 1930 at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and its Poliklinik.When he set off to the USA in 1930, he took in his suitcase the blueprint of theBerlin Psychoanalytic Institute’s organizational structure. The speaker gave a pre-cise and succinct account of how the ‘Berlin model’ fared in the Chicago Institutefor Psychoanalysis, founded in 1932, in which the specific transformation and evenintensification of the basic principles also bears the clear hallmark of Franz Alexan-der (e.g. the strong emphasis on psychoanalytic–psychiatric research).

Franz Alexander is also a key figure in the paper given by Sanford Gifford, thearchivist and librarian of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, concerning the hugeimportance of emigrant analysts from Berlin and Vienna for the Boston Psycho-analytic Society. If we consider this Institute’s (organizational) history, Alexanderappears as a ‘grey eminence’ in the background. Even during his Berlin period, hewas the training analyst of Ives Hendrick, who after his return developed the ratherinformal Boston Institute into a tightly organized and strictly regulated traininginstitute that was closely based on the Berlin model. He also appointed Franz Alex-ander as the first training analyst and was responsible for his one-year interlude inBoston. Alexander’s successor, on Irmarita Putnam’s initiative, was Hanns Sachs,who with his committed support for lay analysis very soon found himself in openconflict with Hendrick. Citing the examples of some other prominent emigrantsfrom Vienna and Berlin (such as Helene and Felix Deutsch, Beata Rank, Jenny andRobert Waelder, Grete and Eduard Bibring, Eduard Hitschmann), the speakerpointed out that for a significant number of the European analysts the emigrationto the USA led to a boost in their (academic) careers.

In her paper, Karl Abraham in New York, Nellie Thompson, archivist and librar-ian of the Brill Library and Archives of the New York Psychoanalytic Society,examined the decisive influence that the founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Insti-tute had on Bertram Lewin’s work. From 1925 onwards, Lewin spent some years

1Panel held at the 45th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Berlin, Germany, 28 July 2007.Panellists: Nellie Thompson (New York); Erika Schmidt (Chicago); Sanford Gifford (Boston). Translated bySophie Leighton.

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in Berlin at the Berlin Institute, where he was analysed by Franz Alexander, whoemerges once more as a key figure in the transfer of European psychoanalysis tothe North American cultural domain. As well as Alexander, there were S�ndorRad� and Hanns Sachs, who actually emigrated shortly afterwards to the USA,and had been his teachers in Berlin, whose works he translated and made accessibleto American expert colleagues. Lewin made some vital contributions, however, withhis edition of Abraham’s writings, which ensured their dissemination in theEnglish-speaking world. How far he himself was influenced by Abraham’s thoughtsis shown by his own theoretical works, especially those on mania, sleep and dreaming,which, as the speaker impressively and very precisely indicated, refer to Abraham’sworks on orality or the developmental stages of the libido and which influencedsubsequent generations of analysts in his specific further revision (Otto Isakower,Jacob Arlow and others).

The ensuing discussion of the papers primarily addressed two aspects of thetransfer of psychoanalysis from Europe to the USA: first, the consequences for itsscientific status and, second, its claim to socio-political and cultural analysis. It wasconjectured that psychoanalysis progressed beyond the existence on the margins ofscience that it generally eked out in Europe in the course of its transposition to thecentre of the North American academic world, albeit at the cost of its medicaliza-tion. To what extent this development was a cause of the transposition, forinstance, of a particularly open-minded and well-disposed reception, or its conse-quence, also came under discussion, as well as the role of World War II and theintegration of psychoanalysis into military psychiatry.

The second line of discussion, on the fate of the socio-political engagement ofsome, mainly younger Berlin analysts, first and foremost, of course, Otto Fenichel,addressed both some general considerations of the rather anti-socialist Americanmindset at that time and the precarious situation and traumatization of the emig-rants from Europe. It was also suggested that the political impetus in its concreteEuropean implementation may have found an outlet in the pre-established Ameri-can discourse of the cultural school as well as psychoanalytically orientated socialwork. In this connection, reference was also made to Wilhelm Reich.

In addition to these two lines of discussion, brief cursory reference was made tosome parallels and differences between paths of emigration and the transfer of psycho-analysis to North America and England, primarily, of course, with the example ofKarl Abraham’s reception. Reference was made here to what were merely differ-ences of perspective between Bertram Lewin’s and Melanie Klein’s revisions of hisfundamental contributions to psychoanalytic theory.

422 L. Gast

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