N. Lionel Blitzsten (1893-1952), one of America's most gifted psychoanalytic clinicians and teachers, appears to have been the first practicing Freudian psychoanalyst west of New York (Orr, 1961; Gitelson, 1953; Oberndorf, 1953). Born to Russian immigrants in Chicago, he was educated in its schools and hospitals. A pupil of the neurologist Hugh Patrick1 at Northwestern University, he early sensed the newer European developments in depth psychology, and between 1921 and 1929 he trained for various periods in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, London, and Zurich. Informally, he organized the first psychoanalytic seminars for psychiatrists in Chicago and listed himself as a training analyst under the