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Integer vitae scelererisque purus [upright in life—free from wickedness]
Karl Abraham's life and work stand as a seminal chapter in the early history of psychoanalysis. He was closely connected to other important figures in our field, whose lives intersected with his: patients, colleagues, and collaborators, as well as competitors vis-à-vis Freud and occasionally outright adversaries. His pioneering work influenced the lives and work of analysts including Melanie Klein, Sándor Radó, Alix and James Strachey, Karen Horney, the Glover brothers, Helene and Felix Deutsch, Bertram Lewin (Thompson 2010), and Edith Jacobson. Given the contemporary interest in building connections between Kleinians, British Middle School followers, object relations theorists, and ego psychologists, we can trace commonalities back to the analyst-teacher Abraham, as well as divergences as they unfolded.
Before this biography of Abraham, little was available in English. We had the oft-quoted obituary by Ernest Jones (1926), a chapter by Martin Grotjahn in the volume Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), an incomplete biographical sketch by Abraham's daughter, the psychoanalyst Hilde Abraham (1974), Abraham's Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis , the Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham (Abraham and Reud 1965), The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham (Falzeder 2002), and a handful of papers on Abraham. One of those papers is Serge Lebovici's presidential address to the International Psychoanalytical Association in Jerusalem in 1977 (Lebovici 1978) on the centenary of Abraham's birth. That paper praises his contributions to theory and practice and reminded the audience of Abraham's leadership role in the IPA. But that address was given almost forty years ago.
Anna Bentinck van Schoonheten, in preparing this biography of Abraham, was able to access sources previously unavailable, especially the complete letters of Abraham to Freud (see a review of