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IMRE HERMANN, THE GRAND old man of the Hungarian psychoanalytic movement, died February 22, 1984. He was 95 years old. With Sandor Ferenczi and Michael Balint he was representative of the so called "Budapest School of Psychoanalysis."
Hermann was graduated from the Medical School of Budapest University and began as a specialist in mental disorders. In his university years he attended one of Sandor Ferenczi's lectures on psychoanalysis. He soon became a passionate follower of the new science and a student of Ferenczi.
His first major works approached the psychology of thinking from the analytic point of view: Psychoanalyse und Logik (1924); Das Ich und das Denken (1929). A philosophical approach characterized his book entitled Psychoanalysis as a Method (1963), Psychoanalyse als Methode (1933).
From the early 1920s he paid close attention to the behaviour of primates and looked for biological analogies with psychoanalytic instinct theory in the lives of the apes closest to man. The results of twenty years of research were summed up in 1943 in his seminal work, 'Az ember ósi ösztönei' (The primitive instincts of man). This book, long unavailable in Hungary, was published in French and Italian a few years ago.
His greatest discovery, however, was the recognition of the clinging instinct, first published under the title, "Sich Anklammern-Auf Suche Gehen; Int. Zeitschr. Psa., 1936, 22: 349–370. (In English: "Clinging-going-in-search, " Psychoanal. Q., 1976, 45: 5–36.) He became aware of its existence in his study of the lives of apes: their young spend the first few months of their life holding on to their mothers' fur. Because of the human's loss of fur, this