You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nathan Adler, Ph.D., one of the founding fathers of the San Francisco psychoanalytic community, was born February 11, 1911. In honor of his centennial, I present the following conversation1 with Dr. Adler based on a tape-recorded interview conducted at his office in San Francisco, California, in September of 1990. We then worked together the following year to edit it into its current form.
In our conversation, Dr. Adler spoke of his training under the illustrious . Bernfeld, a brilliant psychoanalyst, teacher, and writer, was Freud's only student to come to San Francisco to practice and teach. Yet the biographical sketches of Bernfeld typically say little about his work in San Francisco. This article is intended to address this gap in the history. I begin with a brief statement about Nathan Adler, followed by a biographical sketch of Siegfried Bernfeld, and then the conversation with Adler on Bernfeld.
Nathan Adler was born in New York, in 1911, the son of Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. Between the ages of six and nine Adler followed Fiorello La Guardia through the streets as he delivered his political soapbox oratories. It was from La Guardia's polemical style that Adler said he developed his own characteristic narrative.
At the tender age of 10, Adler went with his mother to Wards Island