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On December 25, 1925, Dr. Karl Abraham, President and founder of the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Society and President for the time being of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, died in Berlin. He had not yet reached the age of fifty years when he succumbed to an illness against which his vigorous physique had been struggling ever since the early summer. At the Congress at Homburg his apparent recovery delighted us all; but to our grievous disappointment there followed a relapse.
We bury with him— integer vitoe scelerisque purus —one of the surest hopes we had for our science, young as it is and still so bitterly assailed, and a part of its future which will now, perhaps, never come to fruition. So high a place had he won for himself that, of all who have followed me through the dark pathways of psycho-analytic research, there is only one whose name could be put beside his. Colleagues and younger workers had an unbounded faith in him, so that it is likely that the leadership would have been his. And indeed, he would have been a model leader in the pursuit of truth, led astray neither by the praise and blame of the many nor by the tempting illusion of his own phantasies.
I am writing these lines for friends and fellow-workers who knew and valued him as I did. They will easily understand what the loss of this friend, who was so much younger than myself, means to me, and they will forgive me if I make no further attempt to express things for which it is hard to find words. An account of Abraham's scientific personality and an appreciation of his work will be written for our Journal by another hand.