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There can be no doubt that of all the blows the science of psycho-analysis has yet suffered the death of Karl Abraham is much the most cruel and severe. We have once before lost by death a President of a Branch Society, and we miss a number of other valued workers whose names will always live in our memory. Blows of another sort have several times affected the psycho-analytical movement, one of which even brought with it the loss, by another way than death, of a President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. But, with all due respect to the memory of our other dead colleagues, none of them meant to psycho-analysis what Karl Abraham did; for he was at once a master of its theory and practice, a pioneering contributor to our growing knowledge, a leader and organizer of the rarest order, as well as a loyal friend and colleague to all. Some of the reasons why the loss we have just sustained is so great will appear from the following record of his life and activities.
The main events of Abraham's life, considered externally, are as follows. He was born in Bremen on May 3, 1877, so that he was forty-eight when he died. He came of an old Jewish family that had long been resident in the Hanseatic towns of North Germany; there was an older brother, but no sister. He attended the high school at home until 1896, when he entered on the medical curriculum.
In his later school years Abraham developed an intense fondness for comparative linguistics and philology. Had he had the opportunity he would have preferred to devote himself entirely to such studies, and his interest in them persisted all his life. He certainly possessed an unusual talent in this direction. Besides his mother tongue he could