Max Eitingon

In the first week of August we received the sad news that Dr. Max Eitingon had died on July 30 after a painful and distressing illness. He had for some years suffered from a cardiac disorder, and this culminated in thrombosis and angina pectoris. The news will be received with keen regret by many friends and patients of his all over the world, and especially by those of us who were eagerly looking forward to seeing him again as soon as the separation enforced by war conditions was over.

Dr. Eitingon was born on June 26, 1881, in what was then Austrian Poland, and he retained his Austrian nationality. Early in his childhood the family removed to Leipsic. Perhaps because of his stammer, an affliction from which he suffered throughout life, he left school before matriculating, a fact which proved to be a lasting disadvantage. He commenced his medical studies at the University of Marburg, but pursued the greater part of them at that of Zurich where he acquired the degree of M.D. The missing entry examination, however, prevented his acquiring a legal medical qualification in any country, so that the choice of psycho-analysis proved to be an external convenience as well as being dictated by the deepest inner motives. It was Jung who introduced him to psycho-analysis, and through him he early made contact with both Freud and Abraham, the latter of whom was indeed in Zurich together with him. Presumably it was the latter contact that made him decide to settle—as he thought permanently—in Berlin at the end of 1908. He was present at the First International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Salzburg in 1908, and was, I think, with the possible exception of Drs. Federn and Hitschmann, the only person who has attended all the fifteen congresses.

One heard little about Eitingon in those early years, but in 1920 he performed the greatest deed of his life, one which will never cease reverberating. It was announced that some unknown donor had provided means to found an Institut