Dr. Daniel Dreyfuss

Dr. Daniel Karl Dreyfuss died in Haifa on September 24, 1949, at the age of forty-four.

Hailing from a small country town in the Palatinate in Germany, he studied medicine in Munich, Vienna, Berlin and Heidelberg, where he continued his medical work as assistant at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University. Starting in Berlin he pursued his psycho-analytical training with Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and finished it, after emigrating to Palestine in 1934, under Dr. Eitingon's direction in Jerusalem.

These two phases of his medico-scientific career proved decisive for his professional interests. In Heidelberg he came into contact with patients who had suffered, since the time of the First World War, from traumatic neuroses. Using catharsis during hypnosis as his method, he tried hard to find a solution to the difficult therapeutic task before him and gained a good understanding of the manifold problems involved. Most of his publications are contributions to the theory of traumatic neuroses. A second field of great interest in which he invested much therapeutic effort and scientific research was the psychological problem of epilepsy.

Dreyfuss was deeply attached to psycho-analysis. He was well versed in its theory, proficient in its application, therapeutic and otherwise, always interested in its progress and keen for its propagation. But he did not confine his therapeutic equipment to it. He was one of the few in our circle who appreciated the value of hypnosis and knew how to apply it. Thus, too, he was the first physician in Jerusalem to try narco-analysis.

From his first day in Palestine Dreyfuss joined the staff of the Palestine (now Israel) Institute for Psycho-analysis, first as one of its assistants and lecturers, later, after Dr. Eitingon's death, us a member of its board of directors. When, after Israel's war of liberation, in which also Dreyfuss played his part, he decided to move to Haifa, his Jerusalem colleagues regretted this step very much.

But now,