Eduard Hitschmann—1871–1957

When death overcame Dr. Eduard Hitschmann on 31 July 1957, his association with psycho-analysis had lasted for fifty-two years, of which he had spent thirty-three with Freud and the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society.

Hitschmann was born on 28 July 1871 in Vienna, then the unrivalled centre of Central European culture and medical education. He attended the best of its secondary schools, the Akademisches Gymnasium, for eight years, receiving instruction in the classics and the humanities, which from then on were the basis of his profound cultural and literary interests. It was here that he met Paul Federn. Like his grandfather, he decided to study medicine, receiving his medical education at the University of Vienna. This was followed by eight years of apprenticeship at the University hospitals; he worked for some years with the internist Neusser, and was in close contact with other famous representatives of the Vienna Medical School. In the neurological and psychiatric departments he served under Krafft-Ebing, and if anyone could call himself an eyewitness of psychiatric evolution, it was certainly Dr. Hitschmann.

Coming from a well-to-do middle-class family, he found the way into general practice not too arduous. Always in close relations with the University's teaching staff, locally as well as spiritually, his cultural interests and orientation were no mere pastime but an essential ingredient of his professional and private life.

None the less, there must have been cause for frustration and dissatisfaction in the life of a general practitioner, in spite of the esteem Hitschmann enjoyed among the Viennese middle class. He seems to have felt the stirring of new and revolutionary ideas, and began to pay attention to those unconventional currents and aspects of life which he had not been taught during his University years and were held in abhorrence in society. Consequently, his friend Paul Federn, who was similarly disposed, made Hitschmann attend Freud's lecture