Herman Nunberg—1884–1970

Herman Nunberg died on 20 May last, and it is fitting that we express our grief and our respect for this great psychoanalyst, colleague and good friend. Nunberg was fortunate to receive praise of a precious kind during his lifetime publicly in forewords to his books from Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud1 and finally from Heinz Hartmann on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1954. Herman Nunberg was born in Bendzin, Poland, on 23 January 1884, and in the book called Memoirs, which appeared last year, he gives us a vivid picture of certain aspects of his early life.

Anna Freud, in her introduction to this book, comments on the rarity of autobiographical accounts by psychoanalysts, and I think expresses a slight regret that the Memoirs contain more about his scientific endeavours than about his person. This is true, as all of us who recognize the intensity of Nunberg's investment in this side of his nature must agree; yet for all that, one other aspect of Nunberg's nature, not always generally known, is given prominence. I refer to his account of the aesthetic and imaginative side of his early life. He brings before us the beauty of the countryside around his birthplace, ruins of an old castle dominating the valley in which the town was located, where he took walks with his father. Later, still as a little boy, he recalls the medieval beauty of the town in which he grew up, Czenstochova, and an ancient fortress which surrounded a monastery there, and the monastery housed the famous Black Madonna and was the most important shrine in Poland. Nunberg received a lesson in religious emotion watching the pilgrims gathered around the monastery; he could, he said, never forget the scenes of 'violent piety' in the processions and in the pilgrims massed before the church.

Nunberg's parents were persons of culture, his father something of an artist and poet, and his mother well educated at home and also in Berlin, who spoke German with her children. Another move was conditioned b