Biographical Notes on Professor Imre Hermann

Imre Hermann was born in Budapest on the 13 November 1889; this year brings his 90th birthday. His interest in psychology began while he was studying medicine; he was accepted into Sandor Ferenczi's circle around the 1910s. Within a few years his liking for mathematics and experimental psychology merged with his therapeutic and scientific activity. he began to work as a psychoanalyst in 1919 and since that time he has been a member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

For the past 60 years he has been working with a high degree of commitment in the field of psychoanalytical research and therapy. Lilian Potter, one of his former pupils said about him at his 80th birthday celebration: 'He possesses the very rare, for me the most amazing, quality of a scholar: He is able to work through the upheavals of shattering historical events, in periods of isolation and in times when no reverberation of his thoughts can reach him'.

The most fertile period of his theoretical work came between the two world wars. He published seven books and seventy five papers mostly in German, edited by the International Psycho-Analytical Association. His major work, however, The Archaic Instincts of Man never surfaced in the mainstream of psychoanalytical publications of the period. It was published in Hungarian in 1943. Thirty years elapsed before this work appeared again at last, in French, in the 'Psychanalyse Contemporaire' series. Child psychoanalytical research done elsewhere which elaborated on the importance of the mother–child relationship during the pre-oedipal development has demonstrated since then the validity of Hermann's discovery. Hermann's concept of clinging serves as a conceptual basis for this type of research to this day.

The scope of Hermann's research work reflects his deep understanding of the workings of the unconscious, his careful observation of facts, his interest in experiments, his originality, his creative imagination and wide range of scho