Profile

Dr. Kardiner (a charter member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis), was born in New York, New York, in 1891. He attended public elementary school, Townsend Harris High School, and graduated from the City University of New York in 1912. He graduated from Cornell University Medical School with honors in 1917 and had an internship at Mt. Sinai Hospital between 1917 and 1919. After a residency at Manhattan State Hospital and a position as Medical Examiner of Children's Court, he, along with five other young American psychiatrists, embarked on a trip to Vienna in 1921 for a psychoanalysis with Freud, a personal and intellectual experience that greatly influenced the rest of his long and distinguished life.

Freud's sociological writings were particularly inspiring and triggered some of Kardiner's most creative work. He organized a seminar in 1933 at the New York Psychoanalytic Society, of which he became a member in 1919. The seminar was started with only two students, but within three years he had a class of 100, chiefly from Departments of Anthropology faculties. Among his students were Cora DuBois, Ralph Linton, and James West. Before long, the seminar was moved to the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, and ever since Kardiner's influence, especially in the study of smaller societies, has furthered the interpenetration of anthropology and psychoanalysis.

The best of his efforts, according to his own evaluation, were his two volumes, The Individual and His Society and The Psychological Frontiers of Society. In an earlier study, The Traumatic Neurosis of War, published in 1941, his attention was directed to aspects of psychoanalytic theory that he thought were inadequate. Kardiner has been in the forefront as a critic of orthodox psychoanalytic theory and as an innovator. With Dr. Lionel Ovesey, he collaborated on a study of 25 black individuals in which the authors evaluated the impact of white sociocultural attitudes on black personalit