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When Franz Alexander left Berlin in 1930 to take a position as Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago, Freud's parting words were: ‘I hope America will leave something intact of the real Alexander’ (Alexander, 1960, p. 101). Freud's wistful remark reflected his perception of Americans as superficial and commercial. Freud complained to Alexander that his teachings would be ‘diluted’ because Americans ‘lack emotional investment in genuine understanding,’ preferring quick solutions and material success (Alexander, 1960, p. 99). Since Freud considered Alexander ‘one of our strongest hopes for the future,’ as he wrote in 1926, he worried about the influence of American attitudes on him. Was this concern justified?
Who was the ‘real’ Alexander who went from medical school in Hungary to psychoanalytic training in Berlin to a prominent but controversial career in clinical, research, and institutional psychoanalysis in the US? Did Alexander uphold Freud's vision of psychoanalysis or did he corrupt it?
To explore these questions, I will trace Alexander's moves from Budapest to Berlin to Chicago to Los Angeles, and consider his background, his development as a psychoanalyst, the trajectory of his career in the US, and some of the controversies his work stimulated along the way. I will suggest that Alexander's early training and career in Berlin influenced his subsequent work in three ways, two straightforward and explicit, and the third less so. First, the Berlin Polyclinic and Institute provided an organizational model for the training program and the outpatient clinic of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Second, Alexander became known