Sandor Rado and the Fate of the Berlin Model in New York

Sandor Rado, born in Hungary in 1890, first studied law in Budapest and Berlin. After happening across a pamphlet written by his countryman Sandor Ferenczi, he decided to study medicine and psychoanalysis. Wherever he was, he quickly rose to prominence in the psychoanalytic landscape. In Budapest he joined the close circle around Ferenczi, and in 1913, at the age of 23, he became a founding member and Secretary of the original Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. After moving to Berlin in 1922 to join the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and be analyzed by Karl Abraham he soon became a core faculty member, and his analysands included Heinz Hartmann, Otto Fenichel, and Wilhelm Reich.

Among his supervisees were Rodolph Lowenstein and Franz Alexander, both of whom recalled him as brilliant and influential. He became such a valued contributor in Berlin that by 1924 he was asked by Freud to take over from Otto Rank as editor of both of Freud's journals, the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and Imago, remaining as editor until his emigration to America. By the early 1930s he had already written papers on melancholia, on addiction, and on therapeutic action that remain classics of the psychoanalytic literature. In 1931 he was invited by A.A. Brill to become the first Education Director of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (NYPS), a post he held until 1941. In New York he quickly became controversial as he developed his own theorizing in a direction that vigorously questioned Freud's libido theory, Freud's theory of female development, notions about masochism, and, finally, structural theory. After the post of Education Director was abolished-specifically in order to depose him-in 1941, Rado went on to found the Columbia Psychoanalytic