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A. J. Storfer belonged to the first generation of Freud's collaborators, although he himself never practised psychoanalysis. Like many others of the master's disciples he came to Vienna from Zurich, Switzerland. He was not yet twenty when the psychology of the unconscious became an emotional experience for him. As early as 1911 he published a study called On The Exceptional Position of Parricide, 'a historicolegal and comparative psychological study', and in 1914 Mary's Virginal Motherhood, 'a psychological fragment on sex symbolism'.
Storfer's later activity in Vienna is well known. He was head of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag and coedited Freud's collected works. He published books of many psychoanalysts and also the two official magazines of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1929, he founded his own magazine Die Psychoanalytische Bewegung (The Psychoanalytic Movement) and within the four years of his editorship he made it a cultural organ highly appreciated in Germany. Storfer, himself an excellent journalist, picked a staff of contributors from the growing reservoir of psychoanalytic writers. His Bewegung reflected the impression made by the young science on wide circles in Europe and America and its thriving in the midst of enthusiastic followers and embittered opponents.
In addition to all this, Storfer wrote two philological books which because of their thorough erudition were well received by critics. Words and Their Vicissitudes was published in 1935 after he left the Verlag, the second volume, In the Jungle of Language, in 1937. He had finished the preliminaries for a third volume of philological investigation but all his notes, painstakingly collected during several years of work, were confiscated by the Nazis when in December 1938 he embarked at Bremen.