Siegfried Bernfeld—1892-1953

The second generation of psychoanalysts is beginning to leave us. That their passing is in the 'natural course of events' does not make it easier to accept. The denial of death dies hard. In the instance of Siegfried Bernfeld the problem and the situation are not different, but the feeling is perhaps still more poignant. The loosely defined group which I call the second generation of freudians is part of our contemporary life and of our professional functioning. This second generation is composed of those who were and are at once our teachers and colleagues, our intellectual masters and equals. The majority of this second generation is further distinguished by the fact that they are expatriates, people uprooted from their cultural cradles in Germany, Austria and Hungary and transplanted at a late period into a type of life wholly alien.

Imagine how very strangely different was a childhood spent in the ancient Polish city of Lwow (Lemberg) of the old Austrian Empire, and a youth lived in Vienna before the First World War, from the premature autumn of one's maturity in Marin County near San Francisco during the Second World War and immediately afterward. Bernfeld was destined to cover this physical and psychological distance, and he performed the task with intensity, fieriness, almost impetuousness which were so characteristic of him. When about three years before his death he came to New York to deliver the Brill Lecture to the New York Psychoanalytic Society his English was impeccable and self-assured. He was sufficiently Americanized that he had conquered the distance without even a self-conscious shrug of his shoulders, and yet he preserved his Viennese old-worldliness, his cultural elasticity and creative resilience. For this alone one would be forever grateful, because it is given to very few to synthesize the old traditions of European culture with the new