You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is an important and fascinating document in the history of psychoanalysis. The Berlin Institute, founded in 1920 by Karl Abraham and Max Eitingon, was the first Psychoanalytic Institute; its Poliklinic the first Psychoanalytic Treatment Center.
The fiftieth anniversary of its founding was celebrated in Berlin October 7 and 8, 1970, at a meeting where it was announced that the name of the Institute had been changed to the Karl Abraham Institute. In honor of the occasion the report on the first ten years was reprinted with a new Preface by Anna Freud (the Preface in the original is by her father). The corpus of the work consists of contributions by Ernst Simmel, Otto Fenichel, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Hans Lampl, Karen Horney, Hanns Sachs, Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, Siegfried Bernfeld, Felix Boehm, Eugen J. Hárnik, and Max Eitingon. There were greetings from abroad by Gregory Zilboorg and Ola Ranknes of Norway.
The contributions are models of clarity and condensation. It is striking how much rich instructive detail the small volume contains. I was impressed particularly by the steadfastness with which the founders and faculty of the Institute adhered to its three aims: psychoanalytic training, psychoanalytic treatment services for those who could not afford private treatment, and psychoanalytic research. A high level of social consciousness and responsibility pervades the material; it is most assuredly not the work of an insulated classbound coterie. Neither is the work time-bound or archaic. In fact, the details of the curricula, the financial and administrative headaches, and the problems of referral, indications for analysis, supervision, etc., all have a 'modern' flavor. I doubt whether we are now coping with many of these problems any more successfully than the Berliners were forty-one years ago.