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Analysand of Sigmund Freud; officer of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; training analyst in the Vienna, Topeka, and Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institutes; biologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist prior to his psychoanalytic training; military physician in World War I; escapee from Nazi tyranny and concentration camp inmate in World War II; valued teacher and friend to several generations of psychoanalytic trainees; affectionate and loving family man—Robert Jokl lived a long and rich life.
He was born in Czechoslovakia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the Carl Ferdinand University in Prague, he first studied marine biology and philosophy, then attended medical school at the same university, receiving his medical degree in 1915. After serving as assistant physician in the Department of Medicine of the university, the was appointed an exchange assistant in the clinic of Professor Bleuler in Zürich, where he received his neurological training. It was during this period that he developed an interest in psychiatry.
Dr. Jokl's life was disrupted by two holocausts—World Wars I and II—which he survived although he was in grave danger during both. In World War I, as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he conducted typhus research and was sent to the Eastern Front to combat a cholera epidemic. There he contracted typhus fever, narrowly escaping death. After recovery he was sent to the Italian Front, was captured by the Italian army, and spent a year in Monte Cassino as a prisoner of war.
At the end of World War I, after Dr. Jokl had returned to civilian life, Bleuler suggested he visit Sigmund Freud. He was accepted by Freud for psychoanalytic training and was analyzed by him for two years. From 1919 to 1922, he had a number of control cases with Freud, Federn, Hitschmann, and Bernfeld. In