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When Karl Abraham died on December 25, 1925, he was forty-eight years old. On that day, the international psychoanalytic movement lost one of its most important people: the president of the Internationale Vereinigung Psychoanalytische (the International Psychoanalytical Association) and of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society). Abraham was one of the most valuable training analysts of the latter organization; among his trainees were Edward Glover, James Glover, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Sándor Radó, Theodor Reik, and Ernst Simmel. Abraham was also a member of the so-called Secret Committee, an avid explorer of the early stages of libidinal development and character formation, a respected clinician, and a fine theorist interested in the study and treatment of major depressive psychopathology. To express his deep regret at this profound loss, Sigmund Freud wrote to Abraham's widow: “I have no substitute for him, and no consolatory words for you.”1
I started to study the life and work of Abraham in the 1970s, when his scientific papers were translated from German into Italian,2 and