Emanuel Peterfreund, M.D. 1924-1990

Emanuel Peterfreund, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Psychoanalytic Books, passed away on December 11, 1990 after a long struggle with Leukemia.

Manny was born in Brooklyn in 1924, the second of three children. His was a traditionally Jewish family. He attended Yeshiva Etz Chaim before New Utrecht High School from which he entered City College. Manny's father was a business man and his two sons were groomed to enter the world of commerce via accounting, but “fate” had other plans. After receiving a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1943, Manny entered the Army where he attained the rank of Staff Sergeant in the 118th Signal Radio Intelligence Company.

The Army recognized Manny's brilliance and until his discharge in 1945 he spent his time intercepting and decoding secret German radio messages. During the Battle of the Bulge Manny had a dream that he disguised in Information, Systems, and Psychoanalysis (1971), but in The Process of Psychoanalytic Therapy (1983) he revealed that it was his dream. It is one of the finest specimens of dream interpretation that I have read and should be required reading. He had been reading “The Interpretation of Dreams” prior to the dream and thus the seeds of his future profession seem to have been laid.

He soon realized that his interests were not in commerce but in the mind. He received his M.D. from The University of Chicago in 1950 where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. His internship was at The Mount Sinai Hospital and his Psychiatric residency at Bellevue Hospital, the Veterans Administration, and Hillside Hospital. He completed a fellowship in Child Psychiatry at the Jewish Board of Guardians and graduated from The New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1959. For most of his professional career he was affiliated with Mount Sinai where he was an Associate Attending and Associate Clinical Professor in the Medical