Dr. J. F. Wittmann

Jean Frois-Wittmann died in Paris on October 2, 1937, in his forty-sixth year, carried off in less than a week by an acute infectious disease. He started his adult life as a painter, being a remarkably gifted draughtsman, and had joined the Cubist movement when came the Great War with all its human suffering. He was given work at the American Hospital in Neuilly and gathered there a concrete experience of the emotions of mankind such that after the war he felt the need for an active interest in human behavior and psychology.

He then left France for the United States where he worked his way through the course of Psychology at Princeton University with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. His thesis, entitled “The Judgment of Facial Expression,” was printed in April, 1930, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. XIII, No. 2.

It was during his stay in the U.S.A. that Jean Frois-Wittmann came into contact with psychoanalysis to which he immediately took wholeheartedly. He met Sandor Ferenczi and followed his course of lectures; he read extensively and soon was taken as an assistant in Clarke's clinic. After a time he had to return to France, reluctantly, for he had given his heart to America and was assured of a future there, but he had an urge to fight the battle for psychoanalysis where he thought he was most needed. With undaunted courage he started, at thirty-nine, his medical course in Paris and he should have taken his degree the year after he died. He had been a member of the French Psychoanalytical Society since 1932.

His death is a double loss: we are bereaved of a priceless friend and Science is deprived of a promising work which is left undone. Medical studies together with an average of seven hours a day psychoanalytical practice does not leave much time for original constructive writing. Nevertheless he published in English a paper on Preliminary Psychos analytical Considerations of Modern Art in  Archives of Psychoanalysis, Vol.  I, Part IV, 1927, and va