Notes and News

Dr. Franz Alexander, who 25 years ago founded Chicago's Institute for Psychoanalysis and made this city the home of the nation's first training institution for psychoanalysts, was honored at a farewell banquet on October 12 at the Blackstone Hotel.

Hundreds of prominent people in all professions were on hand to pay tribute to Dr. Alexander, who is retiring as head of the Institute, which under his direction has become a leading center of research into mental illness. New director of the Institute will be Dr. Gerhart Piers, himself an Institute alumnus.

Dr. Alexander gave a farewell address to the city he first came to in 1930 as Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Chicago. At the end of October he moved to California to become director of the new psychiatric research center of the Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He is a former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has been a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

A native of Budapest, Dr. Alexander came to Chicago from the staff of the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he started a career-long chain of noteworthy “firsts” by having been the first student of the first institute of its kind in the world in 1920.

Under his direction, the Chicago Institute, which he founded in 1932, became the scene of the nation's first organized research activity in psychoanalysis. Pioneering research in psychosomatic medicine at the Institute, led by Dr. Alexander, revealed for the first time many underlying emotional factors in the development of a number of diseases and offered new hope to sufferers of such ailments as duodenal ulcer, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and dermatitis.

Admission policies and practices of child guidance clinics are discussed in a new Public Health Service publication entitled “Some Aspects of Child Guidance Clinic Intake Policy and Practices.” (Public Health Monograph No. 42.)

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