A Bridge Between Psychoanalytic Worlds: A Dialogue With Rudolf Ekstein

Rudolf Ekstein, Ph.D., is an internationally known psychoanalyst who has written numerous articles and books on psychoanalytic topics such as psychoanalytic supervision, child therapy, psychoanalytic pedagogy, and a variety of clinical and historical topics. He received his psychoanalytic training in Vienna from 1935 to 1938 under Willi Hoffer, August Aichhorn, Anna Freud, and others. His emigration in 1938 took him from Vienna to England to Boston to New York to Topeka and on to Los Angeles. The edited dialogue before you is about his training and emigration and the people he met along the way. As an edited dialogue, it is a condensation and displacement of two personal interviews conducted at his home in Los Angeles and one public lecture. The lecture, entitled “The Emigration of Psychoanalysis from Vienna to Los Angeles,” was presented in a symposium sponsored by The Friends of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute on September 23, 1995. The symposium, The Emigration of Psychoanalysis from Vienna to California, included additional presentations by Hildegard Berliner, M.S., Haskell Norman, M.D., Beulah Parker, M.D., and Daniel Benveniste, Ph.D. Dr. Ekstein's slide and lecture presentation reproduced for the audience a similar experience to my interviews with him at his home in Los Angeles, which is a veritable museum of psychoanalytic memorabilia including photographs, old books, and other psychoanalytic artifacts. His lecture was illustrated with slides of Viennese psychoanalytic luminaries, many of whom he knew personally. The photos were drawn from books on psychoanalytic history and from Dr. Ekstein's personal collection. Thus, you will find the following edited dialogue partially organized around some of these photographs. So