San Francisco's psychoanalytic community was given much of its current form by a small group of European analysts who, having fled the Nazi plague, settled in the Bay Area in the late 1930s. While some of these analysts had on occasion seen Sigmund Freud, or even had brief contacts with him, only Siegfried Bernfeld could claim to have been Freud's student. Accounts of Bernfeld's contributions to psychoanalysis have typically been written by his colleagues in Europe, who knew little of his work in San Francisco and consequently wrote little about it. Since his death in 1953 his memory has faded and ultimately been lost to all but a handful of Bay Area analysts fortunate enough in their early careers to have studied under him. Resurrecting the memory of this inspiring man, both a psychoanalytic pioneer and one of the strongest links in the chain of descent from Sigmund Freud in Vienna to members of the San Francisco psychoanalytic community, provides a sense of lineage, continuity and context.
Siegfried Bernfeld was born May 7, 1892, in Lvov, Ukraine, then included in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and known as Lemberg. He grew up in Vienna, where his father, a Hungarian Jew, was a clothing merchant. His mother, like Freud's, was considerably younger than her husband. Siegfried, their firstborn, was followed by a brother and a sister.
Interested in psychology, he became familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud and read The Interpretation of Dreams in 1907 while still at the gymnasium. Completing his studies there in 1910, the young Bernfeld entered the University of Vienna to study plant physiology. While pursuing that subject as well as his interests in psychology, he was active in both the socialist and the Zionist youth movements and worked for a time as secretary to Martin Buber.
Bernfeld was a prolific writer. His first publication, a review of William Stern's Psychological Methods of Intelligence Tests and Their Application to School Children, was published in 1912, when Bernfeld was but twenty years old. The following year, the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse published a second article, “Unconscious Determination of the Thinking Process: A Self Observation.”
In 1914 he married Anne Salomon, who shared his interest and involvement in left wing politics and the Zionist movement. The Bernfelds had two daughters, both born during the First World War. After changing his major from botany to pedagogy and psychology, Bernfeld completed his Ph.D. in 1915. On May 12, 1915, he joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as a “guest.” From 1916 to 1921 he was a prominent leader and organizer in the Jewish Youth Movement and on behalf of Zionism. In 1919 he became a full member of the Psychoanalytic Society. That same year he launched the Kinderheim Baumgarten, a residential school for Jewish war orphans and a demonstration center for progressive education based on psychoanalytic principles. From the beginning he was recognized as an inspiring and eloquent lecturer and a leading advocate of progressive education.
In 1922 he began analytic practice in Vienna and shortly thereafter began teaching at the first Psychoanalytic Institute in association with Hermann Nunberg, Theodor Reik, Eduard Hitschmann, and others. In this period Bernfeld wrote a number of articles and books on childhood, adolescence and alternative education. In 1925 he published Psychology des Sauglings which was translated into English in 1929 as The Psychology of the Infant.
In 1926 Bernfeld separated from his first wife. She moved east, and he went west. Moving to Berlin, he married the actress Liesl Neumann, reestablished his analytic practice, and began to teach at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. There too he was acknowledged as a brilliant and dedicated teacher. In a letter of recommendation written in 1931, Freud said of Bernfeld: “He is an outstanding expert of psychoanalysis. I consider him perhaps the strongest head among my students and followers. In addition he is of superior knowledge, an overwhelming speaker and an extremely powerful teacher. Thus I can say all in all only the very best about him and we deeply regretted it when he left for Berlin.”
Within the emerging positivist culture of the Vienna Circle and logical positivism in the 1920s and early Thirties there arose an effort to anchor psychoanalytic theory in the physical sciences. Thus Bernfeld, with his background in botany and mathematics, was led to collaborate with Sergei Feitelberg in a series of scientific and physiological studies proposing to measure libido. In 1930 they published Energie und Trieb. The only part of this work translated into English is an article entitled “The Principle of Entropy and the Death Instinct,” which appeared in 1931 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
In 1932, Hitler was receiving increasingly popular support. Bernfeld separated from his second wife and returned to Vienna. He had studied there under Freud and had been analyzed by Hanns Sachs. As a member of the second generation, his cohort included Anna Freud, August Aichhorn, and Willi Hoffer. The four of them conducted a weekly study group on psychoanalytic pedagogy which was open not only to candidates in training but to school teachers and social workers as well. This study group was conducted in conjunction with their work on the Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalytische Padagogik. This journal, based originally in Switzerland, was moved to Vienna under Hoffer's leadership, was closed down in 1938, and was resurrected after the Second World War in its Anglo-American form as The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
In Vienna Bernfeld married Suzanne Cassirer Paret. She was the daughter of Paul Cassirer, a well-known Berlin art dealer, and the niece of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. She had studied both philosophy and medicine, had been analyzed by Hanns Sachs, and by Sigmund Freud, and subsequently becme a practicing psychoanalyst. At the end of 1934 Bernfeld moved to Menton, France with Suzanne, his daughters Ruth and Rose Marie, and Suzanne's two children from a previous marriage, Renate and Peter Paret.
From as early as 1918, Bernfeld had been attempting to emigrate to Palestine. Now Fascism and antisemitism were spreading through Europe at a feverish pace, and he was still unable to go there. The political situation was bad and getting worse. Knowing they had to leave France, he obtained visas for his family to go to England and then to the United States, where the New York psychoanalytic establishment urged him to go west to San Francisco. Frances Deri, Otto Fenichel, and Ernst Simmel, also recent emigres, had already settled in Los Angeles. Bernfeld arrived in San Francisco in August 1937.
The psychoanalytic community he found there was quite small. The only analysts in town were Joseph Thompson, M.D., an American-born analyst; his two lay analyst students, Aaron Morafka and Earl W. Nelson; and the Berlin-trained analyst Bernhard Berliner. With such a small psychoanalytic community, Bernfeld was once again in the position of being a major teacher at the founding of yet another psychoanalytic institute. From the beginning, Thompson and his students, committed to the cause of lay analysis, kept their distance from the emigre analysts, who were forming a psychoanalytic community that adhered to the American Psychoanalytic Association's requirement that analysts hold M.D. degrees, a policy the non-medical Bernfeld was himself to chafe at in later years. Joining forces with Berliner and a number of recent arrivals, he participated in psychoanalytic study groups
held under the auspices of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1942 the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society was formed and licensed under the aegis of the Topeka Psychoanalytic Society. Later that same year, the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society was accepted as a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
In addition to his private practice and teaching duties at the Institute, Bernfeld was engaged in research at the Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, where investigations were under way to study the methods used by asthmatic children in dealing with psychological problems. He was also on the staff of the now legendary Mount Zion Veterans Rehabilitation Clinic, where he worked under the direction of Jacob Kasanin. Also on this illustrious staff were Berliner, Erik Erikson, Joseph Henderson, Donald Macfarlane, Anna Maenchen, Joseph Wheelwright, and Emanuel Windholz. Erikson had referred to Bernfeld, whom he had previously known in Vienna, as “a powerful figure.” Maenchen said that in Vienna Bernfeld's eloquence had earned him the title “The Caruso of the psychoanalytic movement.” Wheelwright considered him “Freud's last protege,” while E. B. Spiller counted him “second only to Freud.” Haskell Norman, a student at the San Francisco Institute in the late forties, described Bernfeld as “a very impressive lecturer … he seemed like the closest thing to Freud at that time.”
Though Bernfeld was a founding member of the San Francisco Institute, its foremost teacher, a training analyst, and the recognized leader of the psychoanalytic movement in San Francisco, he was permitted only an honorary membership, as the American Psychoanalytic Association did not then grant full membership to non-M.D. analysts. Though openly frustrated with the Institute's policies regarding membership, hierarchies, and other typical pitfalls of bureaucratization, he maintained his affiliation with the Institute and continued to teach there. In 1944, however, he started his own informal training program with a few students at his home. This unauthorized training, clearly in violation of the rules of The American, began with a small group that included Suzanne Bernfeld, Nathan Adler, Agnes Ain, Steven Pepper, Marian Russell, and a couple of others. They had reading seminars and discussed cases. After a time the group disbanded, but the Bernfelds continued to supervise and refer cases to Adler and Ain. Adler, Bernfeld's analysand, student, and friend from 1938 until Bernfeld's death in 1953, has described his mentor as “one of the most eloquent speakers I've ever heard. He identified with Freud so he smoked too much, and also, like Freud, he lectured without notes. His extemporaneous lectures, though not in his native language, would be in the most precise, elegant, and exquisite prose! I sat at the edge of my seat listening not only to what he said but to the way he spoke. It was an aesthetic experience.”
Adler remembers Bernfeld as a man “with zest, humor, playfulness, and wit.” He recalls Bernfeld's genetics experiments in the breeding of siamese cats and the way that he lovingly distributed the kittens to his students and friends. Hildegard Berliner, the wife of Bernhard Berliner and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in her own right, echoes Adler's sentiments: “He was full of life—vim and vigor. He loved nature … I adored him. I loved to listen to him talk about politics.”
Adler challenges the popular notion that the left wing emigre analysts sold out when they came to America. “Fenichel, Bernfeld, Fromm, Horney, and the rest had all been radicals and left wingers. When they came to the U.S.A. they just fell in love with America and were delighted with F.D.R. In the New Deal world they found a responsiveness that made it unnecessary to have to move further left. There was enough openness in the country to change policy, to have influence. What happened to this group was not that they sold out to America but rather that they fell into a great love affair with the America of the New Deal.”
In addition to analytic work, teaching at the Institute, and seminars and supervision with the small group convened in his home, Bernfeld continued to write. In 1938 he published “Types of Adolescence,” in 1940 “Camp and the Emotional Development of the child,” and in 1941 “The Facts of Observation in Psychoanalysis.” In 1944 he and Suzanne embarked on an on-going biographical project pertaining to Freud's early development and published their first collaborative paper “Freud's Early Childhood.” In 1946 Bernfeld published “An Unknown Autobiographical Fragment by Freud,” in 1949 “Freud's Scientific Beginnings,” and in 1951 “Sigmund Freud, M.D., 1882-1885.” In 1952, again with Suzanne, he published “Freud's First Years in Practice, 1886-1887.” “Freud's Studies on Cocaine: 1884-1887” was published posthumously in 1953.
On March 23, 1950, Ernest Jones initiated a collaboration with Bernfeld to aid her in the preparation of his three-volume biography of Freud (see Trosman and Wolf, 1973). Though they were men of very different temperaments, their close collaboration brought them both great pleasure in the last years of their lives. Bernfeld suffered a coronary thrombosis in December 1951. In June 1952 he had surgery to remove a tumor on his right lung. He died April 2, 1953. Jones continued the correspondence with Suzanne Bernfeld up until 1955. Jones died in 1958. Suzanne Bernfeld continued to practice as an analyst and to write articles until her death in 1962.
On November 10, 1952, only six months before his death, Siegfried Bernfeld delivered a lecture before the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Entitled “On Psychoanalytic Training,” it is a well thought out challenge to some of the consequences of Institute training that he had encountered.
The institute he described would be student-centered and progressive in its teaching approach. There would be few formal requirements for admission other than a passionate interest and a talent for psychoanalysis. Potential students would be followed in an informal way and if they showed further promise would be invited to meetings of the Psychoanalytic Society. Study would take place in small groups, with a focus largely on the interests of individual students. At some point a student would be taken into a training analysis, begin work with a control analyst, and, after a time, be confirmed as a member and analyst. The focus would be not on formal admissions requirements or the fulfillment of prescribed educational tasks but on the interests and talents of the student, the relationship with a teacher, and the pursuit of creative psychoanalytic work. This vision of a new kind of psychoanalytic institute was the model he used in recruiting and supervising practitioners outside the San Francisco Institute and was also quite similar to Bernfeld's own psychoanalytic training and mentorship with Sigmund Freud.
Daniel Benveniste, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in San Francisco. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Benveniste is currently doing archival and oral historical research on the origins of psychoanalysis in San Francisco.