In the summer of 1945 I began an internship at Cedars of Lebanon in Los Angeles. My new roommate, assigned to me because we were both refugees, was a man much older than myself. He introduced himself to me as Otto Fenichel, a psychoanalyst originally from Vienna, where he had completed his medical education some twenty-five years earlier. He was undertaking this internship now in order to obtain his California license. Since my interest at the time was in pediatrics, his name meant nothing to me. However, I did have some familiarity with psychoanalysis, from reading and from a medical school lecture delivered by Ernst Simmel.
Fenichel soon became a father figure to me. I was only then beginning to discover that most of my relatives and friends had not survived the war in Europe.
Fenichel had a hard time as an intern. The hospital made no allowances whatever for his being almost fifty years old. He had bluish lips, and if memory serves he told me once that he had been turned down for military duty in Austria because of his heart. He was a very compatible roommate, and we got along very well, though occasionally he would talk in his sleep in German. It became obvious that getting up in the middle of the night was very hard on him. In addition, he was without doubt the worst of all interns when it came to starting IVs. After a while all the interns preferred to do his IVs for him, rather than being called after he had tried all the accessible veins. At night, being a light sleeper anyway, I did some of his night calls and all of his IVs for him. What he may have lacked in fine motor coordination, however, he more than compensated for in intellectual brilliance. I clearly remember his excellent reasoning when it came to our discussions with EKG specialists. I recall also that he was very busy reading galley proofs, of what I later realized was The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis.
We talked quite a bit about psychoanalysis, about psychosomatic cases, and also about his frustration with some of the attending physicians, especially the neurologist Eugene Ziskind, who kept challenging him to prove there was such a thing as the unconscious. We talked about child analysis and pediatrics. I met his wife and some of his friends, like David Brunswick and Frances Deri. In October 1945, on the occasion of my marriage, he gave me the first volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and inscribed it: “This book may remind you of your marriage and internship. October 6, 1945, Fenichel.”
A few months later, in January 1946, Fenichel developed a cold. He stayed home in bed that day. I recall what his wife Hanna told me: “He sat in bed reading a newspaper and suddenly developed a coughing spell; he complained of a severe headache and died instantly.”
Everyone assumed he had died of a heart attack. Guilt feelings at the hospital ran high. At Hanna's request, I attended the autopsy. An aneurysm of the Circle of Willis was found, and his heart was perfectly normal. Despite these findings, however, the story of Fenichel's “heart attack” took on a life of its own. Recently, it cropped up again in Young-Bruehl's biography of Anna Freud.
The tragic death of Otto Fenichel in 1946 shocked the analytic world in general and was for me of particular significance, given its emotional and historical context. Tragedy and loss were not new to me, of course, since the shadow of Hitler had begun to darken more and more of the brightly lit stage that once was Europe. But one is never immune to loss, no matter how much one has suffered, and the news of Fenichel's death affected me deeply.
I first met him in 1935 in Prague. He had come there via Norway from his native Vienna, I had come via Budapest from my native Berlin. I was a student of psychoanalysis. He was the chairman of our study group.
During my years of training I had a number of fine clinicians as teachers. Annie Reich and Edith Jacobson were among my supervisors, but the two who influenced me the most were Otto Fenichel and Anna Freud. The atmosphere in Fenichel's seminars was very informal and relaxed. Fenichel could inspire and coax the best out of his students. During the Prague years I was an inexperienced beginner quite unsure of myself, and he helped me to feel more accepting of myself. In fact, he treated all of us in the same open way. After the seminars we would often play ping-pong together. One of the last times I saw Fenichel was in March 1938, on the day Hitler marched into Vienna. On that fateful day I was invited to dinner at Fenichel's house. Soon afterward he left for America. I was less wise and had to endure jour months of Hitler in Prague before arriving in London six weeks before the war began.
When Fenichel's letter reached me (see facsimile) I had decided to go to America to join my brother and his family. It seems that for all of us who were forced to leave the country of our birth family ties took on a special importance.
Elizabeth Gero-Heymann