On April 22, 1899, Eduard Kronengold was born in Lemberg, now Lvov, to a local businessman and his wife Dora. Later, in the U.S., he changed his name to Edward
Kronold. Little more is known about his family, not even whether he had any siblings. He grew up in Crakow, like Lemberg then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Kronold attended gymnasium in Crakow and began the study of medicine there in 1917. A lecture on The Interpretation of Dreams aroused his interest in psychoanalysis and drew him to Vienna. There he attended medical school for two years, after which he moved to Berlin, where he graduated in 1924. Returning then to Vienna, he worked at the University Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases under Julius Wagner-Jauregg and Paul Schilder. In 1925 Kronold joined the staff of the psychoanalytic outpatient department, which had been founded in 1922. Patients were treated there free of charge, mostly by analytic candidates. Grete Bibring, Richard Sterba, and Kronold were the first clinic physicians to be given salaried positions.
In the same year, Kronold went to Wilhelm Reich to begin a personal analysis. He was Reich's first candidate in training. He also attended Reich's seminar on technique, which he praised highly. Kronold was among the first group to graduate from the training institute of the Vienna Society, which officially opened in 1925. A personal analysis was not required until 1926. Kronold's classmates included Anny Angel (later Katan), Edith Buxbaum, Jenny Pollak-Wälder, and Editha and Richard Sterba.
In 1928 Reich and Marie Pappenheim-Frischauf, a specialist in skin and venereal diseases, founded the Socialist Society for Sexual Counseling. It was staffed by volunteer psychiatrists, most of them analysts, and specialists in obsterics and gynecology. Annie Reich was on staff, and Kronold joined in 1930. In 1932 he married Stefanie Haaz, an ob-gyn specialist from Hungary.
Soon after Hitler's annexation of Austria, the Kronolds left Vienna and traveled, via Prague, to England. He was offered a position as training analyst in Glasgow, but went on to the U.S. because Steffi could not obtain a work permit. From that point on, they lived in New York City, where Kronold immediately became active in the New York Institute. There he became a training analyst and served as president from 1958 to 1959.
Kronold published only one paper, “Two Cases of Fetishisms,” which he wrote in German with Richard Sterba. In 1936 it appeared in the Quarterly, in an English translation by Bettina
photo by Stephen Frishauf
Warburg. It is unclear whether it had appeared earlier in German. Expanding on Fenichel's concept of male fetishism, the authors describe two patients who identified with women through acts of masochistic fetishism.
In 1973 Kronold wrote Otto Isakower's obituary for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, a moving tribute to his contemporary and colleague from the early days in Vienna. Isakower was a shy, very private person, but Kronold succeeded remarkably in portraying him as the warm, sensitive human being and inspired teacher he had been.
A brief contribution Kronold made to a discussion of Anna Freud's 1954 lecture, “Problems of Technique in Adult Psychoanalysis,” perhaps best illustrates the flexible and humane approach he took with his patients. One of his very first cases, a woman, threatened suicide early in treatment. Having consulted an experienced colleague, he visited the patient at home and persuaded her to hand him the weapon. This attitude was characteristic of the entire group in Vienna, Freud included. Exceptions from the rule were accepted. Ernst Kris once said, “You have to win the patient over in the beginning and not expect adherence to strict rules.”
After his wife's death of lung cancer in the 1960s, Kronold pretty much withdrew from social life. To those he kept in touch with, however, he was an inexhaustible font of information. He never forgot a name or the title of a paper. A highly educated man and a dedicated analyst, Ed Kronold will also be remembered for his subtle, but never malicious, sense of humor. Always there was that twinkle in his eye.