author
Karl Abraham
1877–1925
A key figure in the early psychoanalytic movement, this German doctor helped shape ideas about infant development, character formation, and depression. A close collaborator of Sigmund Freud, he also played a major role in building psychoanalysis in Berlin and beyond.
1 Audiobook
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
by Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Ernst Simmel
About the author
Born in Bremen on May 3, 1877, Karl Abraham was a German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who became one of the most important early followers of Sigmund Freud. He studied medicine in Germany and later worked at the Burghölzli hospital in Zürich under Eugen Bleuler, where he encountered the new ideas that would lead him toward psychoanalysis.
Abraham went on to become a central organizer as well as a theorist. He founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and was later active in the International Psychoanalytical Association. His writing explored infant sexuality, stages of libido development, character formation, and mental illness, and his work was especially influential in early thinking about depression and the relationship between childhood experience and adult emotional life.
Though he died relatively young in Berlin on December 25, 1925, Abraham left a lasting mark on the history of psychoanalysis. He is often remembered both for his own clinical and theoretical work and for the generations of analysts influenced by the Berlin school that grew around him.