International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Abraham, Karl (1877-1925)

Karl Abraham, a German psychoanalyst and doctor, was born May 3, 1877, and died December 25, 1925, in Berlin. The son of Nathan Abraham, a businessman, and Ida Oppenheim, he was the youngest of two sons in an Orthodox Jewish family. After studying medicine in Würzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg-im-Breisgau, he married his cousin Hedwig Bürgner in 1906. They had two children; his daughter was the well-known psychoanalyst Hilda Abraham.

Abraham began his training in psychiatry in Berlin, then in Zurich with Eugen Bleuler, where the physician-in-chief was Carl Gustav Jung. It was here that he became familiar with Freud's writings. In 1907 he opened an office in Berlin and, in 1910, founded the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. From 1914 to 1918 he was mobilized as chief physician in a psychiatric unit. It was during this time that he grew interested in studying war neuroses. He was president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) from 1918 to 1925.

A student and friend of Freud, he was a member of the secret "Committee" from its inception. In 1918, he received an award in recognition of his work in analysis. Co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, and Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, he was the analyst and teacher of Felix Boehm, Helene Deutsch, Edward and James Glover, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Sándor Radó, Theodor Reik, and Ernst Simmel.

In addition to his research on collective psychology ("Dreams and Myths," 1909/1949), Abraham made important original contributions to the study of the development of the libido, including Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Frund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen (1924) (A Short Study of the Development of the Libido Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders, 1929). Abraham's starting point was Freud's theory of the stages of pregenital organization (1916-1917). He introduced a differentiation in the phase of libido development designated by Freud as oral-cannibalistic by proposing the existence of two aspects of oral activity—sucking and biting. Based on this hypothesis, he inferred two different modes of infantile object relation, incorporation by sucking and destruction by biting. This last relation was said to introduce the conflict of ambivalence into the infant's life. Starting with this conflict, Abraham interpreted the ego disturbances of the melancholic adult: the ambivalence of the instinctual life causes a withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object; the liberated libido then turns toward the ego, which introjects the object. Abraham links the psychogenesis of melancholy with the disappointing mother during the early infantile phase of libido development. If it occurs before the successful mastery of oedipal wishes, that is, during the phase preceding the triumph of the narcissistic stage, then an associative link is made between the Oedipus complex and the cannibalistic stage of libido development. This would make possible the consecutive introjection of the two love objects, the father and mother.

Even before Abraham had begun to study manic-depressive psychosis (from 1916 to 1924), he had made an important discovery in the research on schizophrenia in Die psychosexuelle Differenz der Hysterie und der Dementia Präcox (1908) (Psychosexual Differences between Hysteria and Dementia Praecox, 1949): Disturbances of ego functions are secondary with respect to the disturbances in the libidinal area. Thus Abraham could make use of libido theory to understand dementia praecox. In this same work Abraham introduced the concept of "autism," which was later taken up by Eugen Bleuler (1911).

Abraham is one of the founders of psychoanalytic research on psychoses, on collective psychoanalytic psychology and, with Sándor Ferenczi and Ernst Simmel, on the psychoanalysis of war neuroses. His principal work, "Examination of the Earliest Pregenital Stage of Libido Development," has continued to stimulate research in the field down to the present day. The Psychoanalytic Training Institute he created in Berlin has become a model for other institutes throughout the world and the current Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin bears his name. Abraham published five books and 115 articles and made numerous presentations at IPA congresses. His complete works have been collected and translated into several languages.

JOHANNES CREMERIUS

Work discussed: "Dreams and Myths."

See also: Depression; Germany; Libidinal stage; Libido; Mania; Melancholia; Visual and psychoanalysis; Secret Committee; Work of mourning.