Edmund Bergler, a major Freudian theoretician and clinician, was born in Austria on July 20, 1899, and died in New York City on February 6, 1962. Bergler received his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1926, and married Marianne Blumberger in 1929. He served on the staff of Freud's clinic in Vienna from 1927-1933, and was an assistant director there from 1933-1938, when he moved to the United States. A prolific speaker and writer, he published nearly three hundred papers and twenty-four books, as well as lecturing and giving interviews.

Bergler's contribution to psychoanalytic thought was remarkable. He extended and made clinically usable several of Freud's later concepts, including superego cruelty, unconscious masochism, and the importance of the pre-oedipal oral mother-attachment. Hitschmann spoke of his "extraordinary talent for the specialty of psychoanalysis . . . his command of the entire subject matter, his...