Rapaport, David (1911-1960)

David Rapaport, a Hungarian psychoanalyst with a PhD in philosophy, was born in Budapest on September 30, 1911, and died December 14, 1960, in Stock-bridge, Massachusetts. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he quickly became active in the Zionist movement and, after studying mathematics and physics at the university, spent two years in a kibbutz in Palestine. There he married Elvira Strasser; their first child, Hanna, was born shortly after. Upon returning to Hungary in 1935, he ran the Young Zionist movement and began studying psychoanalysis with a relative, Samuel Rapaport, about whom he wrote two books. He was analyzed by Theodor Rajka from 1935 to 1938, and obtained his doctorate in psychology at the Royal University of Hungary, Petrus-Pazmany, in 1938, with a dissertation on the history of the concept of association from Bacon to Kant.

In December 1938, with the help of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he and his family traveled to the United States. He worked in New York as a psychologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, then at Osawatomie State Hospital, Kansas, for a year. In 1940 he joined the Menninger Clinic, in Topeka, Kansas, where he became director of the School of Clinical Psychology, then head of the Research Department. His Emotions and Psychology, which appeared in 1942, is a record of his early research, as is Diagnostic Psychological Testing (1945-1946), published in collaboration with Roy Schafer and Merton Gill.

In both books Rapaport refers to the theories of ego-psychology. In August 1948 he left Topeka for the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind his wife, a mathematician, and his two daughters Hanna and Juliette (born in 1943). He worked at Austen Riggs until his death from a heart attack at the age of forty-nine.

Although he never worked as a psychoanalyst, Rapaport was interested in treating schizophrenics and borderline cases, and soon became an eminent theoretician of psychoanalysis. His classes and conferences on affects, activity-passivity, and memory, his comments on chapter 7 of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, his translations of Otto Fenichel, Paul Schilder, and Heinz Hartmann, provided him with many students and material for several books, including Organization and Pathology of Thought (1951), and many articles, which were collected after his death and are often cited. A member of the Western New England Psychoanalytical Society, he was an at-large member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and, shortly before his death, in September 1960, received a prize from the American Psychological Association's division of clinical psychology.

His close collaborator Merton Gill said of Rapaport that "he spoke of metapsychological abstraction with the fervor of a political orator and the thunder of a Hebrew prophet." Gill also recalled Rapaport's desire to create a general psychology that would include ego psychology and social psychology while retaining Freud's revolutionary intuitions about the id.

ALAIN DE MIJOLLA

See also: Cognitivism and psychoanalysis; Ego autonomy; Ego states; Hungarian School.

Bibliography

Gill, Merton M. (1961). David Rapaport, 1911-1960. Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 17, 755-759.

——. (Ed.). (1967). The collected papers of David Rapaport. New York: Basic Books.

Knight, Robert P. (1961). David Rapaport 1911-1960. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 30, 262-264.

Rapaport, David. (1951). Organization and pathology of thought. New York: Columbia University Press.

——. (1959). The structure of psychoanalytic theory: A systematizing attempt. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science, vol. 3. New York: McGraw-Hill. (Reprinted in Psychological Issues Monographs, 6, 1960.)