Background
Clarence Paul Oberndorf was born on February 16, 1882, in New York City, the son of Joseph Oberndorf and Augusta Hammerstein Oberndorf, sister of the impresario Oscar Hammerstein. His father was a merchant.
(NY 1948 International Universities Press. 8vo., 236pp., c...)
NY 1948 International Universities Press. 8vo., 236pp., cloth. Inscribed and signed by Oberndorf. VG, no DJ.
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Clarence Paul Oberndorf was born on February 16, 1882, in New York City, the son of Joseph Oberndorf and Augusta Hammerstein Oberndorf, sister of the impresario Oscar Hammerstein. His father was a merchant.
Clarence Oberndorf attended the Dallas Academy in Selma, Alabama. When he was eleven, his father died, and Oberndorf entered public school in New York City. He spent the year 1896-1897 in Munich, where he learned German, then entered Morris High School in New York. He studied journalism at Cornell University on a state scholarship, and received the A. B. in 1904; he then went to Cornell Medical School, from which he graduated M. D. in 1906.
Clarence Oberndorf interned and became house physician at Bellevue Hospital (1906 - 1908), where he worked with the eminent neurologist, C. L. Dana, who later sent him many patients. Although he had originally intended to specialize in pediatrics, Oberndorf soon decided to concentrate on nervous and mental diseases. He perfected his German in Berlin and Munich, and studied with Theodor Ziehen, Hermann Oppenheim, and Emil Kraepelin.
In May 1909, Oberndorf returned to New York and began a residency - an unusual step at that time - at Manhattan State Hospital, where he was influenced by Adolf Meyer and August Hoch. Five months later Oberndorf began part-time private practice in New York. He continued to serve on the state hospitals staff for three more years, then began a full-time outpatient practice. In 1910 Oberndorf met A. A. Brill, who further interested him in the teachings of Freud. The following year he became a founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Society; he joined the American Psychoanalytic Association shortly thereafter.
Oberndorf, one of the pioneer analysts in America, was greatly influential in persuading young physicians to become interested in psychoanalysis. He was particularly effective in making Freud's work known to the physicians with whom he worked at the psychiatric outpatient clinic that he established at Mount Sinai Hospital in 1913. Oberndorf was one of the first Americans to attempt a training analysis, when he worked briefly with Ernst Federn and then with Alphonse Maeder in 1914 and spent 100 hours with Freud in 1921-1922. He was one of the small group of American analysts who worked with Brill to exclude amateurs, eclectics, and dissenters from psychoanalytic organizations and - against the wishes of Freud and European analysts - to restrict the ranks to physicians.
Oberndorf was the first to set up formal instruction in psychoanalysis in America - in New York in the 1920's. The New York group was successful in the early 1930's in reorganizing the American Psychoanalytic Association into a highly restrictive organization concerned with training and with establishing standards for psychoanalysis. The members successfully defied their colleagues throughout the world by refusing to countenance lay analysts, even after many European practitioners had sought refuge in the United States. Oberndorf was a leader in all these causes, serving as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1924 and again in 1936, when he inaugurated a new federal structure that had been recommended by a committee under his chairmanship. The reorganization marked a new phase of the psychoanalytic movement in the United States, one in which analysts were extremely rigorously trained and aggressively advocated a strictly Freudian viewpoint. (In his later years, however, Oberndorf was himself less orthodox. )
In 1948 Oberndorf published Which Way Out, a collection of short stories based on his case material, and in 1953 the highly autobiographical A History of Psychoanalysis in America, which documented his view that psychoanalysis would become increasingly more influential in American life. He also published more than 100 scientific papers that reflected his continuing interest in general psychiatric problems as well as technical psychoanalysis. He made particularly important contributions concerning feelings of depersonalization, and toward the end of his career he was influential in inducing psychoanalysts to consider unfavorable as well as favorable results of therapy in their evaluation of both method and theory. Although highly cultured and erudite, he mistrusted theorizing and emphasized clinical effectiveness.
From 1914 to 1920 he held a clinical appointment at Cornell, and from 1936 to 1949 he was clinical professor at Columbia.
Clarence Oberndorf died in New York City.
(NY 1948 International Universities Press. 8vo., 236pp., c...)
Clarence Oberndorf was founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (1911); and president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
A lifelong bachelor, Oberndorf entertained his many friends with his conversation, stories, and sharp wit.
Clarence Oberndorf never married.