(The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Fenichel's classic...)
The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Fenichel's classic text, summarized the first half century of psychoanalytic investigation into psychopathology and presented a general psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. When Otto Fenichel died, Anna Freud mourned the loss of 'his inexhaustible knowledge of psychoanalysis and his inimitable way of organizing and presenting his facts'. These qualities shine through The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis which has been a standard reference for generations of psychoanalysts. For this anniversary edition, Leo Rangell has written an introduction that sets Fenichel's work in context. He sees Fenichel as a worthy heir to Freud; both men influenced their followers by what Rangell calls 'the charisma of ideas'. In his epilogue, Rangell describes the fate of Fenichel's ideas and of this book as 'a barometer of the place of psychoanalysis ... within the external intellectual world and, even more significantly, of the trends and shifting winds of opinion within the psychoanalytic field itself'. He traces those trends through the turbulent controversies of the field, concluding that Fenichel's observations are as fresh and relevant today as they were fifty years ago.
https://www.amazon.com/Psychoanalytic-Theory-Neurosis-Otto-Fenichel-ebook/dp/B00JVSJLQG?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00JVSJLQG
( A perennially best-selling and influential psychoanalyt...)
A perennially best-selling and influential psychoanalytic work. When Otto Fenichel died suddenly at age 48, Anna Freud mourned the loss of "his inexhaustible knowledge of psychoanalysis and his inimitable way of organizing and presenting his facts." These qualities shine in his classic text, which has been a beacon to generations of psychoanalysts. Investigating the relationship between biological needs and external influences―the tensions and inhibitions that nurture neuroses―Fenichel concludes that "neuroses are social diseases," arising from the demands of civilization on the developing organism. For this 50th anniversary edition, distinguished psychoanalyst Leo Rangell has written an introduction to set the context of Fenichel's work and an epilogue to describe its influence.
https://www.amazon.com/Psychoanalytic-Theory-Neurosis-Otto-Fenichel/dp/0393038904?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0393038904
https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Psychoanalytic-Technique-Otto-Fenichel/dp/B000GSVV68?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000GSVV68
(1945 Norton Publishing; Hardcover)
1945 Norton Publishing; Hardcover
https://www.amazon.com/Psychoanalytic-Theory-Neurosis-Otto-Fenichel/dp/B0006FFMYS?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0006FFMYS
(Con esta obra el eminente psicoanalista austríaco Otto Fe...)
Con esta obra el eminente psicoanalista austríaco Otto Fenichel brinda no sólo una teoría "general y especial" de las neurosis, sino también nada menos que una recopilación puesta al día de toda la materia, el tratado ya clásico del psicoanálisis.
https://www.amazon.com/Psicoanalitica-Neurosis-Psychoanalytic-Psicologia-Psychology/dp/9688532657?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=9688532657
( In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel ...)
In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel was pre-eminently distinguished for brilliant observation, tireless energy, and skill. Otto Fenichel's highly significant essays explore many subjects that were only touched on in his books. Many of these discussions, present-day classics in their fields, are comprehensive monographs in themselves. Often so much is brought to bear on the central topic from so many sources, and then related so clearly to the context, that these essays become works of reference for a much larger field. It is a contribution of the greatest value to preserve and make conveniently available so much that is intensely useful from the life work of this remarkable man.
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Papers-Otto-Fenichel-ebook/dp/B00IOEO8Q6?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00IOEO8Q6
(hardcover with yellow and black dust jacket)
hardcover with yellow and black dust jacket
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Papers-Second-Fenichel-Rapaport-Norton/dp/B00109YIUI?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00109YIUI
( In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel ...)
In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel was pre-eminently distinguished for brilliant scholarship, incisive powers of observation, tireless energy and skill. "There was nothing in the analytic atmosphere," says Bertram D. Lewin in his Introduction, "for which he did not serve as a condenser, no currents for which he did not serve as a medium. His justly famous book The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, with its immense erudition and textual profusion, is monumental and a lasting demonstration of his immense capacity." His highly significant essays explore many subjects that were only touched on in his books. Many of these discussions, present-day classics in their fields, are comprehensive monographs in themselves. Often so much is brought to bear on the central topic from so many sources, and then related so clearly to the context, that these essays become works of reference for a much larger field. It is a contribution of the greatest value to preserve and make conveniently available so much that is intensely useful from the life work of this remarkable man. The papers forming this volume are those that were written between the years 1922 and 1936. A Second Series, containing papers written from 1936 to 1946, is also available. The papers have been collected and edited by Dr. Hanna Fenichel and Dr. David Rapaport. Papers not heretofore published in English have been especially translated for this work by James and Alix Strachey.
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Papers-Otto-Fenichel-First/dp/039301505X?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=039301505X
He was born in Vienna, the second son and youngest of three children of Leo Fenichel and Emma (Braun) Fenichel. His father, a native of Tarnow, Poland, was a lawyer in moderately wealthy circumstances.
His earlier ambition was to be a biologist, but he was persuaded by his father to enter medical school, where his interest led him to the biology and psychology of sexology.
Otto demonstrated exceptional intellectual abilities as a boy attending the Gymnasium and at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his M. D. degree in 1921.
At seventeen he decided to become a psychoanalyst and began his training while still a medical student.
His earlier ambition was to be a biologist, but he was persuaded by his father to enter medical school, where his interest led him to the biology and psychology of sexology.
In 1918 at the age of twenty-one he presented his first paper, "The Derivatives of the Incest Conflict. "
In 1922 he moved to Berlin to complete his training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, the first established psychoanalytic training center.
In 1923 he was appointed an assistant at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic and in 1925 he was made a training analyst. Meanwhile, he undertook postgraduate work in psychiatry and neurology under Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer and Richard Cassirer.
He led a seminar for younger students, which was looked upon askance by the elders of the movement because too many evenings were devoted to the relation of psychoanalysis to sociology and Marxism. His comment, "What of it? If you don't like the way we do it--let us be naughty children, " led to the discussion group's becoming known as "The Children's Seminar. "
Fenichel loved to teach, discuss, and lecture; he traveled widely, to wherever psychoanalytic training was in progress, and thus made friends all over the Continent.
In 1929 and in 1932 he traveled to the Soviet Union, and in 1933 Fenichel went to Oslo to undertake the training of analysts. Two years later he was called to Prague to take charge of the teaching and training there.
Finding the political climate in Central Europe under the Nazis inimical to psychoanalysis, he moved to Los Angeles in 1938, where he remained for the rest of his brief life. Fenichel's way of scientific work was characterized by youthful enthusiasm and optimism.
His early years in the youth movement in Austria evidenced his interest in social change.
Therefore he opposed epistemological idealism in psychoanalysis as he did in other fields of knowledge. He was not a Communist and could not agree with the small handful of colleagues in the Soviet Union he met on a trip there in 1929 and 1934 that the eradication of the bourgeois family would lead to the prevention of neurosis.
He admired their efforts but felt them doomed to failure because of their doctrinaire political attitudes.
This credo guided his 100 published papers, 200 reviews, and 240 abstracts. His papers were marked by originality; his reviews were often essays in which he advanced new concepts. His productions reveal wide reading, clarity of thinking, an ability to judge the work of others dispassionately, and a prodigious memory.
He made notes on almost everything he read, a trait useful in the writing of his encyclopedic works The Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis (1934) and The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945).
Once a student asked him if anything worthwhile had been written on psychoanalysis and economics; he immediately opened the top right-hand drawer of his ancient desk and removed one of the many batches of 3 x 5 slips of paper, all bound by rubber bands, and in about ten seconds extracted one slip with the names of the paper, author, and journal. He handed it over with a chuckle, saying, "It's very good, almost as good as the author thinks. "
When The Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis appeared it immediately became a standard reference, not only for psychoanalysis but also for the larger world of psychology, psychiatry, and the behavioral sciences. It was, however, more than replaced by The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945), which was characterized by colleagues as both a "labor of love" and "an encyclopedia of stupendous completeness. " Its defect of not having complete case histories is in part made up for by Fenichel's clinical studies, reported in Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (1953 - 1954).
Another major book, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique (1941), exerted considerable influence on subsequent psychoanalytic writers in its succinct statement of the issues, especially on the relatively unexplored area of the theory of technique. As a youth, Fenichel was tall and thin; in later years he became portly.
Quite myopic, one of his characteristic gestures was to lift his glasses in order to peruse his notes. Always fortified by a small notebook and a stub of a pencil, he would extract them and unobtrusively make a note when an idea occurred to him in the course of conversation or discussion.
Concerned by trends in psychoanalysis toward over-biologization on the one hand and toward attribution of behavior solely to cultural influences on the other, Fenichel decided that he should obtain a license to practice medicine in California, feeling that this legal formality would give his voice and reputation a sounder pragmatic basis.
Accordingly, he began an internship at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, a legal prerequisite to taking the medical board examinations.
However, he died, during the internship, of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. His ashes are in the care of his widow in Los Angeles.
Fenichel was a prolific writer on psychoanalysis, and published some forty articles between "Introjektion und Kastrationkomplex" (1925) and "Neurotic Acting Out" (1945). Among some of the areas he contributed to were female sexuality, the feeling of triumph, and the antecedents of the Oedipus complex. He also published an influential technical manual, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique (1939).
(Con esta obra el eminente psicoanalista austríaco Otto Fe...)
(The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Fenichel's classic...)
( In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel ...)
( In the world of psychoanalysis, the late Otto Fenichel ...)
( A perennially best-selling and influential psychoanalyt...)
(hardcover with yellow and black dust jacket)
(1945 Norton Publishing; Hardcover)
He was not a Communist and could not agree with the small handful of colleagues in the Soviet Union he met on a trip there in 1929 and 1934 that the eradication of the bourgeois family would lead to the prevention of neurosis.
He was a confirmed Marxist, holding that psychoanalysis was dialectical materialism in psychology.
Therefore he opposed epistemological idealism in psychoanalysis as he did in other fields of knowledge.
He was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
During his Berlin time, until 1934, he was a member of a group of Socialist and/or Marxist psychoanalysts (with Siegfried Bernfeld, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Ernst Simmel, Frances Deri and others).
He loved conversation, friends, and travel. Once a patient in a particularly difficult part of his analysis told Fenichel a funny story, pertinent to his problems.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Fenichel, "Scientific psychology explains mental phenomena as the result of the interplay of primitive physical needs, rooted in the biological structure of man--and the influence of the environment on these needs. . As to the influence of the surroundings, these must be studied in detail, in their practical reality. There is no psychology of man in a vacuum--only a psychology of man in a certain concrete society and in a certain social setting within this concrete society. "
On May 10, 1926, Fenichel married Clare Nathansohn. They had one daughter, Hanna. This marriage ended in divorce in August 1940 and on September 30 of that year Fenichel married Hanna Heilborn, a lay analyst in Los Angeles.
