Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham was an influential German psychoanalyst, born in Bremen in 1877 and died in 1925, and a collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who called him his best pupil. He studied medicine and took a position at the Burghölzli Swiss mental hospital, where Eugen Bleuler practiced, and there first met the psychoanalysis of Carl Jung. After first contact with Freud in 1907 he returned to Germany and founded the Berlin Society of Psychoanalysis in 1910, and he was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1914 to 1918 and again in 1925. He worked with Freud on manic-depressive illness, was the analyst of Melanie Klein and mentored Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch and Franz Alexander. He described the personality traits and psychopathology that follow fixation at the oral and anal stages of development.