Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham (Bremen, 1877 – Berlin, 1925) was one of the first German psychoanalysts and one of Sigmund Freud's closest followers, with whom he kept a long correspondence. Freud once called him his 'best pupil'. His work belongs to the early years of psychoanalysis, and it is central to the development of the theory of psychosexual stages.

The son of a Jewish religion teacher, he studied medicine and in 1901 obtained a post at the Burghölzli Swiss Mental Hospital, where Eugen Bleuler worked. It was in that setting that he first encountered psychoanalysis, through Carl Gustav Jung. In 1907 he settled in Berlin and met Freud in person, who drew him into his inner circle. In 1910 he founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and became the first German analyst to run a private psychoanalytic practice. At the Munich congress of 1913 he led the opposition to Jung, and he served as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1918 and again in 1925.

His best-known contribution concerns childhood as the root of mental disorder. Abraham described the oral and anal stages of development. He argued that fixation at one of these stages shapes character: optimism or pessimism in the oral stage, and frugality, orderliness and obstinacy in the anal stage, with obsessional neurosis as a possible result of anal fixation. He also proposed splitting each of these stages into two substages. He studied manic-depressive illness through the case of the painter Giovanni Segantini, and held that melancholic depression is not explained by a real loss alone but by disappointments in early childhood, in men always linked to the mother. This idea of a pre-Oedipal "bad" mother differed from Freud's Oedipal mother and prepared the ground for Melanie Klein, who was his patient in 1924 and 1925. His short study of the development of the libido extended Freud's reflections on mourning and melancholia.

Abraham also turned to culture. Like Jung and Otto Rank, he tried to explain myths and folk traditions through psychoanalytic theory, and he wrote on the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV. He died young, in 1925, from complications of a lung infection. His influence was considerable: he mentored Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch and Franz Alexander, and his notion of the pre-Oedipal mother and his account of developmental stages remain part of the history of psychoanalysis.