ABRAHAM, KARL

ABRAHAM, KARL (1877–1925), German psychoanalyst. Born in Bremen to religious parents, Abraham was Germany's first psychoanalyst and a major figure in both the organizational and scientific development of psychoanalysis. Abraham received his early clinical experience at a mental hospital in Dalldorf. He became acquainted with Freud's work through Bleuler and Jung in Zurich, and first met Freud in 1907. A deep friendship and professional alliance bound the two men until Abraham's death. Abraham's work covered almost every field of psychoanalysis, but his most significant contributions through pioneering studies were in the fields of libidinal development, character formation, the psychoses, and addiction. He investigated the effects of infantile sexuality and family relationships on the child's mental development, and drew a correlation between characteristic mental disorders and the problems at different stages of the child's mental development. Toward the end of his life, Abraham concentrated almost exclusively on manic-depressive psychosis, where he paralleled and deepened Freud's work. This work is written up in his paper of 1911 translated in 1927 as "Notes on the Psychoanalytic Investigation and Treatment of Manic-Depressive Insanity and Allied Conditions." Abraham related melancholia to regression to the oral level and to the loss of love and its patterning after mourning. Schizophrenia, too, is a regression from a traumatic situation to an early infantile level of development. Abraham was president of the Berlin Psychoanalytical Society from its founding until his death. He was also secretary (1922–24), and then president (1924–25), of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Most of his research work appears in his Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis (1955) and his published correspondence with Freud in A Psychoanalytic Dialogue (1965). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Jones, in: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 7 (1926), 155–81 (includes bibliography); E. Glover, in: L. Eidelberg (ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (1968), 1–8 and index; M. Grotjahn, in: F. Alexander et al. (eds.), Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), 142–59. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: H. Abraham, Karl Abraham. Sein Leben fuer die Psychoanalyse (1976).