FENICHEL, OTTO

FENICHEL, OTTO (1897–1946), Austrian psychoanalyst. Born in Vienna, he moved to Berlin in 1922 and studied at the Psycho-Analytic Institute under max eitingon and in 1926 joined the staff. With the coming of the Nazi regime he left Berlin in 1933 and went to Norway and Prague, where he taught. In 1938 he went to the U.S. and taught in Los Angeles. He wrote two important textbooks on psychoanalysis, The Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis (1934) and The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945). Some of these contributions have become classics in their field, for example, "Elements of a psychoanalytic theory of anti-Semitism" in which he tried to trace the sources of anti-Jewish prejudice. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis is a systematic, comprehensive, and detailed study of every major form of neurosis from a psychoanalytic point of view. The theoretical formulations are painstakingly worked out along with old, new, and controversial points of view. Freud's thinking is followed historically on each issue, along with the major contributions of Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, and Ernest Jones. In addition, there is an encyclopedic bibliography containing more than 1,600 items. Fenichel also wrote a short monograph, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique (1941), which is a classic in its systematic clarity and scientific discipline. His collected papers were published in two series in 1953–54. (Hilel Klein)