Edmund Bergler

Edmund Bergler
Edmund Bergler in the Wiener Psychoanalytisches Ambulatorium 1922 (standing, 1. right)
Born	1899 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	1962 New York City
Nationality	American
Occupation	Psychoanalyst

Edmund Bergler (/ˈbɛərɡlər/; German: [ˈbɛɐ̯glɐ]; 1899–1962) was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst whose books covered such topics as childhood development, mid-life crises, loveless marriages, gambling, self-defeating behaviors, and homosexuality. He was the most important psychoanalytic theorist of homosexuality in the 1950s.

Edmund Bergler was born in 1899. An Austrian Jew, he fled the Nazis in 1937–38 and settled in New York City, where he worked as a psychoanalyst. Over the course of his career, he wrote twenty-five psychology books along with 273 articles that were published in leading professional journals. He also had unfinished manuscripts of dozens of more titles in the possession of the Edmund and Marianne Bergler Psychiatric Foundation. He has been referred to as "one of the few original minds among the followers of Freud". Delos Smith, science editor of United Press International, said Bergler was "among the most prolific Freudian theoreticians after Freud himself".

Summarizing his work, Bergler said that people were heavily defended against realization of the darkest aspects of human nature, meaning the individual's emotional addiction to unresolved negative emotions. He wrote in 1958, "I can only reiterate my opinion that the superego is the real master of the personality, that psychic masochism constitutes the most dangerous countermeasure of the unconscious ego against the superego's tyranny, that psychic masochism is 'the life-blood of neurosis' and is in fact the basic neurosis. I still subscribe to my dictum, 'Man's inhumanity to man is equaled only by man's inhumanity to himself.'"

Bergler was the most important psychoanalytic theorist of homosexuality in the 1950s. According to Kenneth Lewes, "...Bergler frequently distanced himself from the central, psychoanalytical tradition, while at the same time claiming a position of importance within it. He thought of himself as a revolutionary who would transform the movement." Near the end of his life, Bergler became an embarrassment to many other analysts: "His views at conferences and symposia were reported without remark, or they were softened and their offensive edge blunted." Bergler was highly critical of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, and rejected the Kinsey scale, deeming it to be based on flawed assumptions.