Max Eitingon

Max Eitingon (26 June 1881 – 30 July 1943) was a Belarusian-German medical doctor and psychoanalyst, instrumental in establishing the institutional parameters of psychoanalytic education and training.

Eitingon was cofounder and president from 1920 to 1933 of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He was also director and patron of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (1921-1930), president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1927-1933), founder and president of the International Training Committee (1925-1943), and founder of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (1934) and of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Israel.

Eitingon was born to an extremely wealthy orthodox Jewish family in Mohilev, Imperial Russia, the son of a successful fur trader Chaim Eitingon. When he was twelve the family moved to Leipzig. He studied at private school and at universities in Halle, Heidelberg, and Marburg — studying philosophy under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen — before studying medicine at the University of Leipzig in 1902.

Before completing his dissertation, Eitingon worked as an intern at Eugen Bleuler's Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich. In 1907 he was sent by Bleuler to meet Freud, and in 1908-9 underwent five weeks of analysis with Freud: "This was indeed the first training analysis!" He completed his dissertation, Effect of an epileptic attack on mental associations, with Carl Jung's help, and settled in Berlin. In 1913 he married Mirra Jacovleina Raigorodsky, an actress with the Moscow Art Theater.

During World War I Eitingon became an Austrian citizen, joining the army as a doctor and using hypnosis to treat soldiers with war trauma. Settling in Berlin after the war, he was invited by Freud to join the secret Psychoanalytic Committee. Eitingon financed the building of a polyclinic, using Freud's son Ernst Freud as architect. Eitingon, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel ran the clinic until the rise of Nazism in 1933. At the Budapest Congress in 1918, Hermann Nunberg had "declared that no one could any longer learn to practice psychoanalysis without having been analyzed himself": as Eitingon's 1922 report made clear, this rule was formalized in the practice of the Polyclinic:

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