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KARL ABRAHAM

(1926)

Dr. Karl Abraham, President of the Berlin group, of which he was the founder, and President at the time of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, died in Berlin on December 25. He had not reached the age of fifty when he succumbed to an internal complaint against which his powerful physique had had to contend ever since the spring. At the Homburg Congress he had seemed, to the great joy of us all, to have recovered; but a relapse brought us painful disappointment.

We bury with him - integer vitae scerisque purus - one of the firmest hopes of our science, young as it is and still so bitterly assailed, and a part of its future that is now, perhaps, unrealizable. Among all those who followed me along the dark paths of psycho-analytic research, he won so pre-eminent a place that only one other name could be set beside his. It is likely that the boundless trust of his colleagues and pupils would have called him to the leadership; and he would without doubt have been a model leader in the pursuit of truth, led astray neither by the praise or blame of the many nor by the seductive illusion of his own phantasies.

I write these lines for friends and fellow-workers who knew and valued Abraham as I did. They will find it easy to understand what the loss of this friend, so much younger than I am, means to me; and they will forgive me if I make no further attempt to express what it is so hard to put into words. An account of Abraham’s scientific personality and an appreciation of his work will be undertaken for our journal by another hand.