Paul Federn. Source: US National Library of Medicine
(identified as being in the public domain).
Paul Federn (1871-1950), a Viennese medical psychologist, completed medical training at the University of Vienna in 1895. His medical colleague Hermann Nothnagel (1841-1905) introduced him to Freud's works on psychopathology. Federn met Sigmund Freud in 1903, when Freud was keen to attract adherents to the nascent Wednesday Psychological Society (see Freud chronology). Although Federn was not the first Viennese colleague to seek out Freud in the years immediately following the publication of the watershed Interpretation of Dreams -- that distinction belongs to Wilhelm Stekel -- he was one of the most trusted and loyal.
A frequent presenter at professional meetings, Federn focused on such complex theoretical and technical matters as ego boundaries and the treatment of the psychoses. Federn served as a Vice-President of the Vienna Psa Society, along with Anna Freud (1895-1983), who later remembered him as among the early generation of colleagues "more senior than her own" who would often voice telling comments at meetings. The depth of Freud's trust in Federn became evident many years later, in 1930, when it was Federn who escorted the ailing mother of the debilitated Freud on her final journey, from Ischl back to Vienna, where she died (Jones, vol. III, "Fame and Suffering").
Federn was among the Jewish analysts who fled Hitler's Europe in 1938. He emigrated to the United States where he became a training analyst of the New York Psa Society. In 1950, believing he was suffering from the recurrence of an untreatable cancer, he committed suicide.
Bibliography
Federn, Paul.Ego Psychology and The Psychoses. New York: Basic Books, 1952.
Jones, Ernest.The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Created 26 February 2021