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Karl Abraham: The Birth of Object Relations Theory

Author(s) : Isabel Sanfeliu

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Karl Abraham was one of the earliest psychoanalysts. His contribution is an enormous but neglected achievement. He was responsible for the ideas, but most especially the observations and practice, of the object relations approach, long before the approach was fully conceived. It was his innovative recording of his patients’ internal objects and the fate of those objects under the pressures of projection and introjection that started the movement away from pure “drive theory”.

Abraham died young, in 1925, which is no doubt responsible for the neglect that has placed him, his work, and his originality in the shadows. It was an unfortunate fate that is now being rectified by this book, which restores Abraham to the principal place he has deserved for so long. Isabel Sanfeliu has created a really accessible conceptual biography, detailing the clinical journey of Abraham’s career from his early training at the Burgholzli Hospital with Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung, to being the pre-eminent psychoanalyst in Germany in the 1920s. He was the destination for many younger people wishing to train with him in the psychoanalysis that was developing after World War One. Not least of those were the generation that included James and Edward Glover, Alix Strachey, and, of course, Melanie Klein. His life is truly that of a psychoanalytic celebrity.’
—R. D. Hinshelwood, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex