Rene Spitz (1887–1974)

Abstract

Rene Arpad Spitz was born in Vienna, to a wealthy Jewish family on January 29, 1887, in the very same building in which Sigmund Freud had opened his first office for the practice of medicine (Steele, 1975) . He spent most of his childhood in Hungary. He declined the opportunity to enter the family business, choosing instead to become a physician, graduating from the University of Budapest in 1910 at the age of 23. While studying medicine, he came upon the works of Sigmund Freud, which he read avidly. Sandor Ferenczi, who was one of his teachers, stimulated further his interest in psychoanalysis, which led him to consult Freud in Vienna in 1911 and to begin a “didactic analysis” with Freud (Emde, 1992) , an analysis undertaken primarily for training rather than therapeutic purposes. This was the first such analysis that Freud conducted. From then on, Spitz considered Freud as his mentor. During World War I, he served in the medical corps of the Austrian Army on the Eastern front. Between 1924 and 1928, he was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and later became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society in Berlin. Between 1932 and 1938 Spitz moved to Paris where he taught psychoanalysis and child development at the Ecole Normale Superieure . There he frequently attended conferences of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. During the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s, Spitz, who had a Hungarian passport, often carried valuables and money across borders for various analysts, at great risk to himself. He eventually fled the advance of the Nazis and came to the United States in 1938. From 1938 to 1957, he was a training and supervising analyst and a member of the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.