David Rapaport

This article describes the Hungarian-American psychoanalyst David Rapaport , the British actor of a similar name would be found under David Rappaport (1951–1990).

David A. Rapaport (born September 30, 1911 in Budapest , † December 14, 1960 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts ) was an American psychologist and psychoanalyst .

Life

David Rapaport comes from a middle-class Jewish family and was involved in the Zionist movement at an early age . After studying mathematics and physics , he spent two years in a kibbutz in Palestine . There he married Elvira Strasser , who would later become a well-known mathematician. Their first child Hanna was born soon afterwards. After returning to Hungary in 1935, he led the Zionist youth movement and began studying psychoanalysis. His training analyst was - from 1935 to 1938 - Theodor Reik . In 1938 he completed his studies in psychology at what was then Péter Pázmány University ; the subject of his dissertation was: History of the Concepts of Associations - from Bacon to Kant .

In December 1938, Rapaport, wife and daughter had to emigrate. They came to the United States with the help of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration . Rapaport quickly found work as a psychologist in New York at Mount Sinai Hospital , then at Osawatomie State Hospital , Kansas , and finally from 1940 at the Menninger Clinic , in Topeka . There he was the first full-time psychologist in the history of the clinic, quickly becoming director of the School of Clinical Psychology , then head of the research department. His book Emotions and Psychology was published in 1942 and is evidence of his early research. In 1943 the second daughter, Juliette, was born.

Rapaport left Topeka and his family in August 1948 to accept a position at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts . His seminars and lectures on affects , activity / passivity, memory , his comments on the seventh chapter of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and his translations of the works of Fenichel , Schilder and Hartmann quickly made him popular among students and teachers. His work has been widely cited, and he has become a member of the Western New England Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association . Rapaport died suddenly - at the age of 49 - of a heart attack.

Award

• In 1960 Rapaport received the Award of the Division of Clinical Psychology in the American Psychological Association .

Publications

In English

• Emotions and Memory. International Universities Press, New York 1971 (5th edition)
• The structure of psychoanalytic theory: A systematizing attempt. In S. Koch (Ed.): Psychology: A study of a science, vol. 3. New York 1959
• Organization and pathology of thought. Columbia University Press, New York 1951
• Diagnostic Psychological Testing (edited together with Roy Schafer and Merton Gill), 1945-1946
• Emotions and Psychology , 1942

In German language

• Feeling and memory. Fischer Verlag 1994
• The structure of psychoanalytic theory. Attempt a systematic. Ernst Klett, Stuttgart 1959, 1970 (2nd edition)

literature

• Merton M. Gill: David Rapaport, 1911-1960. Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 17 (1961): 755-759.
• Merton M. Gill (Ed.): The collected papers of David Rapaport. Basic Books, New York 1967
• Robert P. Knight: David Rapaport 1911-1960. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 30 (1961): 262-264

Web links

• Alain de Mijolla: Rapaport, David (1911-1960). In: International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis . Thomson Gale, Detroit 2005.