Fritz Wittels

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Dedication to Wanda Tauber (1930)

Fritz Wittels , actually Siegfried Wittels (born November 14, 1880 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died October 16, 1950 in New York City ) was an Austro-American doctor , psychoanalyst and writer .

Life

Fritz Wittel's parents were the stockbroker Rubin Wittels (1849–1908) and Charlotte Fuchs (1852–1887), both came from the Crown Land of Galicia . He had four siblings from this marriage and two half-siblings from his father's second marriage to Malke Sadger, a sister of Isidor Sadger . He himself derived his origins from the Kabbalist Chaim Vital . Wittels attended Maximiliansgymnasium and studied medicine, received his doctorate in 1904 and then worked for four years as an intern, aspirant and finally as a secondary doctor with Julius Wagner-Jauregg in the Vienna General Hospital . At the age of seventeen he published his first drama The Mermaids .

In the spring of 1906 he discovered psychoanalysis for himself and began to attend Sigmund Freud's lectures. Under this influence he wrote short stories and was able to convince Karl Kraus to reprint them in the magazine Die Fackel . Between February 1907 and May 1908 five short stories and seven essays on scientific topics appeared in the torch .

His essay on birth control and the ban on abortion , which he published in the Torch under the pseudonym "Avicenna" , met Freud's interest, and he invited Wittels to the Wednesday Society meetings . At the instigation of his uncle Isidor Sadger, he was accepted into society in 1907 and in April 1907 gave the lecture "Tatjana Leontiew" about female assassins. Avicenna's essay "Female Doctors", in which he pathologizes the women's movement as a product of hysteria and speaks out sharply against its goals aimed at the education and employment of women, was the subject of the Wednesday Society. Wittel's concept of the sexual liberation of women was based on his idea of ​​a hetaera and met with rejection and criticism in the circle, as did his play on words coito ergo sum . Four more lectures followed by 1910. In the torch he wrote under the title “Das Kindweib” about the menage a trois , which connected him to Kraus and Irma Karczewska at the time. In January 1908 Wittels opened a private practice in the center of Vienna, Am Graben No. 13. In April 1908 he took part in the 1st Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg . He married Yerta Pick, the daughter of the Prague psychiatrist Arnold Pick , who died of leukemia soon after.

In the autumn of 1908, Wittels published a volume with stories from the torch under the title Alte Liebeshändel , which he prefixed with a dedication to Karl Kraus, and he dedicated a collection of articles from the torch under the title Die Sexuelle Not to his “teacher Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud dedicated ", which was an affront to Kraus, who exposed him for it in the torch . In 1909, Wittels began working on the novel Ezekiel the Newcomer in order to get revenge on Kraus. Freud tried to influence Wittels not to let the text appear, whereupon Wittels left the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association (WPV) on October 5, 1910 out of spite . The book was published in Vienna and Berlin and contained insulting passages against Karczewska, Kraus, Karl Hauer and others. In Berlin, the insulting process initiated by Kraus as spiritus rector against the German publisher was won, and further sales were banned in Germany, but not in Austria-Hungary.

In 1910 Wittels gave up his private practice for lack of success and took a position in the private Viennese Cottage Sanatorium , whose director Rudolf Urbantschitsch was also a member of the WPV. Wittels worked there as a ward doctor for 15 years. Within three years he published the works Tragische Motive: The unconscious of hero and heroine , All about love: a primeval world poetry , The Jeweler of Baghdad , as well as the book About Death and About Belief in God: Two, dedicated to the memory of his wife Yerta Lectures . Wittels was drafted as a military doctor in 1914 and did five years of military service, on the Russian and Italian fronts and for three years with the allies in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1919, Wittels supported the “Association for General Nutrition”, an organization that pursued the ideas of Josef Popper-Lynkeus . He wrote articles for the social democratic newspaper Der Abend . In 1920 Wittels married Lilly Krishaber, they had the son Hans Rudolf (John R. Wittels).

Wittels now joined the psychoanalyst and sharp critic of Freud Wilhelm Stekel and made a training analysis with him . In 1923 he published a biography of Freud, which was also intended to be a popular science introduction to psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. The man, the apprenticeship, the school . Freud was not pleased with the book and sent Wittels a long list of errata and factual misrepresentations. After Wittels broke with Stekel in 1925, he was fully re-accepted as a member of the IPA in 1927. Wittels was committed to the public relations work of the IPA with lectures and magazine articles and published four other books between 1925 and 1928: Die Technik der Psychoanalyse (1926), Die Psychoanalyse: Neue Weg der Seelenkunde (1927), Die Befreiung des Kind (1927) and Die World Without Prison (1928). In 1925 he reviewed Siegfried Bernfeld's Sisyphos or the Limits of Upbringing .

In 1928 he was invited by Alvin Johnson to give lectures on psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, and in the following years he was also invited to give guest lectures in the USA. He also spoke before the New York Psychoanalytic Society . In 1931 Wittel's fundamentally revised Freud biography Freud and His Time appeared as a general introduction to psychoanalysis and its possible applications in other disciplines of the human sciences.

In March 1932, Wittels moved with the family to the United States and he became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychiatric Association . In 1933 a journal article appeared with Revision of a Biography in English or under the title Addendum to my book Sigmund Freud in German, in which he revoked some allegations from the first version of his Freud biography. Freud did not believe this change in attitude and suspected him of opportunism.

Until 1938 Wittels taught at the New School for Social Research , he became a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine , he was also active at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute , at Bellevue Hospital at New York University and as an associate psychoanalyst at Columbia University . In 1940 he received US citizenship. His last book, The Sex Habits of American Women , was published posthumously in 1951.

Fonts (selection)

Critique of love (1929)
  • The mermaids. A fairy tale drama in five acts . Vienna, 1897
  • The baptizing Jew . Vienna, 1904
  • The sexual distress . Vienna, Leipzig, CW Stern, 1907; 1909
  • Old love deals . Vienna, 1909
  • Ezekiel the Newcomer: Roman . Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1910.
  • Tragic motives: the unconscious of hero and heroine . Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1911
  • All about love: a primeval world poetry (Berlin 1912),
  • The Baghdad Jeweler . Berlin: Fleischel, 1914
  • About Death and About Faith in God: Two Lectures . Vienna: Pertes, 1914
  • The annihilation of need . Leipzig; Vienna: Anzengruber-Verlag Brothers Suschitzky, 1922
  • Zacharias Pamperl or The Displaced Crescent: Satirical Novel. Vienna: H. Goldschmiedt, 1923
  • Sigmund Freud: The man, the apprenticeship, the school . Vienna: Tal & Co., 1924
    • Freud and his time: The influence of the master psychologist on the emotional problems in our lives . Translator: Louise Brink. 1931, London 1956
  • Wonderful healings through divine help, spells, moral powers, through animals. Magnetism, Hypnosis and Suggestion . Vienna: Anzengruber-Verlag, 1925
  • The technique of psychoanalysis . Munich: JF Bergmann, 1926
  • Psychoanalysis: New Ways of Soul Science . Vienna: Steyrermühl, 1927
  • The liberation of the child . Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag, 1927
  • The world without prison . Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag, 1928
  • Critique of love . New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929
  • Freud and his time . New York, 1931
    • Freud and the childwoman: the memoirs of Fritz Wittels . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995
    • Freud and the child woman: the memories of Fritz Wittels . Edited by Edward Timms . Translated from the English by Marie-Therese Pitner. Vienna: Böhlau, 1996
  • The Sex Habits of American Women . New York: Eton Books, 1951

literature

  • Elke Mühlleitner: Biographical Lexicon of Psychoanalysis. The members of the Psychological Wednesday Society and the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association 1902–1938 . Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992, ISBN 3-89295-557-3 , pp. 369-372
  • Ulrich Weinzierl : Arthur Schnitzler. Love, dream, die. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TB, 5th edition, 1998, ISBN 3-596-13448-X , pp. 112-118
  • Wittels, Fritz , in: Élisabeth Roudinesco ; Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: Names, Countries, Works, Terms . Translation from French. Vienna: Springer, 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 1148–1150

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chaim ben Josef Vital (1542-1620)
  2. ↑ a b Elke Mühlleitner: Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse , 1992, p. 369f.
  3. ^ Fritz Wittels: Female Doctors . In: The torch . tape 9 , no. 225 , 1907, pp. 9-24 .
  4. ^ Brigitte Bruns: Gender struggles and psychoanalytic theory formation . In: Jürgen Nautz (Ed.): The turn of the century in Vienna: Influences, environment, effects . Vienna: Böhlau, 1993, ISBN 3-205-98038-7 , pp. 334f.
  5. ↑ Review in: Der Tag , Vienna, November 1, 1925, p. 9, printed by: Ulrich Herrmann u. a. (Ed.): Siegfried Bernfeld. Works. 5. Theory and practice of education, pedagogy and psychoanalysis . Gießen: Psychosozial, 2013 ISBN 978-3-8379-2161-8 , pp. 480-483
personal data
SURNAME Wittels, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wittels, Siegfried (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-American doctor, psychoanalyst and writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1950
Place of death New York City