Fenichel, Otto

   (pronounced [FEN-ee-kel])

   (1897–1946)

   Born in Vienna into a lawyer’s family, Fenichel was a systematizer of psychoanalytic theory, especially the theory of neurosis. He graduated in medicine from Vienna in 1921, then became involved in the youth movement, especially those aspects stressing sexual liberation. Having audited Freud’s lectures at the university during the First World War, in 1919 he organized in the medical faculty a psychoanalytically inspired Seminar for Sexology. Fenichel did psychoanalytic training analyses with Paul Federn (1871–1950) in Vienna and Sándor Radó in Berlin, and in 1924 in Berlin he organized a "child seminar" outside the framework of the local psychoanalytic institute. In Berlin, Fenichel sympathized with fellow psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s (1897–1957) communist associations: "Marxism and psychoanalysis counted alike for him as scientific disciplines," as one observer put it (quoted in Mühlleitner, Biographien, p. 94). In 1933, Fenichel went into exile, first to Norway (where in 1934 he became secretary of the Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society), then to Prague, then after 1938 to the United States, where, like so many psychoanalysts, he settled in Los Angeles. His 1931 book, Hysterien und Zwangsneurosen: Psychoanalytische Spezielle Neurosenlehre, actually about hysteria and obsessive-compulsive disorder, was translated into English in 1934 as Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis. In 1945, Fenichel’s principal work was published, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, with which he established himself as the "Encyclopaedist of Psychoanalysis." (See also Freudian Interpretations of Obsession: Otto Fenichel [1945].)