ABSTRACT
N. Lionel Blitzsten (1893–1952), one of America’s most gifted psychoanalytic clinicians and teachers, appears to have been the first practicing Freudian psychoanalyst west of New York (Orr, 1961; Gitelson, 1953; Oberndorf, 1953). Born to Russian immigrants in Chicago, he was educated in its schools and hospitals. A pupil of the neurologist Hugh Patrick 1 at Northwestern University, he early sensed the newer European developments in depth psychology, and between 1921 and 1929 he trained for various periods in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, London, and Zurich. Informally, he organized the first psychoanalytic seminars for psychiatrists in Chicago and listed himself as a training analyst under the auspices of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations in 1926, making him Chicago’s pioneer psychoanalyst. He was the founder and first president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society (1931) and also helped organize the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis (1933) although he was never to formally teach courses there. For many years, in fact, he constituted its gadfly.
