ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the life of Franz Alexander who was the first graduate of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Budapest, in the early days and years of the twentieth century, and before the devastation of World War I, was a spectacular place to live and raise a family. Bernard Alexander began his university training close to home, in Pest, but spent only one year there. Bernard eventually obtained his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1874. He presented his dissertation on a defence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The Alexander children’s formative years played out in a building that was the local head office of the New York Life Insurance Company. The intellectual society of Budapest clearly played a major role in Alexander’s development. Bernard Alexander had little interest in experimental psychology, the field his son was expressing interest in. On March 1, 1912, while still studying medicine, Alexander was drafted into the Hungarian Army for six months.
