ABSTRACT
Freud regularly credited Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) with inaugurating the psychoanalytic study of myths. Abraham, whom Freud called the first German psychoanalyst, was a psychiatrist who worked, among other places, for three years at Eugen Bleuler’s psychiatric clinic at Zurich, during the period that C. G. Jung was a Freudian. Abraham met Freud in 1907 and they rapidly became close friends. After settling in Berlin in 1907, Abraham founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1910. To Abraham we owe both the basic structure and curriculum of psychoanalytic training and a strong influence on the medicalization of psychoanalysis. In the 1920s, Abraham subdivided Freud’s ideas about oral, anal, and Oedipal sexuality into a developmental scheme of six stages: oral-sucking and oral-biting, anal-sadistic and anal-retentive, phallic (Oedipal), and genital (adult). At the same time, he correlated the stages with different forms of psychopathology. Abraham continued to meet regularly with Freud until August 1924. He belonged to the inner circle around Freud, called “The Committee of the Seven Rings.” Other members were Sándor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Hanns Sachs, Otto Rank, and Max Eitington. Abraham died of pneumonia in 1925; Freud wrote his obituary (Grotjahn 1966).
