Fenichel, Otto

Psychoanalyst; b. 1897; married Hanna Heilborn, lay analyst, in 1940; d. 1946.

Otto Fenichel (1897-1946), psychoanalyst and author. Hanna Heilborn, lay analyst, married Fenichel in 1940.

Fenichel was born on Dec. 2, 1897 in Vienna; MD, Univ. of Vienna, 1921; at age 17, decided to become a psychoanalyst and began his training while a medical student; moved to Berlin in 1922 to complete his training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; appointed an asst. (1923) and a training analyst (1925) at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic; traveled to the Soviet Union in 1929 and 1932; in 1933 went to Oslo to undertake the training of psychoanalysts, and did the same in Prague two years later; fleeing the Nazis, he moved to Los Angeles in 1938; Fenichel was a Marxist, and insisted that psychology needed to be studied in a societal context; publications include The outline of clinical psychoanalysis (1934), Problems of psychoanalytic technique (1941) and The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis (1945); he died on Jan. 22, 1946.