In this article we will present a brief biography of Ernst Simmel, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis whose name has been forgotten for several decades.
Like other of his contemporaries, he endured the rigors of World War II and had to emigrate to the United States. This change was an interruption in his work and, as a result, his contributions were not recognized until the end of the twentieth century.
- Ernst Simmel.
- Considered one of the initiators of the concept of war neurosis.
- Was also at the forefront of the social medicine movement.
- Which defends the emphasis on care for the poorest.
- On an equal footing with whom consultations can pay.
“The flight to mass psychosis is not only an escape from reality, but also from individual madness. “Ernst Simmel.
One of the aspects in which Ernst Simmel made great contributions was in the field of addictions, which unlike other psychoanalysts, addressed phenomena that went beyond traditional cases of neurosis, there is social training throughout his practice and intellectual production.
Ernst Simmel was born on April 4, 1882 in a village in Poland called Breslau, at that time the place had been annexed to the German Empire.
He came from a middle-class Jewish family. Still very young, the Simmels moved to Berlin, where their mother was director of an employment agency.
Simmel studied medicine and specialized in psychiatry. He graduated in 1908 with a postgraduate thesis on early dementia. In 1910, he married Alicia Seckelson.
In 1913, he and other colleagues founded the Society of Socialist Physicians, an organization that sought to provide care to those in need and those who could not afford an appointment.
Ernst Simmel later took over the management of a military psychiatric hospital, allowing him to come into contact with patients who had experienced the horrors of World War I, where he also began to become familiar with psychoanalysis and, mainly, technique. hypnosis.
Simmel has found in psychoanalysis a valuable way to deal with the traumas of war veterans, made a specific application of Freudian methods, used hypnosis and also a mannequin, so that patients could unload their aggression.
All this work allowed him to lay the foundations for the concept of war neurosis. He published an interesting book on the subject in 1918, a work that passes into the hands of Sigmund Freud, who is impressed.
In one of his letters to Karl Abraham, Freud openly praised Simmel; in fact, his work on group psychology and self-analysis is explicitly based on Simmel’s postulates.
Subsequently, Simmel psychoanalyses directly with Karl Abraham. Then he helped this analyst create the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, the world’s first psychoanalytic clinic to offer free consultations to the poorest.
He also contributed to the creation of the Berlin Polyclinic, where he presented several seminars and developed a work on war neurosis, with eminent colleagues such as Sandor Ferenczi, Ernst Jones and others.
After Abraham’s death, Simmel was elected president of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. This happened in 1925. A year later, he created a sanatorium in Tegel, in the style of the great clinics of the time.
This place has become one of the pillars of psychoanalytic methods, applied to cases of addiction, psychosis and severe neurosis, and then served as a model for the creation of several American clinics.
Freud remained in this sanatorium when he went to Berlin to treat his cancer, however, the area experienced several economic difficulties and went bankrupt. Freud and Einstein pleaded with the German Ministry of Culture to support the center, but their demands were in vain. In 1931, he closed the doors.
Two years later, Ernst Simmel was captured by the Gestapo. The Association of Socialist Physicians paid bail to the Nazis and thus managed to free the psychoanalyst.
He moved to Belgium and then to Los Angeles, USA. But it’s not the first time In North America he met several of his colleagues and, like them, always deplored the trivialization of psychoanalysis on American lands.
However, he was the favorite psychoanalyst of Hollywood stars. He died in 1947 and his work was not rediscovered until 1993, thanks to the good offices of some Freudian scholars.