Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham (born May 3, 1877, Bremen, Germany—died December 25, 1925, Berlin) was a German psychoanalyst who studied the role of infant sexuality in character development and mental illness.

While serving as an assistant to the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich (1904–07), Abraham met the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and was introduced to the ideas of Sigmund Freud. His first psychoanalytic paper dealt with childhood sexual trauma in relation to the symptoms of schizophrenia.

(Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.)

Abraham entered psychoanalytic practice in Berlin (1907), where he helped to establish the first branch of the International Psychoanalytic Institute (1910). His studies contributed to theories about symbols and myths; in a major paper published in 1909, he connected myths with dreams and viewed both as wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Abraham devoted himself chiefly to pioneering efforts in the psychoanalytic treatment of manic depression (known today as bipolar disorder). He suggested that the libido, or sexual drive, develops in six stages: earlier oral, oral-sadistic, anal expulsive, anal retentive, phallic, and adult genital. If an infant’s development becomes arrested at any of the earlier stages, mental disorders will most likely result from a libidinal fixation at that level.

Abraham’s most important work, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Grund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen (1924; A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders), appeared in English in his Selected Papers (1953). “Character-Formation on the Genital Level of Libido-Development,” also contained in the Selected Papers, is a translation of his last major paper (1925).