About the " Psycho-suiciders"

Karen & Adrian Stephen  Eugenie Sokolnicka  Sophie Morgenstern  Istvan Hollos   Sabina Spielrein              Viktor Tausk     Otto Gross   Wilhelm Stekel    Paul Federn  Bruno Bettelheim   Masud Khan   Max Kahane   Herbert Silberer   Monroe Meyer    Martin Peck       Karl Schroetter   Johann Honegger   Edward Bibring  Karl Landauer  Clara Happel  Horace Frink

Background music: Tachanka [Tachanka] music: K. Listov, lyrics: M. Ruderman; 1936

  About the Psychosuiciders

<Outre Federn, Stekel, Tausk et Silberer, on trouve d'autres suicidés parmi les analystes du premier groupe Karin Stephen, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Tatiana Rosenthal, Kan Schrötter, Monroe Meyer, Martin Peck, Max Kahane, Johann Honegger. (...) Il n'en demeure pas moins troublant que ces premiers analystes se soient si souvent donné la mort, lorsqu'il ne leur arrivait pas d'autres malheurs.>> (Paul Roazen, "Freud and his followers", version française, 1974, New York, Knopf)

  MONROE MEYER (1892-1939)

(source: excerpt from obituary published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1939, 8:139-140)

<<On February 27, 1939, Dr. Monroe A. Meyer died in his forty-seventh year. His death takes from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute the man who more than any one else had given to it his time and thought and energy. It was his incessant watchfulness which made the Institute function smoothly and effectively. During the last seven years of his life, the major portion of his time had gone into the exacting task of guiding it in its growth from a small, informal unit with a dozen students to a highly organized teaching institution with seventy students. Those of his colleagues who had had an opportunity to know the depth of his analytic penetration and learning often regretted that during these years his scientific energies were not freer from the burden of these administrative responsibilities. He himself felt so keenly, however, that it was important to set the Institute firmly on its feet, that no personal sacrifice seemed to him too great to make>>.

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(source: Endonotes from Kevin McDonald, <<Culture and Critique>> www.solargeneral.com )

Wittels (1924, 143-144) recounts an interpretation of a recurrent dream of Monroe Meyer, a student of psychoanalysis, in which Meyer feels in danger of choking after eating a large piece of beefsteak. The interpretation favored by Wittels is that of Stekel, who noted: “It seems to me that the beefsteak represents the indigestible analysis. My unfortunate colleague is compelled six times every week to swallow a wisdom which threatens to stifle him. The dream is the way in which his internal resistance to the analysis secures expression.” Whatever one might think of this interpretation, Wittel’s comments indicate that even during the 1920s, devoted disciples within the psychoanalytic community realized the danger that psychoanalysis could easily become a form of brainwashing.