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)

  WILHELM STEKEL (1868-1940)

(source: Lester D., <<Suicide and the Holocaust>>, Nova Publisher, pagg.61-62)

<<Wilhelm Stekel was born on March 18, 1868, in Bojan, Bukovina, then in Romania, with a brother six years older and a sister three years older (Packer, 1964). His father had been an orthodox Jew, but on his second marriage became a free thinker. Stekel's father was illiterate and a spendthrift, and his wife bullied him, but they were devoted to each other.

Stekel's mother made sure her children were well educated, and Stekel played bothe the piano and the violin and wrote poetry. After the age of fourteen he began to excel at school. He went to the University of Vienna, supporting himself by giving piano lessons. He accepted a military scolarship to study medicine, and as a result had to serve six years in the army.  He hated this service and persuaded the army to throw him out by refusing to take an examination that was required, although this meant that he had to pay back his scholarship.

Stekel had romantic attachments starting in his teenage years, but he was wary of lasting attachments. However, as a student he fell in love and married against his mother's wishes. Before his brief military service, he had studied at the Kraft-Ebing's clinic ( a neurologist famous for his studies of aberrant sexual behavior), and he also studied with a hydrotherapist. He set up a private practice in Vienna and focussed on neurotic problems and sexology. He heard of the work of Freud in the city and went to visit him. Freud psychoanalyzed him in just a few sessions, and he and Stekel became close associates. It was Stekel who suggested the Wednesday sessions at Freud's home where psychoanalytic issues were discussed.

Stekel soon had disagreements with Freud. For example, Stekel preferred brief psychoanalytic therapy. He was also hurt when Freud chose Jung to preside over the new psychoanalytic society. He decided to join Alfred Adler in publishing an independent journal and to break with Freud.

Stekel had a poor relationship with his wife who bullied him just as his mother had bullied his father, and he was impotent for much of their life together. She disapproved of his change of career, from physician to psychoanalyst. At the beginning of the First World War, he fell in love with a patient, a forty-four year old mother of four. They both planned to get divorces, but she decided to remain with her husband. In a desperate search for a replacement, he found Hilda, unhappily married with two children. After a lecture tour of America in the 1920s to earn some money, he divorced his first wife and married Hilda. He settled down near Vienna, trained Hilda as a psychoanalyst, and continued his work.

By the time he was sixty, his reputation had grown. He was invited to congresses, his books sold well, and he was invited to start a new journal (Psychoanalytic Practice). There were failures too - a clinic to cure jealousy was not only a failure, the press ridiculed it.

As Hitler rose the power, Stekel was placed on a black-list and, at the urging of friends, he fled with his family to Switzerland where he celebrated his seventieth birthday. Now penniless, he accepted an invitation from the Tavistock Clinic in London, and the clinic persuaded the British Government to permit Stekel and his family to reside there permanently. He lectured, saw patients and, for a time, was in good spirits.

However, he was suffering from diabetes (which eventually led to gangrene of the foot) and prostate problems. His son was drafted into a work battalion in France, and Stekel feared that he would be killed. Hilda was convalescing in the country outside of London after a serious operation, and it seemed quite possible that the Germans would invade and capture England. Living in a hotel alone in London he injected himself with insulin and fell into a hypoglicemic coma, but Hilda found him when she visited him for the day and saved him. He continued to be worried about his son and to have insomnia. Hilda thought of moving into the hotel with him, but Stekel persuaded her to remain in the country.

Four days after her last visit, on June 21, 1940, he took an overdose of aspirin and died. In his suicide note, he said that his physical illnesses were the reason for his decision. He urged Hilda to continue her psychoanalytic work,  and he asked his friends, pupils and patients to forgive him>>.