Freudian memorials
When walking my daughter’s dog in Charlottenburg, I enjoy examining the plaques on buildings. My favorite is the one marking the building on Mommsenstraße where Hanns Sachs lived from 1920 to 1932. Sachs was a Viennese lawyer who was trained by Freud and became a member of his inner circle. Karl Abraham, another early student of Freud, returned to Berlin and founded the first psychoanalytic institute anywhere in 1920. Freud sent Sachs to Berlin to be the training analyst. He remained in Berlin analyzing future psychoanalysts in his Mommsenstraße apartment until 1932, when he moved to Boston, Massachusetts and performed the same function for the Boston institute. Another such plaque marks the residence of Ernst Simmel, psychoanalyst and socialist, in Westend. He founded the first psychoanalytic hospital, in Schloß Tegel, in 1927. Arrested by the Nazis, on his release he moved to Los Angeles, where he organized the first psychoanalytic study group in 1934. (Bob LeVine)
