THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

VOLUME VII JANUARY 1926 PART I

KARL ABRAHAM

On December 25, 1925, Dr. Karl Abraham, President and
Founder of the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Society and Presi-
dent for the time being of the International Psycho-Analyti-
cal Association, died in Berlin. He had not yet reached the
age of fifty years when he succumbed to an illness against
which his vigorous physique had been struggling ever since
the early summer. At the Congress in Homburg his
apparent recovery delighted us all; but to our grievous
disappointment there followed a relapse.
We bury with him—integer vitae scelerisque purus—one of
the surest hopes we had for our science, young as it is and
still so bitterly assailed, and a part of its future which will
now perhaps never come to fruition. So high a place had
he won for himself that, of all who have followed me through
the dark pathways of psycho-analytic research, there is only
one whose name could be put beside his. Colleagues and
younger workers had an unbounded faith in him, so that it
is likely that the leadership would have been his. And,
indeed, he would have been a model leader in the pursuit
of truth, led astray neither by the praise and blame of the
many nor by the tempting illusion of his own phantasies.
I am writing these lines for friends and fellow-workers who
knew and valued him as I did. They will easily understand
what the loss of this friend, who was so much younger than
myself, means to me, and they will forgive me if I make no
further attempt to express things for whom it is hard to find
words. An account of Abraham’s scientific personality and
an appreciation of his work will be written for our Journal
by another hand.

SIGM. FREUD.

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