ELLENBERGER, HENRI FRÉDÉRIC (1905-1993)

Henri Frédéric Ellenberger, physician, psychiatrist, and historian of psychoanalysis, was born in Nanolo, Rhodesia, on November 6, 1905, and died in Montreal on May 1, 1993. He was born into a family of Swiss protestants. His father, Victor Ellenberger, a naturalist and anthropologist, was a member of the Société des missionsévangéliques de Paris (Society of Evangelical Missions of Paris), and his mother,Évangéline Christol, was the daughter of a pastor.

Ellenberger completed his medical studies in Strasbourg, France, and it was there that he was introduced to historical research. He moved to Paris to specialize in psychiatry and, after being appointed a resident in psychiatry, worked at the Sainte-Anne Hospital alongside Henri Ey. In November 1930 he married Esther von Bachst, a Russianémigrée with a passion for zoology, and they had four children.

Ellenberger settled in Poitiers, but because he was not a naturalized French citizen, in 1941 he emigrated to Switzerland . He worked as a psychiatrist at the Breitenau Hospital in Schaffhausen and was part of the Jung Circle in Zurich, through which he met Carl Gustav Jung. In 1950 he began a training analysis with Oskar Pfister, who was then seventy-seven years old. In 1952 he traveled to the United States, met Karl Menninger, and was appointed professor at the Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas. In 1953 he encountered immigration problems, and in 1959 he moved to Montreal, where he became a professor of criminology at McGill University.

In 1962 he began the historical research that resulted in the publication of The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970 . In contrast with the oral tradition of the history of psychoanalysis and Ernest Jones's biography of Sigmund Freud, and in spite of the paucity of documentation, Ellenberger's work provided a detailed history of the theories and practices that, since antiquity, made use of the forces of what would come to be theoretically designated as the unconscious. Ellenberger traced the "dynamic" tradition in psychiatry back to Franz Mesmer. In this tradition he placed Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung. Ellenberger wanted to show that the hagiographies of Freud were mistaken: Freud did not receive some heavenly illumination. Rather, his theories are only one link, albeit an important one, in a tradition that included sorcerers, shamans, the Catholic confession, Alfred Schopenhauer, and Gustav Fechner.

After learning about Ola Andersson's discovery of the true story of Emmy von N., which Ellenberger published, he continued working as a historian of psychoanalysis, intent on removing the doubts and omissions that littered a historiography divided between worship and calumny. His position has been judged by a number of psychoanalysts as unfavorable to Freud and psychoanalysis, for it served as a point of departure for several openly hostile research efforts. Although his attitude was seen as largely negative, especially in Freudian circles, where his work received a poor reception, he remained a dedicated researcher, conscious of establishing the first principles of a psychiatric historiography that stood in marked contrast to a cult of hero worship.

Alain de Mijolla

See also: Anna O., case of; Emmy von N., case of; Moser-von Sulzer-Wart, Fanny Louise; Pappenheim, Bertha.

Bibliography

Ellenberger, Henri Frédéric. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

——. (1972). L'histoire d'Anna O.:étude critique avec documents nouveaux.Évolution psychiatrique, 37 (4), 693-717.

——. (1977). L'histoire d'Emmy von N.Évolution psychiatrique, 42 (3/1), 519-540.

Micale, Mark S. (1993). Henri Ellenberger and the origin of European psychiatric historiography. In Henri Ellenberger, Beyond the unconscious: essays of Henry F. Ellenberger in the history of psychiatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993.

Roudinesco, E. (1994). Présentation. In Henri F. Ellenberger, Histoire de la découverte de l'inconscient. Paris: Fayard.