Franz Gabriel Alexander January 22 1891 - March 8 1964) was an Hungarian American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of the Psychosomatic medicine, and the psychoanalytic criminology.

Life

Franz Gabriel Alexander, in Hungarian Alexander Ferenc Gábor, was born in Budapest in 1891 and studied in Berlin. There he was part of an influential group of German analysts, including Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch mentored by Karl Abraham, gathered around the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

In 1930 he was invited by Robert Hutchins, then President of the University of Chicago, to become its Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis in Chicago. Alexander worked there at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, where Paul Rosenfels was one of his students.

Franz Alexander died in Palm Springs, California in 1964.^[1]

Work

In the beginnings of the 20th century Franz Alexander led the movement looking for the dynamic interrelation between mind and body.^[2] Sigmund Freud pursued a deep interest in psychosomatic illnesses following his correspondence with Georg Groddeck who was, at the time, researching the possibility of treating physical disorders through psychological processes.^[3]

Together with Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi he developed the concept of autoplastic adaptation. They proposed that when an individual was presented with a stressful situation, he could react in one of two ways:

• Autoplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change himself, i.e. the internal environment.
• Alloplastic adaptation: The subject tries to change the situation, i.e. the external environment.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, numerous analysts were engaged with the question of how to shorten the course of therapy but still achieve therapeutic effectiveness. These included Sándor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander, Peter Sifneos, David Malan, and Habib Davanloo. One of the first discoveries was that the patients who tended to benefit the most greatly from therapy were those who could rapidly engage, could describe a specific therapeutic focus, and could quickly move to an experience of their previously warded-off feelings. These also happened to represent those patients who were the healthiest to begin with and therefore had the least need for the therapy being offered. Clinical research revealed that these patients were able to benefit because they were the least resistant. They were the least resistant because they were the least traumatised and therefore had the smallest burden of repressed emotion. However, among the patients coming to the clinic for various problems, the rapid responders represented only a small minority. What could be offered to those who represented the vast bulk of patients coming for treatment? See further Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy

Publications

• Roots of crime: psychoanalytic studies by Franz Alexander and William Healy.
• 1931, The Criminal, the judge and the public: A psychological analysis. (Together with Hugo Staub. Orig. ed. transl. by Gregory Zilboorg).
• 1961, The Scope of psychoanalysis 1921 - 1961: selected papers. 2. pr. New York: Basic Books.
• 1966, Psychoanalytic Pioneers. New York; London: Basic Books.
• 1968, The history of psychiatry; An evaluation of psychiatric thought and practice from prehistoric times to the present. By Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick. New York [etc.]: New American Libr.
• 1980, Psychoanalytic therapy. Principles and application. Franz Alexander and Thomas Morton French.
• 1984, The medical value of psychoanalysis. New York: Internat. Universities Pr., 1984. ISBN 0-8236-3285-7.
• 1987, Psychosomatic Medicine: Its Principles and Applications. 2nd. ed., New York; London: Norton. ISBN 0-393-70036-4.

References

Further reading

External links

• http://www.mek.iif.hu/porta/szint/egyeb/lexikon/eletrajz/html/ABC00003/00174.htm
• The corrective emotional experience (1946) (chapters 2, 4, and 17 of the book by Franz Alexander, Thomas M. French et al., Psychoanalytic Therapy: Principles and Application. New York: Ronald Press, 1946) Franz Alexander

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