Franz Alexander

Franz Gabriel Alexander (Austrian German: [frants ˈɡaːbri̯eːl ˈalɛksandɐ]; born Alexander Ferenc Gábor, Hungarian: [ˈɒlɛksɒndɒr ˈfɛrɛnts ˈɡaːbor]; 22 January 1891 – 8 March 1964) was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.

Alexander was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, in 1891, his father was Bernhard Alexander, a philosopher and literary critic, his nephew was Alfréd Rényi, a Hungarian mathematician who made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory but mostly in probability theory. Alexander studied in Berlin; there he was part of an influential group of German analysts mentored by Karl Abraham, including Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch, and gathered around the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In the early 1920s, Oliver Freud (Sigmund Freud's son) was in analysis with Franz Alexander, while Charles Odier, one of the first among French psychoanalysts, was analysed in Berlin by Franz Alexander as well.

In 1930, he was invited by Robert Hutchins, then President of the University of Chicago, to become its Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis. Alexander worked there at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where Paul Rosenfels was one of his students. In the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.

Franz Alexander died in Palm Springs, California in 1964.

Alexander was a prolific writer. Between 'The Castration Complex in the Formation of Character [1923] ... [&] Fundamental Concepts of Psychosomatic Research [1943]' he published nearly twenty other articles, contributing on a wide variety of subjects to the work of the "second psychoanalytic generation".

'Alexander in his "vector analysis"... measured the relative participation of the three basic directions in which an organism's tendencies towards the external world may be effective: reception, elimination, and retention'. In this he may have been a forerunner to Erik H. Erikson's later exploration of 'Zones, Modes, and Modalities'.

He also explored the 'morality demanded by the archaic superego ... an automatized pseudo morality, characterized by Alexander as the corruptibility of the superego'.

Notable too was his exploration of acting out in real life, 'in which the patient's entire life consists of actions not adapted to reality but rather aimed at relieving unconscious tensions. It was this type of neurosis that was first described by Alexander under the name of neurotic character'.