Henri F. Ellenberger
Henri F. Ellenberger , born in 1905 and died in 1993, is a Canadian psychiatrist of origin Suisse.
Biography
Born in Rhodesia, French parents in an English colony (it is resulting from a family of Protestant missionaries of Swiss origin), it should have had French nationality. But as his/her father had forgotten to declare it with the consulate of France, it was carrying an English passport. Nevertheless later, his wife stateless person, his children and itself were made naturalize French. In 1941, being likely to be denaturalized by the Vichy government, it emigrated in Suisse.It makes its studies of Psychiatrie to Strasbourg, then will live in Paris where it marries an young girl of Russo-Baltic origin and orthodoxe religion. With the beginning of the year 1930, it meets with Saint Anne, the history of this dynamic Psychiatrie, of which it will tell the adventure, thirty years later. It directed services of psychiatry to Topeka to the USA then to Montreal where it occupied the post of professor of Criminologie.
Ellenberger makes a didactic Analyze with Oskar Pfister then 77 years old, of 1949 to 1952. He thinks then, has to become member of the Swiss Société of psychoanalysis (SSP).
In the Fifties, it then acquired a great knowledge of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Europe. He speaks and writes with ease French, English, and German and is interested in the evolution of all the forms of psychic cure. He goes to the United States, for study and a meeting trip of Karl Menniger as well as the stay in its private clinic of Topeka to the Kansas will determine the orientation of its work to come.
In 1953, after having received the title of professor in Menninger School off Psychiatry, it should have settled definitively in the United States, but as his wife had been born in Russia, and taking into account the context of the Cold war, she cannot obtain from visa long life. Then, in 1959, they make the decision of living with Montreal where it obtains the pulpit of criminology in Allen Memorial Institute of the McGill university. The Quebec will be its last land of welcome. It will die there in May 1993. Its contribution formed many American historians of the Psychanalyse freudism.
Its principal work is the result of a search for twenty years, it was written in English: The Discovery off the Unconscious. The History and Evolution off Dynamic Psychiatry , appeared in the United States in 1970, it to him been worth an international recognition. In France in particular its influence as historian was less, in any case at the time of the exit of the first translation in 1974.