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Otto Fenichel (; 2 December 1897, Vienna – 22 January 1946, Los Angeles) was an Austrian psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation". He was born into a prominent family of Jewish lawyers.
In 1922, Fenichel moved to Berlin. During his Berlin time, until 1934, he was a member of a group of Socialist and/or Marxist psychoanalysts (with Siegfried Bernfeld, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Ernst Simmel, Frances Deri and others). After his emigration – 1934 to Oslo, 1935 to Prague, 1938 to Los Angeles – he organized the contact between the worldwide scattered Marxist psychoanalysts by means of top secret newsletters ("Rundbriefe").
Those Rundbriefe can be counted among the most important documents pertaining to the problematic history of psychoanalysis between 1934 and 1945, especially in regard to the problem of the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934. In Los Angeles, Fenichel joined existing psychoanalytic circles and later helped found the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. His training analysands in Los Angeles included Ralph Greenson.
Three interwar papers on female sexuality, attracted Freud's own attention:Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (London 1988) p. 521 he wrote of the first that "Fenichel (1930) rightly emphasizes the difficulty of recognizing in the material produced in analysis what parts of it represent the unchanged content of the pre-Oedipus phase and what parts have been distorted by regression".Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (London 1991) p. 390. His 1936 article on the symbolic equation of Girl and Phallus subsequently became a launch pad for Jacques Lacan.Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1997), p. 207.
In his 1939 article "Trophy and Triumph", Fenichel pointed out that the feeling of triumph "results from the removal of anxiety and inhibition by the winning of a trophy", but added that as "the trophy is a super-ego derivative since it is a symbol of parental authority ... it threatens the ego in the same way that the super-ego threatens the ego".Ralph R. Greenson, "On Gambling" in Jon Halliday and Peter Fuller eds., The Psychology of Gambling (London 1974), p. 210.
Building on his own work, and the contributions of his peers and predecessors, Fenichel produced his encyclopedic textbook of 1945:Gay, Freud, p. 336 n. "For countless students and professionals Fenichel is synonymous with his Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis ; and this text is regarded as synonymous with reliable and comprehensive psychoanalytic knowledge."Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (Chicago 1986). p. 24. Nevertheless, the work was not uncontroversial, challenging among others the findings of Melanie Klein, the and much of the work of Franz Alexander, as well as displaying Fenichel's continuing Marxist affiliation.Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 64, p. 588-9 and p. 507.
Comparing Fenichel's work to "an enumeration of the 'main sewer' type", he argued for a distinction between a catalogue of past interpretations, and the actual job of finding the mutative interpretation within the actual session.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London 1994), p. 11. He also criticised Fenichel's use of organic stages of development in his writing;J. Lacan, Ecrits (1997), p. 51 while others saw Fenichel as oversimplifying his accounts of neurosis by categorical taxonomies.Peter Fuller, "Introduction" in Halliday/Fuller, Gambling, p. 28.
Although Fenichel himself had warned from the start of his book that he was only offering illustrative examples, not case histories,O. Fenichel, the Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946), p. 8 he may have unwittingly contributed to the vice of attempting to mastermind, not follow and learn from, the analytic process.Patrick Casement, On Learning from the Patient (London 1990), p. 220.
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