Franz Alexander
If books are the deathless presence of the men who write them, what manner of man was the late senior author of this book?Franz Alexander was born in Budapest on Jan 22, 1891, attended the Gymnasium and Medical School of that city, interned at its University Hospital, served his stint in the Austria-Hungarian army, and then returned to postgraduate work at the Institute for Experimental Pathology. What this bare chronology does not reveal is that young Franz had since childhood been inspired by his father Bernard, a respected historian and philosophic disciple of Spinoza, to dedicate a searching, acquisitive, syncretic intellect to the medical and social sciences. Just as Freud had followed Charcot in turning from cerebral pathology to the more comprehensive study of human behavior, so Alexander followed Freud from neurophysiology to a lifelong exploration of the new science of psychoanalysis. After a