Hermann Nunberg

Training and life

Writings and work

• In 1932 copies of his lectures were published ; and in the preface of the 1932 publication, an impressed Sigmund Freud wrote that it:

  "contains the most complete and conscientious presentation of a psycho-analytic theory of the neurotic processes which we at present possess".

• Nunberg was an early advocate of required "training analysis" sessions for psychoanalysts in training. He also spoke up strongly in favor of lay analysis, suggesting that behind opposition to it stood non-theoretical motives “such as medical prestige and motives of an economic nature”.
• Ernest Jones noted Nunberg as one of the few proponents for Freud’s Death drive. Jacques Lacan however considered that Nunberg revealed something of his own grandiosity in his meditations upon the relations between the life and the death forces.
• Nunberg’s articles on ‘The Will to Recovery’ and ‘On the Theory of Therapeutic Results of Psychoanalysis’ reveal his interest in the curative aspects of analysis. Lacan singled out the former piece as showing the inherent ambiguities in the neurotic’s search for cure: “to restore peace in his home...the patient admits to a desire, in the form of a temporary suspension of his presence at home, the opposite of what he came to propose as the first aim of his analysis”.