Siegfried Bernfeld And Social Education

Siegfried Bernfeld was a first-generation psychoanalyst who played an important role in his time, but was later unfairly banished. However, his work was very interesting and his contributions are relevant to this day.

Anna Freud said that Siegfried Bernfeld was a “unique mind”. In fact, Sigmund Freud spoke of him in one of his letters:  “He is a leading expert in psychoanalysis. I consider him perhaps the most gifted of my students and disciples. He also has superior knowledge. He is an irresistible speaker and an extremely influential teacher. All in all, I only have good things to say about him ”.

Like her colleagues  , Siegfried Bernfeld lived during a socially and politically violent time. In the face of the persecution he endured due to the fact that he was a Jew, he focused on reflecting on social fields. He strayed away from psychoanalysis and became more involved in the collective phenomena from a political point of view.

Siegfried Bernfeld’s beginnings

Like many other psychoanalysts, Siegfried Bernfeld was a Jew. He was born in Lemberg, Galicia in 1892. His parents were textile traders. Bernfeld’s passion for nature led him to study zoology and botany.

Pedagogy and psychology interested him deeply at a very young age. He thinks hypnosis was extremely fascinating because it was quite innovative at the time. In fact, he practiced it with his younger brother. In addition, he was deeply interested in Maria Montessori’s theories. He later studied psychoanalysis and became fascinated by the free-spirited method.

At the age of 22, he married Anne Solomon, a young student and passionate supporter of Marxism. She strongly influenced Bernfeld’s thoughts and activities.

Social activity and psychoanalysis

Motivated by his political involvement, Siegfried Bernfeld created an institution dedicated to picking up Jewish children who were orphaned after the First World War. The institution’s goal was to train them so that they could immigrate to Palestine. He protected approx. 145 children. It is important to mention that many of them had severe trauma. Consequently, this led him even more towards psychoanalysis.

Shortly afterwards, he met Sigmund Freud and ended up opening an office in Vienna in 1922. By then, he had established a close friendship with Anna Freud, and many considered him one of the greatest proponents of the new psychoanalytic current. With Anna and other relevant psychoanalysts at the time, he created a group dedicated to helping homeless children.

The group’s main goal was to extend psychoanalytic issues to the social field. In 1925, Siegfried Bernfeld published his first two works on social education. One of them focused on adolescence and the other on German pedagogical methods.

Siegfried Bernfeld’s end

Siegfried Bernfeld married three times and lived in several European countries when Nazism arose. He ended up moving to San Francisco, California with his third wife. Unlike other psychoanalysts, Bernfeld did not feel satisfied with the “self-psychology” that became popular in the United States.

Perhaps his nostalgia and great intellectual curiosity led him to become one of Freud’s most important cinemas. Although people do not consider him his “official” cinema, his articles were clearly resumed by Ernest Jones, whom Anna Freud considered his father’s authorized cinema.

In short, Siegfried Bernfeld left an interesting essay in which he talked about the principles of psychoanalysis and social education. His studies on psychology in his youth are remarkable. He founded the first psychoanalytic community in San Francisco. Many remember him as a compulsive tobacco consumer, a lover of beautiful women and an honest psychoanalyst.