ALEXANDER, FRANZ

ALEXANDER, FRANZ (1891–1964), psychoanalyst; best known for his work on psychosomatic disorders. Born to a philosophy professor in Budapest, he studied medicine at Go¨ttingen with Max Verworn. Having completed medical studies, he was serving his compulsory year as a physician in an Austrian military hospital when war was declared. He spent the next four years as a medical officer. The turmoil surrounding Be´la Kun's short-lived Soviet regime in 1919 convinced Alexander to leave Hungary. Resuming recently initiated psychiatric studies, he became Karl Abraham's* first student at Berlin's* new Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1921 he received Sigmund Freud's prize for the best clinical essay of the year, published later as Analysis of the Total Personality. He followed with an analytical study of ‘‘the criminal, the judge, and the public,'' coauthored with Hugo Staub. In 1932, after visiting the United States, he settled permanently in Chicago and founded the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Alexander had a proclivity for philosophy, stemming, perhaps, from the influence of his father or from attending Edmund Husserl's* lectures at Go¨ttingen. He argued that the well-adjusted individual was not the goal of human development; instead, a good life was one in which an unadjusted individual used his creativity to change his environment to meet his needs. His work on psychosomatic disorders was highly influential.