Abraham Brill

Abraham Arden Brill (born in Kańczuga, Austrian Galicia, 1874; died in New York, 1948) was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was born in Austria but spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He is remembered as one of the first psychoanalysts to practice in America and as a driving force behind the spread of Freud's ideas in the English-speaking world.

He emigrated as a young man, alone and with little money. He worked to pay for his education, graduated from New York University in 1901 and went on to train in medicine at Columbia University. After studying in Zurich with Eugen Bleuler and meeting Freud, he kept up a correspondence with him that lasted until Freud's death in 1939.

His most lasting contribution was translating most of Freud's major works into English, along with some of Jung's. His translations were not always polished, but they were essential in bringing Freud to American readers. In 1911 he founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and he later helped establish the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Brill held that psychoanalysis should remain in the hands of physicians, believing that its survival in America depended on medical status. He opposed lay analysis in principle, but in 1929 accepted a limited opening to non-medical analysts to avoid a split with the international movement. The library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute bears his name.