Max Eitingon

Max Eitingon (Mogilev, Russian Empire, 1881 – Jerusalem, 1943) was a physician and psychoanalyst who played a central role in shaping how psychoanalysts are trained. As one of Freud's early followers, his lasting importance lies in the institutions he built. He presided over the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1925 to 1932.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in the fur trade, he moved with his relatives to Leipzig at the age of twelve. He studied philosophy under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen before qualifying in medicine at Leipzig in 1902. He worked with Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich and, after a short analysis with Freud, settled in Berlin. There he belonged to the so-called Secret Committee and, together with Karl Abraham, founded the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in 1920, which also offered treatment to patients without means. From it grew the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, whose training model rested on three pillars: personal analysis, theoretical seminars and supervised clinical work. At the Bad Homburg Congress of 1925 this structure was proposed as an international standard, and Eitingon chaired the International Training Commission until his death.

After the rise of the Nazis he left Germany and settled in Palestine, where he founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Association. His legacy is chiefly institutional: the requirement that analysts undergo analysis themselves and a systematic training model that still shapes much of the field.