LEHRMAN, PHILIP R. (1895-1958)

Philip R. Lehrman was born in Plissa in Russia on October 12, 1895, and died in New York on February 4, 1958. He was the fifth of seven children in a family that emigrated to the United States in 1905. An excellent student Lehrman graduated from Fordham University Medical School in 1918. While working at the St. Lawrence State Hospital in Ogdensburg, New York, he met Abraham Arden Brill, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. He joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1921 where he served for many years on the educational commmittee and board of directors. He was secretary of the Society from 1935 to 1944 and president in 1946. Lehrman was also a professor of clinical psychiatry and neurology at Columbia University and New York University.

In 1928 Lehrman traveled with his wife, Wanda Scheps, who was from Vienna, and their two children, Howard and Marilyn, to Vienna for a year of analytic work with Freud. He took part in the meetings of the Vienna and Berlin societies, where he met the analysts from the Tegel clinic and the Polyclinic. Lehrman was an amateur cinematographer and filmed Freud and his colleagues with a Bell and Howell camera during his year in Vienna. His films are documents of inestimable value for the history of psychoanalysis. These films were edited by his daughter, Lynne Wiener-Lehrman, in 1986 and are the subject of a forthcoming book.

Lehrman wrote about thirty articles and was the editor of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's 1943 book War and Children and, in 1948, also edited Brill's Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis.

Among his students were Louise Gordy, Ruth Loveland, and Sidney Klein.

Michelle Moreau Ricaud

See also: Cinema and psychoanalysis; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; United States.

Bibliography

Lehrman, Philip R. (1927). The fantasy of not belonging to one's family. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 18, 1015-1023.

——. (1939). Some unconscious determinants in homicide. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 13, 605-621.

——. (1948). A. A. Brill in American Psychiatry, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 17 (2), 155-160.

——. (1951). Fritz Wittels, 1880-1950. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20 (1), 96-104.