Max Eitingon

Max Eitingon (; 26 June 1881 – 30 July 1943) was a German medical doctor and psychoanalyst, instrumental in establishing the institutional parameters of psychoanalytic education and training.

Eitingon was cofounder and president from 1920 to 1933 of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He was also director and patron of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (1921–1930), president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1927–1933), founder and president of the International Training Committee (1925–1943), and founder of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (1934) and of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Israel.

Life Eitingon was born to a wealthy Lithuanian Jewish family in Mohilev, Imperial Russia. He was the son of a successful fur trader Chaim Eitingon. When he was twelve the family moved to Leipzig. He studied at private school and at universities in Halle, Heidelberg, and Marburg — studying philosophy under the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen — before studying medicine at the University of Leipzig in 1902. He completed his dissertation, Effect of an epileptic attack on mental associations, with Carl Jung's help, and settled in Berlin. In 1913 he married Mirra Jacovleina Raigorodsky, an actress with the Moscow Art Theater. Eitingon financed the building of a polyclinic, using Freud's son Ernst Freud as architect. Eitingon, Karl Abraham and Ernst Simmel ran the clinic until the rise of Nazism in 1933. as Eitingon's 1922 report made clear, this rule was formalized in the practice of the Polyclinic:

At the 1925 Bad Homburg Congress, Eitingon proposed that the Berlin system of psychoanalytic training should be made an international standard under an International Training Commission. Eitingon was appointed president of the ITC, and kept the position until his death in 1943. which resulted in a lengthy discussion between Schwartz, historians who wrote the books, and others who disputed the involvement of Eitingon in the team, such as Theodore Draper and Walter Laqueur. The discussion was concluded by Robert Conquest who noted that although there is no direct proof of involvement of Max Eitingon in the murders, his financial interests in the Soviet Union and connections with all key members of team, including his brother Leonid Eitingon, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, and Nikolai Skoblin who acted as an intermediary between NKVD and Gestapo in Tukhachevsky affair, are grounds for suspicion.

Eitingon died on 30 July 1943 in Jerusalem, and is buried on Mount Scopus.

Works 'Genie, Talent und Psychoanalyse', Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse 2 (1912) 539–540. 'Gott und Vater', Imago 3 (1914), 90–93 'Ein Fall von Verlesen', Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 3 (1915), 349–350. 'Zur psychoanalytischen Bewegung', Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 8 (1922), 103–106. 'Report of the Berlin Psychoanalytical Polyclinic', Bulletin of the International Psychoanalytical Association 4 (1923), 254. 'Concluding remarks on the question of lay analysis', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 8 (1927), p. 399–401 'Report of Marienbad Congress', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 18 (1937), p. 351 'In the Dawn of Psychoanalysis', in M. Wulff (ed.) Max Eitingon: in memoriam, Jerusalem: Israel Psychoanalytic Society, 1950