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Rudolf Allers "Work and Play"

Notes on Rudolf Allers and

his Thought

by

alexander batthyany & jorge olaechea

1. from the early years until the first world war

Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883, of Jewish

extraction, the son of a doctor, Mark Allers, and his wife, Augusta

Grailich. He was baptized that same year in Vienna’s Votivkirche. The

young Allers received his primary education at home, and although he

received instruction in Catholicism, he would later recognize that he

did not develop a real faith from family (Hoehn, 1948). He instead

cultivated a great interest for art, music, languages – at Aller’s home

German, English, and French were all spoken – and books.

After finishing his studies in a secondary school focused on humanities,

in 1902, Allers began to study medicine, convinced “that medical

science could represent for his spirit a wide path into the world of the

human being, a precious key that would be able to open up the mysteries

of human life introducing him into the sacred depths of the soul”

(Titone, 1957, p. 21). Although it was possible to attend Sigmund

Freud’s lectures at the University of Vienna, psychoanalysis did not

interest him until 1908, the year that he was named assistant to the

Neural and Mental Illness Clinic of the German University in Prague

(under the guidance of Arnold Pick). There he met Dr. Otto Pötzl,

who introduced Allers to psychoanalytic thought, of which he would

afterwards become an “enthusiastic follower” (Allers, 1922, p. 15). In

1909 he became a psychiatrist and was transferred to the Psychiatric

Clinic of Munich. There he worked as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin,

one of the founders of modern psychiatry.

A year prior to his transfer, in 1908, he married Carola Meitner, of

a Jewish family, who was the sister of the noted scientist Lise Meitner.

During his time in Munich Allers came into contact with the phenomenological

circle of philosophers living there, especially with Max

Scheler and his anthropological theories, and so distanced himself at

the same time from the ideas of psychoanalysis.

In 1913 Allers started the work that he would come to love most:

teaching at the university, as a psychiatry instructor in the Medical

School of the University of Munich. The First World War, however,

interrupted his teaching and he was put to work as a surgeon at the

front, which earned him distinction from the Red Cross. Allers produced

his first book during this period, entitled Über Schädelschüsse:

Probleme der Klinik und der Fürsorge (1916). In it Allers compiled his

research of physical and psychological traumas suffered by soldiers

afflicted by gunshot wounds during the war. The endeavour to find

links between physiological and psychological problems is already visible

in his early work. The time that he dedicated to his philosophical

writings would be no less important, as he recalls: “During the war

(1914-1918); and the long periods of relative inertia in the field hospital,

I was persuaded that the Thomistic philosophy offered the most

adequate basis for the development of an “anthropological philosophical”

system as the foundation of a theory of the normal and abnormal

psyche” (Titone, 1957, p. 27).

2. in vienna from 1918-1938

With the peace of 1918 “Allers served in the Medical School of the

University of Vienna, working first in the department of sense physiology

and medical psychology and then (from 1927) in that of psychiatry.

He was able to blend teaching with laboratory research and

a private practice. It was always against his complex background of

teaching-research-therapy that he viewed the several schools of psychiatry

which acknowledged Vienna as their radiating left. He became

increasingly aware that psychiatric interpretations and methods

were raising very general questions about man, and that the positions

to which they led were laden with philosophical and religious implications”

(Collins, 1964, pp. 282-283).

The first subject that he examined in depth was psychoanalysis.

On April 26, 1920, Rudolf Allers gave his noted report Über Psychoanalyse

before the Applied Psychopathological and Psychological

Association of Vienna. In attendance were such notables as Schilder,

Pötzl, Neumann, Pappenheim, Roffenstein, Federn, Hitschmann, and

Stransky, who were among the great thinkers of psychology and psychiatry

at that time. His criticisms of psychoanalysis were deepened.......

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