Born in Kolomea, Galicia, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In World War I Bergler served in the Austrian-Hungarian Army. After the war he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and received his Ph.D. in 1926. Concurrently he worked as a journalist. As a psychoanalyst he was trained with Helene Deutsch. From 1927 Bergler maintained a private practice while he also became staff member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Institute. From 1933 to 1937 he was assistant director of the Institute.
In 1938, due to the Nazi persecutions Edmund Bergler immigrated, via France to the USA. He established contacts with eminent American psychiatrists, among them Brill and Menninger. In 1941, shortly after passing the New York State board, he opened his private practice and in 1942-1943 and in 1944-1945 he also lectured at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute.
Bergler was a fellow of the Academy of Psychoanalytic Medicine and a member of American Psychoanalysts’ Association; of the New York Psychoanalysts’ Society; the Gerontological Society; the Society for Psychopathology and Psychotherapy and others. Bergler was co-author of Geschlechtskalte der Frau, ihre Wesen und ihre Behandlung (Vienna 1934), the English edition: Frigidity in Women: Its Characteristics and Treatment was published in New York and Washington in 1936. His Die Psychische Impotenz des Mannes was published in Bern in 1937. Other works published in New York included: Divorce Won’t Help (1948); The Basic Neurosis: Oral regression and Psychic Masochism (1949); The Writer and Psychoanalysis (1950, 1954); Counterfeit Sex (1951). The Superego, Unconscious Conscience: The Key to the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis appeared in 1952, Fashion and the Unconscious (1953). The Revolt of the Middle-Aged Man (1954, 1957) and it’s German edition in Zurich in 1955. Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? was printed in 1956 and 1962; Principles of Self-Damage (1954, 1974); Tensions can be reduced to Nuisances: A Technique for Not-too-Neurotic People (1960, 1962); Curable and Incurable Neurotics (1961). Bergler contributed a number of other publications, many books translated, and more than 300 articles to major psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals.