Paul Federn was born in Vienna in November 1871. His father, Joseph Solomon Federn was a distinguished physician. Federn graduated from the medical school of Vienna and became interested in the work of Dr. Sigmund Freud. With three other physicians, he formed the inner circle of Freud (1904). His early studies mixed biological and psychological viewpoints. Later he wrote on other subjects, sex, night- fears (1912), Sadism, Masochism and dream interpretation (1913). During WWI, he was a physician in the Austrian army. After the war he devoted himself to training of analysts and was chair of the education committee of the Vienna Society. He specialized on social psychology and published Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft (1919) (Psychology of Revolution). In the 1920’s he wrote many papers on psychoanalytic subjects. From 1924 to 1938 he was Freud’s assistant. At the beginning of World War II, Federn and his son Walter fled to the USA.
Paul Federn made many great contributions in the field of psychiatry. He was a pioneer in the field of ego psychology and the psychoses. He contributed greatly to the psychoanalytical issues of ego as manifestations of ego, sources of its feeling and nature of its attachment to objects. His writings about ego in dreams, neuroses and Schizophrenia brought him to develop new concepts, which sometimes differed from Freud’s way of thinking, and allowed him to develop new methods to therapy of psychoses.
Paul Federn died in May 1950 in New York.