Wilhelm Stekel

Wilhelm Stekel was an Austrian physician and psychologist, who became one of Sigmund Freud's earliest followers, and was once described as "Freud's most distinguished pupil". According to Ernest Jones, "Stekel may be accorded the honour, together with Freud, of having founded the first psycho-analytic society.". However, a phrase used by Freud in a letter to Stekel, "the Psychological Society founded by you," suggests that the initiative was entirely Stekel's. Jones also wrote of Stekel that he was "a naturally gifted psychologist with an unusual flair for detecting repressed material." Freud and Stekel later had a falling-out, with Freud announcing in November 1912 that "Stekel is going his own way". Stekel's works are translated and published in many languages. 

  
Stekel was born in 1868 in Boiany (Yiddish Boyan), Bukovina. After an abortive apprenticeship to a shoemaker, he completed his education, matriculating in 1887. He then enlisted as a "one-year-volunteer" with the 9th Company, Prince Eugen's Imperial Infantry Regiment No 41 in Czernowitz [today's Chernivtsi, Ukraine]. Under this scheme he was not obliged to do his military service until 1890, after completing the first part of his medical studies. He was therefore free to enrol at the University of Vienna in 1887, and studied under the eminent sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Theodor Meynert, Emil Zuckerkandl, (whose son would later marry Stekel's daughter, Gertrude), Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Hermann Notnagel, and Max Kassowitz. 

From 1886 to 1896 Freud was head of the neurological department at the "1st Public Institute for Sick Children" (otherwise known as the Kassowitz Institute) of which Kassowitz had been the director since 1882. 

In 1890 Stekel completed the first six months of required military training, which he described as "the most disagreeable period of my life." No doubt in part because of this experience, in 1891 Stekel attended the International Pacifist Convention in Bern, funded by the well-known peace activist Berta von Suttner, and founded a University Pacifists Club supported not only by von Suttner, but also by Krafft-Ebing. 

Nevertheless, he was in such financial straits that at the instigation of his family he applied for a military scholarship. This bound him to another six years of service in the army, and also prohibited him from marrying until his release in 1897. He managed, however, by intentionally failing an examination and using a loophole in the regulations, to gain his release in 1894. 

Stekel wrote a book called Auto-erotism: A Psychiatric Study of Onanism and Neurosis, first published in English in 1950. He is also credited with coining the term paraphilia to replace perversion. He analysed, among others, the psychoanalysts Otto Gross and A. S. Neill, as well as Freud's first biographer, Fritz Wittels. In his 1924 Freud biography, Wittels expressed his admiration for Stekel, to whose school he at that time adhered. This annoyed Freud who wrote in the margin of the copy of the book Wittels sent him 'Zu viel Stekel,' (Too much Stekel). Much later, Wittels, who by then had returned to the Freudian fold, still praised Stekel's "strange ease in understanding" but commented, "The trouble with Stekel's analysis was that it almost invariably reached an impasse when the so-called negative transference grew stronger". Stekel's autobiography was published posthumously in English in 1950. 

  
Stekel committed suicide in London by taking an overdose of Aspirin "to end the pain of his prostate and the diabetic gangrene". He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 29 June 1940. His ashes lie in section 3-V of the Garden of Remembrance but there is no memorial. 

He was married twice and left two children. Stekel's autobiography was published posthumously, edited by his former personal assistant Emil Gutheil and his wife Hilda Binder Stekel. She died in 1969.