Unfree Associations: A Psychoanalyst Recollects the Holocaust

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In Unfree Associations, Gottfried Bloch, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, describes his experiences in Auschwitz through a lens at once clinical and personal. For Bloch, unfree associations are haunting and powerful memories that are always painfully on the margin of everyday life. Since the end of World War II, Bloch has been compili

Author Bio

Dr. Gottfried R. Bloch was a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor. He was in October 1914 in what was then a part of Austria-Hungary. Bloch began to develop an interest in the human psyche at the age of fifteen when he came across the book Psychoanalyse und Individualpsychologie by the German psychiatrist Dr. Alfred Brauchle. He continued to read about medicine, biology, and psychology with aspirations of studying medicine at university. He studied at the medical school of Pragues German University until the fall of 1938 when, as he was trying to enroll in his final semester, he was asked to sign a form declaring he was not Jewish. It wasnt until 1947 that Bloch was able to finish his last semester of medical school at the Czech University. In 1955, Blochs application to emigrate to the U.S. was approved and a year later he arrived in Los Angeles with his family. In 1961 he was accepted into the L.A. Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and received his California Medical license. He died in 2008.