Ernst Bernhard

Passions

Vocation

German psychoanalyst, pediatrician and astrologer, who had been stateless from 1935, and who lived in Italy from 1938 onwards. From 1935 in Zurich he worked with Carl Gustav Jung, who became a follower, radicalizing the Jungian theories with remarkable theosophical and esoteric veins. He studied and applied astronomy and astrology, made long journeys, and conscientiously consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese-oracle book with a preface by Jung. Following the Nazi racial laws, which deprived him of German citizenship and many rights (as happened to all Jews living in Germany) to escape Nazi persecution he decided to move to England as did Sigmund Freud, but London refused him entry. He decided to settle in Italy together with his wife Dora in Rome where he practised Jungian psychotherapy for thirty years. He came into contact with a small group of Freudians led by Edoardo Weiss. Friendship with Weiss also resulted in significant harmony between the Jungians and Freudians. Following the Fascist racial laws of 1938, he had many limitations placed on his profession, and in 1940 he was arrested in Rome as a "Jewish non-Polish foreign citizen" and interned at Ferramonti di Tarsia, a concentration camp in Calabria. Released in 1941, following an intervention by Giuseppe Tucci, he thus escaped deportation to the Reich which would almost certainly have meant death. He returned to live in Rome, where he lived through the Nazi occupation period (1943-1944). After the war he resumed his activity as a Jungian psychotherapist, always in Rome, where he would stay for the rest of his life without ever taking Italian citizenship and being stateless. Ernst Bernhard died in Rome on 29 June 1965, aged 68. Link to Wikipedia biography (Italian)