Rudolf Allers


Rudolf Allers was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and academic.

Life and career

Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich. In 1908, he married Carola Meitner.
Allers was the only Catholic to join the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. Together with Alfred Adler, he later distanced himself from psychoanalysis as understood by Freud and his followers. He was later detached from the group of Adler in 1927. He taught at the University of Vienna.
Allers was master of Viktor Frankl in 1925–1930, mentor of Hans Urs von Balthasar and friend of Saint Edith Stein. Both von Balthasar and Stein lived for several months in Allers' home in Vienna in 1931.
He studied the preventive method of St. John Bosco and his pedagogical applications, and at the invitation of Father Agostino Gemelli, was in Italy to study the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Catholic University of Milan and graduated in Philosophy in 1934.
With the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, Allers emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., then as professor of philosophy at Georgetown University from 1948 until his death in 1963. Allers died in 1963 and is buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1958.

Books