Heinrich Racker

Heinrich Racker was born in 1910 in a small town in Poland to Jewish parents, Naphtali Meyer Racker and Ella Spiegel, the second of three children. At the outbreak of the First World War his family moved to Vienna where, from a young age, Heinrich learned the piano, developing a deep passion and talent for music. He became a professor at the Vienna Conservatory at the age of only 18. At university he studied psychology and musicology, and quickly grew fascinated by psychoanalytic theory. This intense interest led him to begin training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, and to enter into analysis with Dutch analyst Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, who had studied with Sigmund Freud. He also started medical training but was forced to flee Vienna the following year when the Nazis invaded Austria.