Fateful events in early childhood unquestionably shaped the direction of
Abram Kardiner's scientific investigations as an innovative psychoanalyst
and psychocultural theorist. Born on August 17, 1891, to Jewish parents
recently emigrated from the Russian Ukraine, Abraham Elionais Kardiner
grew up in New York City's Lower East Side. His father, a tailor by
trade, struggled to keep the family from the brink of starvation by
working as a street peddler. The precarious insecurity of young Abram's
early life worsened when his mother contracted pulmonary tuberculosis;
she died when he was three years old ( Kardiner 1977:25-27). Thirty
years later Sigmund Freud would trace Kardiner's phobia of masks to the
small child's discovery of an unspeaking and unresponsive body one
November afternoon. Designated by his father to say the family's
mourning kaddish, the three-year old Abram offered prayers for his
mother in daily synagogue attendance for almost a year ( 1977: 29 ).
Meanwhile, his father remarried without undue delay, and Kardiner was
reared largely by his "kind and forbidding" stepmother ( 1977: 39 ).
Kardiner recalled a few years before his death in 1981 that his early
childhood seemed "a ceaseless nightmare, with starvation, neglect, a
sense of being of no account, and a bewildering depressive feeling"
( 1977: 27 ). By the 1940s, as a pathbreaking theorist on the impact of both
traumatic stress and maternal deprivation in ego adaptations, Kardiner
had insightfully drawn upon his personal experience in constructing
hypotheses and collecting data.

After attending New York City public schools, Kardiner graduated
from the City College of New York in 1912. His father directed him
toward the profession of medicine, and Kardiner enrolled that same year
in the Cornell University Medical College in Manhattan. Several months

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