A. Brill was the first psychoanalyst in the United States. He was also the first to bring the teaching of Sigmund Freud to this country and translate Freud's works into English. He also translated many works of Carl Jung.
Brill was born in Austria and came to the United States as a teenager. Alone and penniless, he worked at menial jobs while learning to speak English. It took Brill only three years to complete his American elementary and high school education; in 1898, he graduated from the College of the City of New York. He went on to earn a B.A. in philosophy from New York University on a scholarship and received his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1903.
As a medical student, Brill was interested in neurology and psychiatry, but it was a later meeting with Freud in Vienna that had the greatest impact on his life and work. Learning the essentials of psychoanalysis from Freud and continuing to correspond with his teacher and friend until Freud's death, Brill returned to the United States in 1908 and set up the first psychoanalytic practice in the United States in New York City.
Brill's Psychoanalysis: Its Theory and Application (1912) was the first American book on the subject of psychoanalysis, and his Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis (1949) is the classic handbook of psychoanalysis for lay readers.
Brill died in 1948.
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