Born in Czechoslovakia 1914  
Immigrated to Israel 1949
Died in USA 2008

Dr. Gottfried R. Bloch
1914-2008
was a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor. He was in October 1914 in what was then a part of Austria-Hungary. Bloch began to develop an interest in the human psyche at the age of fifteen when he came across the book Psychoanalyse und Individualpsychologie by the German psychiatrist Dr. Alfred Brauchle. He continued to read about medicine, biology, and psychology with aspirations of studying medicine at university. He studied at the medical school of Prague’s German University until the fall of 1938 when, as he was trying to enroll in his final semester, he was asked to sign a form declaring he was not Jewish. During WWII he was a prisoner at the Theresienstadt and Buchenwald concentration camps.
It wasn’t until 1947 that Bloch was able to finish his last semester of medical school at the Czech University. In 1955, Bloch’s application to emigrate to the U.S. was approved and a year later he arrived in Los Angeles with his family. In 1961 he was accepted into the L.A. Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and received his California Medical license. He died in 2008
Unfree Associations
Gottfried Bloch

In Unfree Associations, Gottfried Bloch, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, describes his experiences in Auschwitz through a lens at once clinical and personal. For Bloch, unfree associations are haunting and powerful memories that are always painfully on the margin of everyday life. Since the end of World War II, Bloch has been compiling and reliving his experiences, which he now revisits with a sense of clarity and objectivity. In Unfree Associations, Bloch does not seek to be praised for his survival, which he attributes to chance or luck. Instead, he seeks to be understood in human terms.

Dr.Bloch came to Israel in 1949 from Prague, worked in Geha Hospital near Ramat Gan and began analysis with Dr.Moshe Wulff. He was accepted as a candidate into Israeli Psa Society. He had small analytical  practice along with his hospital work. (quoted from his book Unfree Association, p. 246)