 A student of Professor Henri Baruk, he obtained his doctorate in 1934, while working at the famous Hôpital Sainte-Anne alongside such well-known contemporaries as Jacques Lacan (whose flair for self-publicity he early noted).Subsequent to the emergence of the Vichy government, Ellenberger emigrated to Switzerland in 1941.There he went through a training analysis with Oskar Pfister between 1949 and 1952, before becoming a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society (SSP).