Pioneers of Child Psychoanalysis

Influential Theories and Practices in Healthy Child Development

Beatriz Markman Reubins, Marc Stephan Reubins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917318
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book describes the lives and theories of the pioneer child psychoanalysts who created the field of child psychoanalysis and contributed to the understanding of child development. It aims to expose emerging professionals in the field of psychoanalysis to theories of infant experiences.

CHAPTER ONE


Sigmund Freud

Volumes have been written concerning the subject of Freud’s life and work. In this chapter, the focus is narrowed to Freud’s immediate family, his parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren. The history of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud’s circle of friends and the pioneers of what became the International Psychoanalytic Society, is also highlighted.

Freud and his siblings

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856, in the Moravian town of Freiberg (now known as Pr˘íbor, in the Czech Republic), during the era of the Austrian Empire. His parents were of Jewish Galitzian descent. His father, Jacob Freud (1815–1896), was born in Tysmenitz, Galitzia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1886, at the age of forty-one, Jacob married his second (or possibly third) wife and Sigmund Freud’s mother, Amalia Malka Nathansohn, a woman twenty-one years her husband’s junior. Sigmund was their first child.

Jacob Freud had two children from his first marriage to Sally Kanner (1829–1852), Emanuel (1833–1914) and Philipp (1836–1911). Both children were born in Tysmenitz in Galitzia. It is not known and questionable whether Jacob had a second wife, Rebecca, who died after three years of marriage (1852–1855).

Jacob Freud’s older son, Emanuel, married Marie in the city of Freiberg; they had two children, Johann (1855–1919) and Pauline (1855–1944). Johann and Sigmund were very close in age, and during their early childhood they played together, but lost touch after the emigration of Emanuel and his family to Manchester, England, in 1860. In Manchester, Emanuel and Marie had two more children, Bertha (1866– 1940) and Samuel (1870–1945). Jacob Freud’s second son, Phillip, married Bloomah Frankel and they had two children, Pauline (1873–1951) and Morris (1875–1938).

Sigmund Freud kept in touch with his British half-siblings and their families through regular correspondence with Samuel, and the two men eventually met for the first time in London in 1938, one year before Freud’s death.

Jacob Freud had eight children with his wife Amalia Nathansohn. Sigmund, whose birth name was Sigismund Schlomo, was the first born, in 1856; he changed his name to Sigmund in 1877, when he was twenty-one.

Freud’s siblings

Sigmund (Freiberg, 6 May 1856–London, 23 September 1939)

Julius (Freiberg, October 1857–Freiberg, 15 April 1858)

Anna (Freiberg, 31 December 1858–New York, 11 March 1955)

Rosa (Vienna, 21 March 1860, deported 23 September 1942)

Mitzi (Vienna, 22 March 1861, deported 23 September 1942)

Dolfi (Vienna, 23 July 1862, deported 23 September 1942)

Pauline (Vienna, 3 May 1864, deported 23 September 1942)

Alexander Gotthold Ephraim (Vienna, 19 April 1866–Canada, 23 April 1943).

Freud’s younger brother, Julius, died in infancy (1858) when Sigmund was a toddler. His first sister Anna was born in Freiberg in 1858, and was the only sister who survived the Nazi occupation. Anna married Ely Bernays (1860–1921), who was Sigmund Freud’s brother-in-law. In 1892, the Bernayses moved to the United States and settled in New York. They had four daughters and a son, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), who became well known in the area of public relations and advertising. Their daughters were Judith, Lucy, Hella, and Martha.

Freud’s second and favourite sister, Regine Debora (Rosa) (1860–1942) married a medical doctor, Heinrich Graf (1852–1908). They had a son, Hermann (1897–1917), who was killed in the First World War, and a daughter, Cacilie (1899–1922), who committed suicide after an unhappy love affair.

Freud’s sister Maria (Mitzi) married her cousin Moritz Freud. They had three daughters, Margarete, Lily, Martha, and a son, Theodor, who died at the age of twenty-three after a drowning accident.

Freud’s sister, Esther Adolfine (Dolfi), never married and remained in the family home to care for her parents until their deaths, while his fifth sister, Pauline Regine (Paula), married Valentine Winternitz (1859–1900). The couple emigrated to the United States where their daughter, Rose Beatrice, was born in 1896. After the death of her husband, Paula and her daughter Rosi returned to Europe. When Rosi was seventeen, she developed psychological problems; ten years later, she became pregnant and married Ernst Waldinger, a poet. It was an unhappy relationship, and in 1931 she suffered a relapse and emigrated to the United States, where in 1946 she entered analysis with Paul Federn in New York.

Freud’s youngest brother, Alexander, married Sophie Sabine Schreiber, and the couple had one son, Harry (1909–1968). Alexander was intelligent and hard-working and became a specialist in transportation at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. As the Second World War approached, Alexander lost his business, and in March 1938 he and his family escaped the Nazis by moving to Switzerland. In September, they emigrated to London, joining his son Harry; later, he and his wife immigrated to Canada, where he died in 1943.

Their father, Jacob Freud, died on 23 October 1896, at the age of eighty-one; their mother, Martha Freud, died in 1930 when she was ninety-four. Both parents died in Vienna.

At the time of the Nazi persecution, Sigmund Freud pleaded to Marie Bonaparte to get permission for his sisters to leave Vienna, but it was not possible, and his four younger sisters were murdered by the Nazis, including Adolfine (Dolfi) Freud who was killed in the Treblinka concentration camp.

Freud in Vienna

In 1859, when Sigmund Freud was four years old, the Freud family moved from Freiberg to Vienna following an economic crisis that ruined his father’s wool business, and Sigmund lived in Vienna until his forced immigration to London in 1938.

Freud attended medical school at Vienna University in 1873 at the age of seventeen. He was brilliant, always ahead of his class, and graduated in March 1881. He was excellent at his research, which concentrated on neurophysiology in Brucke’s laboratory, and in 1883 he joined Theodor Meynert’s service in the psychiatric hospital. After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children’s ward in Berlin, he returned to Vienna in 1886.

Freud and his children

In September of 1886, Freud married Martha Bernays (1861–1951), whom he loved immensely. In November 1895, Minna Bernays, Martha’s sister, lost her fiancé Ignaz Schoenberg, a close friend of Freud’s, to pulmonary tuberculosis. Minna moved in with the Freuds and lived with them until the end of her life.

Freud and Martha had six children and eight grandchildren. Only Anna, the youngest child, followed in her father’s footsteps and became a psychoanalyst.

Freud’s children

Mathilde (Vienna, 1887–London, 1978)

Jean Martin (Vienna, 1889–London, 1976)

Oliver (Vienna, 1891–United States, 1969)

Ernst (Vienna, 1892–London, 1970)

Sophie (Vienna, 1893–Vienna, 1920)

Anna (Vienna, 1895–London, 1982).

Freud’s oldest daughter Mathilde married Robert Hollitscher in 1909. The couple did not have children, and in 1938, during Nazi persecution, she left Vienna to settle in London.

Freud’s eldest son, Jean Martin, was named in honour of the great French clinician Jean Martin Charcot. Martin served as a lieutenant in the Austrian Artillery from 1914 to 1915, but from 1915 to 1919 was held prisoner in Genoa, Italy, until his release at the age of twenty-five.

On his return to Vienna, he became a lawyer, ultimately working in a bank and managing Freud’s finances and his accounts.

Martin met his wife, Ernestine Drucker (1896–1980), in Vienna, and they married on 7 December 1919. The couple had two children, Anton Walter (1921) and Myriam Sophie (1924). After the Nazi occupation in 1938, the couple fled from Austria to France. They separated but never divorced, and Ernestine remained in France with their daughter while Martin left for London. She and their daughter Sophie escaped France in 1940 by way of Morocco, where they boarded a ship for the United States. There, Ernestine began a speech pathology practice and remained in the United States until her death in 1980. Martin’s life in London was difficult. He held several different jobs for short periods. His last job was in a smoke shop near the British Museum. In 1958, against his sister Anna’s advice, he published his memoirs, Sigmund Freud: Man and Father, which is still in print.

Oliver Freud was also born in Vienna, during the same year the Freuds moved to their new home, Berggasse 19, which has become the current location of the Freud Museum. In 1909, Oliver attended the Vienna Polytechnic, graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1915. During the Second World War and until December 1916, he was put to work building barracks and tunnels; after this assignment, he was made an officer in an engineering regiment. Oliver married for the first time in December 1915, but was divorced by September 1916; in 1921, he began analysis with Franz Alexander.

He later married Henny Fuchs (1892–1971), and the couple had one daughter, Eva Mathilde, who was born on 3 September 1924. Oliver lived and worked in Berlin until Hitler came to power in 1933. At the time of the persecution, he fled to France. Later, Oliver and his wife emigrated to the United States, while their daughter Eva remained in France with her fiancé. Eva died of influenza in 1944. Oliver died in 1969.

Ernst Ludwig was born in 1892. He began his studies in Vienna in 1911 and graduated in 1919, in a tumultuous political time. In Munich, he met Lucy, his future wife, who was the daughter of a wealthy family from Berlin and a student of art history. In 1920, they moved to Berlin and married. Ernst developed a successful architectural career in Berlin, where the couple had three children: Stephan Gabriel; Lucian (1922–2011), the internationally recognised painter; and Clement (1924–2009), who became a writer. In 1933, with the rise of National Socialism and the related murder of one of his wife’s family members, Ernst and his family fled to London; by November, he and his family were settled there, where he became a partner in an architectural firm and built his own clientele. Many psychoanalysts asked him to build and update their offices, and he succeeded in establishing himself for a second time. He died in 1970 in London.

Sophie married Max Halberstadt and had three children. She died during the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1920.

Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, was born in 1895 in Vienna, and died in 1982 in London after a notable psychoanalytic career. She never married.

The Freud family lived at Bergasse 19 in Vienna until they immigrated to London in 1938, just as Vienna was becoming an increasingly dangerous place for Jews. Not long afterwards, Sigmund Freud died of cancer of the mouth and jaw, a disease he had suffered from for the last twenty years of his life. He died at the age of eighty-three, in London, on 23 September 1939. Martha Bernays Freud died in London on 2 November 1951; her sister, Minna Bernays, had died there earlier, 13 February 1941.

Freud and his friends: the Wednesday meetings

Sigmund Freud was an intense and passionate man, especially when it came to his wife Martha, his family, his children, his friends, and his psychoanalytic discoveries. As he was developing ideas in search of an explanation for the mental health and symptoms of his patients, he shared his discoveries with his best friends, also physicians, with whom he exchanged numerous letters containing his ideas regarding himself and his patients. One of his closest friends was Wilhelm Fliess, a German-Jewish physician.

Freud successfully treated William Stekel, a physician and psychologist, who suggested to him in 1902 that he should begin a group to discuss various issues related to his ideas. This was the beginning of the Wednesday meetings, at that time called the “Wednesday’s Psychological Meetings”. Every week, a group of men (later three women were included) met at Freud’s home at Berggasse 19. The founding men in the group included Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Paul Federn, Isidor Sadger, Edward Hitschmann, Max Kahane, Rudolph Reitter, and Otto Rank, with Freud present for each meeting.

The men came from a range of medical backgrounds. Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was a medical doctor, and specialised in ophthalmology at the beginning of his career. Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) was a medical doctor. Paul Federn (1871–1937) was a medical doctor who first met Freud in 1902 and remained loyal to him until he died. Isidor Sadger (1867–1942), a medical doctor, was an important pioneer who remained a member of the group until it ended in 1938. He was respected for his work in the area of the perversions. Edward Hitschmann (1871–1958) was a medical doctor who specialised in internal medicine. He joined the group in 1905, making him one of the last remaining members of the group, always loyal to Freud. He then emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. Max Kahane (1856–1923), another medical doctor, was one of the first members of the group, while Rudolph Reitter (1865–1917) was a well-known medical doctor when he joined the group in 1902. Otto Rank (1884–1939) was a good friend and one of Freud’s favourite members, until Rank left the group.

Over the years, the Wednesday meetings boasted many other members.

Some Wednesday meeting members

Fritz Wittels, MD, joined the group in 1907, became a psychoanalyst and settle in New York in 1932. He was a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

Rudolf von Urbantschitoch, MD, joined the group in 1909, psychiatrist and psychologist was interested in human sexuality. He became a psychoanalyst and settle in Carmel, California in 1936.

Maximilian Steiner, MD, specialised in dermatology.

Erdwin Hollerung, MD, specialised in surgery.

Albert Jochim, MD, director of a well-known sanatorium in Vienna.

David Bach, PhD, was a music critic.

Philipp Frey, a teacher and writer.

Hugo Heller, a publisher who also owned a bookshop where the intellectuals of the time used to gathered for discussions.

Max Graf, PhD...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author and Editor
• Prologue
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One Sigmund Freud
• Chapter Two Freud’s papers concerning child psychoanalysis
• Chapter Three Anna Freud
• Chapter Four Melanie Klein
• Chapter Five Donald Woods Winnicott
• Chapter Six Clinical case presentation: Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Donald Woods Winnicott in perspective
• Chapter Seven Margaret Mahler
• Chapter Eight John Bowlby
• Chapter Nine Pioneers around the world
• Conclusions
• References
• Index