Jenny Waelder-Hall and Early Child Analysis

The life of Dr. Jenny Waelder-Hall as an émigré analyst is important for a number of reasons. First, her recollections of Anna Freud's first Children's Seminar, and its many followers, are among the few that we have of that formative period. Second, she was a brilliant clinician and teacher who published very little, leaving us only the memories of her students as evidence. Third, she and her husband Robert Waelder played an important part in shaping the future of two psychoanalytic institutes, Boston and Baltimore-Washington. In 1935 Felix and Helene Deutsch were early émigrés, settling in Boston, and their decision to emigrate had been partly determined by Robert Waelder, the only Viennese analyst who foresaw the Nazi threat at a time when most Viennese, including Freud, were denying the danger. The Waelders had followed in 1938, and Waelder-Hall then helped obtain a professorship at Tufts for Edward Bibring. This enabled Edward and Grete Bibring to emigrate to Boston, establishing the sequence of Viennese refugee analysts, in contrast to the analytic institutes in New York and Chicago. Later, Dr. Waelder-Hall was a powerful force in creating the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and separating it from the original Washington-Baltimore Institute,