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Anna Wolff was the kind of friend everyone wants and the kind of teacher everyone needs. She would listen carefully, consider seriously what you were telling her, whether it was about yourself or a patient. Then, in no uncertain terms, she would tell you what she thought. Her response went to the core of the issue at hand in often surprising ways. Her friend and colleague Dr. Warren Poland put it best, “What she said was always original, from a fresh slant, always seeming to arise from her sense of the immediacy of the moment in the clinical process; yes, informed by theory but never originating there.” There was never anything inauthentic or artificial about her.
Anna's name was not widely known among psychoanalysts. She contributed very little to the psychoanalytic literature. She had an abhorrence of public speaking. She was a private person. She worked quietly out of her office in her home with its large, beautiful garden, of which she was very proud, on Channing Street in Cambridge, MA. She was happy there. Forced to move several times as a child, she commented: “In my grownup life, I have always wanted to stay put in one place and have a house that I could keep as my own and not have to leave.” There she was surrounded by artwork that her father Ernst, an art historian as well as analyst, had purchased. In her quiet elegance, she exemplified the many talented analysts whose outstanding work often is not fully recognized because they choose to avoid the limelight.
Anna was the daughter of Ernst and Marianne Kris, analysts themselves and friends of the Freuds. Of her mother, Anna said, “She was very honest and able to tell difficult things to people. And she would always do it in a thoughtful way so that they learned, and weren't hurt by it.” Anna was cut from the same cloth. “I don't think I ever was in Anna's presence when