Mary Flumerfelt

I first met Mary Flumerfelt (Mary Hamm as she then was) when we both started training in the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course in 1951. So in a sense I knew her for more than thirty years, but our ways separated after 1954. She did, however, staunchly maintain our friendship, staying with me several times when she visited England.

She had a warm and friendly personality, but the first impression I had of her remains with me forcibly, namely her fervent desire to understand and use psychoanalysis. This gave her, I think, a sort of purpose in life if not, perhaps, total satisfaction. She showed sincerity in all she did and honestly strove to learn and do the right thing.

When I heard she was getting married I hoped she might find some real happiness, but, alas, the marriage did not endure. It left her, however, with a growing son for whom she showed great concern, and she once brought him with her to England in his adolescence. It was he who wrote and told me of Mary's death a year ago which, he added, was calm and peaceful after long suffering.

B. J. Oxford (Barbara Reeve)

Mary left Hampstead in 1956 and I met her again in Cleveland when I arrived there in 1960. We both took part in Anny Katan's weekly Child Seminars and at that time we were both teaching at the Cleveland Training Center for Child Therapists. Mary was also acting as a consultant in various agencies in the Cleveland area, as well as treating children and working with mothers at the Therapeutic Nursery School and at the University Hospital in Cleveland. However, most of her energies during those years were directed towards the education and upbringing of her young son.

I left Cleveland for Baltimore in 1965, and a year later Mary and I met again, in Jenny Waelder Hall's seminar for the child analysts of the Baltimore-District of Columbia Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Mary was highly thought of wherever she worked. After