Liselotte Frankl: An Obituary1

Dr Liselotte Frankl qualified as psychologist in Vienna and became a lecturer at the University and Research Assistant to Charlotte Bühler, the first, and at that time the only, Professor of Child Development anywhere in Europe. Although Professor Bühler was strongly opposed to psychoanalytic thinking, Liselotte Frankl attended, more or less secretly, the lectures which Anna Freud was holding less than ten minutes' walk from the University. She was one of three of Bühler's assistants who later became psychoanalysts: the others were Esther Bick and Ilse Hellman. She gained her PhD at the same university in 1935 and she began her personal analysis with Ernst Kris.

She was able, through the good offices of an organization set up to help Jewish academics, to leave Germany in 1938 and to come to live and work in England. She decided to undertake a medical training: this seemed to her, as a foreigner, a necessary condition for professional advancement. She was accepted at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, and spent part of her time as a medical student at the University of St Andrews, to which a part of the School was evacuated in 1940. In 1945 she obtained an MBBS with distinction from the University of London. While in London, she was able to continue her personal analysis and join the British Psycho-Analytical Society. She was appointed a Training Analyst a few years later and is remembered with affection by many of her trainees.

Following an appointment at the West Sussex Child Guidance Service, an important proportion of her professional career was spent as Psychiatrist to the East London Child Guidance Clinic, a part of the London Hospital, where she worked in close association with Augusta Bonnard. Many students of the Child Training of the Hampstead Clinic (as the Anna Freud Centre was then called) were able to gain valuable clinical experience under her tutelage, and had cause to appreciate and be grateful for her deep insight into child assessm