Anny Katan (1898-1992)

Dr Anny Katan (née Rosenberg) died at her home on 24th December 1992. She was 94 years old. Her family were friends of the Freuds and she completed her medical and psychoanalytic training in Vienna. After her marriage to Maurits Katan, the Dutch psychoanalyst, they moved to Holland, where both survived the war, he in hiding, she on false papers. Prior to and after leaving Vienna she had been most active in the underground and helped a number of analysts to escape, among them Margaret Mahler, who Dr Anny always said, remained grateful for the rest of her life.

After the war, at the instigation and urging of Anna Freud, the Katans came to Cleveland to assist in the restructuring of the Western Reserve University School of Medicine and to establish psychoanalytic training in Cleveland. Shortly after her arrival she began importing graduates of Miss Freud's Child Therapy Course in Hampstead, who formed around her the centre of the child analytic movement in Cleveland. First came 'The Therapeutic Nursery School', now know as the Hanna Perkins School, in 1950, then the Cleveland Child Therapy Course for training non-medical child analysts in 1958, and in 1964 the Child Analytic Clinic where to this day children may receive a full analysis based strictly on need because of the Clinic's sliding fee scale. In 1966 she was a Founding Trustee of the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development, the umbrella organisation that oversees operation of all these various programmes in addition to community outreach services and research projects.

In addition to her work in establishing the child analytic research complex in Cleveland, Dr Katan was perhaps best known for her papers on verbalisation, object removal, stranger distress (as opposed to stranger anxiety), distortions of the phallic phase, and adults who had been raped as children.

An era comes close to the end with her death, as we do believe she was the last of that second generation of analysts who gathered abou