Marie Eglé Laufer (1925-2021)

I would like to share my sadness about the death of Eglé Laufer and to give a brief account of some of her main contributions. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to enjoy her friendship as well as to work with her and learn from her.

Eglé Laufer’s contribution to psychoanalysis has been profound and highly enriching. Some of her ideas were jointly discussed and developed together with her husband Moses Laufer (known as Moe), and within the context of working at the Brent Consultation Centre (now the Brent Centre for Young People) in London. Others arose just from her own experience and provided a different view from the notions that were already in place. Eglé brought a different perspective on the relationship to the body in adolescence and, in particular, to the relationship to the body in the adolescent girl. She also paid special attention to the infantile precursors of adolescent pathology. Her contributions to the understanding of adolescents’ relationship to their body, which she describes in terms of the reality of the “sexual” body, was of great help in understanding the reasons why adolescents frequently attack their bodies and/or try to transform them.

Eglé described her development in a paper published in 2009 in Psychoanalytic Enquiry (M. E. Laufer 2009). She was born in Vienna in 1925 at a time when many young intellectuals, like her parents, were inspired by the Russian revolution and became involved in left-wing politics.1 Her father was a Hungarian economist called Imre Vajda who had fled from Hungary following the failed 1919 revolution under threat of a death sentence. After the liberation of Hungary from fascism he became one of the leaders of the left wing Social Democratic Party.

Eglé's mother Sigrid was Austrian. She studied at Vienna University and became a qualified doctor, later working as a child psychiatrist. They lived in Vienna and Eglé attended the nursery school founded by Maria Montessori. Then, in the early 1930s, Eglé’s par