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The Last Tiffany is really two biographies, the first a biography of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the second and latter half of the book, a biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and her relationship with the Freuds. On the dust cover, the author, Michael John Burlingham, is described as an authority on the life and work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, thus the emphasis on the origins of Tiffany glass and its place among the wealthy names of New York City and the artists of nineteenth-century America. This reviewer, a psychoanalyst, will focus on portions of the book of interest to psychoanalysts, specifically the latter half of the book devoted to Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham herself and her role in the history of psychoanalysis.
Dorothy was the eighth and last of Louis Comfort's children and the fourth and last of his second wife, Louise Wakeman Knox. Dorothy's childhood was marred at the age of six months by the death of her next older sister, Annie. Her mother became depressed and Dorothy was placed in the care of a nanny. In her loneliness Dorothy vainly sought companionship from her 4-year-old twin sisters who, bonded to each other, ignored her. Her plaintive search for companionship caused her family, somewhat unfeelingly, to give her the nickname of 'Me-Too'. In addition to these early narcissistic deprivations her mother died of cancer after a long conspicuously painful illness when Dorothy was 12. She attended high school for four years at an expensive boarding school, but her father did not allow her to graduate because of his loneliness and because of his prejudice against education for women. This was the end of Dorothy's formal education.
Her marriage and early motherhood were disasters. Robert Burlingham had manic-depressive illness with repeated manic psychoses. Her four children, especially the eldest, Bob, had severe emotional, behavioural and psychosomatic disorders which were due in large part to Dorothy repeating with them the traumatic desertions o