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With warmth and great sadness, the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy (JICAP) extends our condolences to those closest to Elsa First: her dear daughter Shoshana First and her sister, Gail Farber, extended family, as well as friends, colleagues (nationally and internationally), students, and former patients, for whom Elsa was a profound, recognizing presence and generous guiding light. Elsa was a member of the editorial board of JICAP since its inception, an esteemed colleague, important supporter of our mission, and a mentor and friend to many of us.
Elsa was a psychoanalyst who studied with Anna Freud in the 1960s at the Hampstead Clinic (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) in London. Upon her return to the United States, Elsa’s presence in New York City, as an exquisitely attuned British-trained child psychoanalyst, rapidly brought her teaching and speaking invitations from numerous psychoanalytic training programs, with which she remained affiliated for decades. Along with this recognition came a steady stream of requests for clinical consultation and supervision. Elsa's sensitivity and capacity to use psychoanalytic developmental understanding to grasp the subtleties of clinical work with children and adults provided valuable insights to those with whom she worked, and always in a deeply respectful manner.
Among her many professional affiliations, Elsa was a full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association as a training and supervising analyst for adults and children (New York Freudian Society), a member of the faculty and supervisor in the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program at the William Alanson White Institute, an associate in clinical psychiatry and faculty member in the Parent Infant Psychotherapy Program of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, and an adjunct clinical professor in the NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, where she supervised and taught a course