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Anna Emilie Rink was born in Vienna on January 10, 1919. By the time she escaped the Nazis in 1939, her parents and two sisters had died of medical causes; her two brothers set off for Italy and Australia. At age 19, she arrived in California alone, which she described as ‘a great adventure.’ In LA, she became part of a group of young musicians and students studying with Arnold Shoenberg at UCLA. She supported herself by living as an assistant and companion to the psychoanalyst Christine Olden, sparking her love affair with psychoanalysis. In Dr. Olden’s circle of European expats, she met Polish-born activist, publisher and writer Peter Bergman, whom she married shortly after moving to New York City in 1943. By then, she had completed a BA in Music and Early Childhood Education. Anni taught recorder and piano and with Florence White, wrote Playing the Recorder, a book still in print. Over the next few years, her sons Kostia and Tobi were born.
In 1959, after a friend declined the position, Anni was hired by Dr. Margaret Mahler who was beginning her research at the Masters Children’s Center. Working with Drs. Fred Pine, Manuel Furer, and John McDevitt, Anni was one of several psychoanalytic-researcher-observers who dictated detailed observations of children in the two nurseries at the center. One nursery, for “normal” toddlers and their mothers, was designed in an informal way so that the comings and goings between child and mother could be observed as they occurred naturally over the course of the day. These families were recruited from a local playground, representing the middle class downtown New Yorkers of the day; many of these families formed lifelong connections. In the second nursery, designed for autistic and psychotic children, therapists conducted intensive work with mother and child together. Dyadic psychotherapy was unique, if not unknown, at the time. Anni was involved in both projects, recordi