Chapter 9 The Two Schools and Some of the Main Figures

The period between 1920 and 1940 was particularly fruitful, and the group of child psychoanalysts which formed around Anna Freud was very rich in notable personalities. The ‘Kinderseminar’, the name given by psychoanalysts of Sigmund Freud’s generation to the circle she had organized, had rallied little by little: August Aichhorn, Siegfried Bernfeld, Willi Hoffer, Heinz Hartmann, Wilhelm Reich, Jeanne Lampl de Groot, Richard Sterba, René Spitz, Helene Deutsch, Ernst Kris, Marianne Kris-Rie and Anny Rosenberg-Katan. Some were childhood friends, most were Jewish, nearly all were committed to left-wing politics.

This group of analysts was very active. They carried out lectures on education, ran the Vienna Institute of Psychoanalysis, where, in the third year, students were given lectures on the specifics of child analysis, and contributed to and published the journal Zeitschrif für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik. The journal was to be discontinued in 1938 and was replaced by the Anglo-American journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. They also founded a number of institutions—for re-education (in which Aichhorn, Bernfeld and Hoffer became heavily involved) and kindergartens (in which Dorothy Burlingham, Peter Blos, Erik Homburger Erikson and others became involved)—and took part in consultations organized by the Viennese municipal authorities for children in difficulty.

The spirit of the period was one of pioneering. Private and professional life tended to mingle, all the more so since some of them were undergoing analysis or supervision with the others, and often the families into which they were born were already friends.

Their activity was intense, but the spread of their ideas in the Vienna of the period met with much resistance. We should remember that Ilse Hellman, who at that time was assistant to child psychology Professor Charlotte Bühler, was not authorized by the latter to meet Anna Freud. Moreover, Ilse Hellman says (I. 4)