You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Many psychoanalytically minded Londoners, to say nothing of those further afield, will be familiar with the Anna Freud Centre, recently renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. But for the initiative of the Freud Museum, which hosted the ‘Freud/Tiffany and “The Best Possible School”’ exhibition in early summer 2017, few would have any inkling of its intellectual and institutional origins in the Heitzing School, founded in inter-war Vienna by Anna Freud and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. During the opening symposium, held in mid-May 2017, the contributors to this volume presented, with one substitution (Paul Werner replacing Nick Midgley in the volume), the papers upon which their chapters were based.1
In the introduction, Elizabeth Ann Danto recounts the symposium's purpose, which is to locate the personalities and the project of these ‘Austrian-American pioneers in psychoanalysis and education under one roof’ (p. 12). In doing so, Danto underscores the Heitzing School's aim, which was to respect the children's autonomy and to promote their independence of thought against a backdrop of growing authoritarianism. In the first chapter, Michael John Burlingham examines his father's experience at his grandmother's ‘Matchbox School’ (p. 19), noting above all the commitment to forging a path to adulthood that privileged interiority and self-reflection. The Heitzing School in Vienna comes across in this chapter as similar to a ‘progressive’ version of the many dame schools operating in London at the time.
In Chapter 2, Michael Molnar picks up on a common word play, a faux-cockney rhyming slang in which ‘psychiatrist’ is rendered as ‘trick cyclist’, to organize his exploration of Bob Burlingham's schoolboy photos of the schoolmates and teachers. Molnar's descriptions of the spirit of the school are more evocative today of ‘unschooling’, rather than the ‘home schooling’ so familiar to those with experience of Covid-19 lockdowns, but the ambivalent playfuln