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Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham died on November 19, 1979, in London in her eighty-ninth year. Because she was an unusually modest and unassuming person, her work and contributions to psychoanalysis may not be as widely known as they deserve. Her professional life as a psychoanalyst spanned more than fifty years and was intimately linked with the earliest days of child psychoanalysis in Vienna and with the work of Anna Freud of whom she was a close friend and collaborator throughout these years.
As one of the daughters of the famous New York artist and jeweler, Charles Tiffany, she grew up, married, and lived in the United States until she moved to Vienna in 1925 to seek analytic help. She had a short period of analysis with Theodor Reik before he moved to Berlin and was then analyzed by Freud himself. This gradually developed into a training analysis, and she eventually became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society at a time when the other young members included Anna Freud, Ernst and Marianne Kris, Edward and Grete Bibring, Heinz Hartmann, Richard Sterba, and Robert Waelder, to mention just a few.
Her interest in child analysis and its application to education also first stemmed from personal needs. Her four young children were in psychoanalytic treatment, and she felt that the conventional Viennese schools did not meet their requirements. She resolved this problem by founding a small modern school, engaging as teachers two young men who later acquired renown in the psychoanalytic world: Erik Erikson and Peter Blos. Excited by this venture, she wanted to spread the knowledge of psychoanalytic ideas to other educators and, with Anna Freud, set up the first psychoanalytic seminars for nursery school teachers in Vienna.