We have lost another great pioneer in psychoanalysis. Dr. Jenny Waelder-Hall died November 15, 1989, at the age of 91, after a stroke in Sarasota, Florida, where she lived after her retirement.
The former Jenny Pollak, she was a native of Austria. She earned her medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1925 and completed her training in psychiatry and pediatrics at the Franz Joseph Hospital in 1930. She started analytic training when she was a medical student. Grete Bibring, her friend and classmate in medical school, had introduced her to analysis and influenced her to become an analyst. Dr. Waelder-Hall was appointed a Training and Supervising Analyst by the Vienna Institute. She had become close to the Sigmund Freud family, especially Anna Freud.
A gifted teacher and psychotherapist, with a strong need to increase her knowledge and understanding of the workings of the human mind, she added to her work with adults the study and treatment of children. Many of the earliest psychoanalysts in this country owed much of their basic learning in this field to Jenny Waelder-Hall. In the original Child Seminar, begun in 1926 and headed by Anna Freud, Jenny Waelder (Hall) presented her case of Anton. This seminar was attended by Dorothy Burlingham, Annie Reich, Anny Angel (Katan), Willi Hoffer, and Edith Sterba. They were soon joined by Edith Buxbaum, Marianne Kris, Berta Bornstein, Erik Homburger, and others, including Helen Ross, Julia Deming, George Mohr, Edith Jackson, Mary O'Neil Hawkins, Margaret Ribble, Edith Entenmann, and Hy Lippman. The latter group formed a subseminar sometimes called the Kinder Seminar. Helene Deutsch also visited and used this seminar as the model for the Adult Continuous Case Seminar she founded.
Dr. Waelder-Hall's paper on pavor nocturnus, probably the first classical child analytic case in the literature, was her membership paper, read before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1930. In the analytic process, the meaning of Anton's pavor nocturnus could be traced back to the patient's murderous wishes toward his father. From this work and other studies, Sigmund Freud concluded that such wishes were the central factor in the development of this extremely distressing psychological problem found in patients of all ages.
In the early 30s, Dr. Waelder-Hall presented a second case, that of Walter, a five-year-old boy, the youngest child in analysis at that time. In this seminar, as Helen Ross recalled in her tribute on the occasion of Jenny Waelder-Hall's 70th birthday, “ego psychology was unfolding itself as we worked out the mechanisms of Walter's defenses.” These studies led to the publication that year of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, which has over the years served as the foundation for modern-day psychoanalytic technique.
It was because of her closeness to the Freuds that Dr. Waelder-Hall and her family remained in Vienna, tolerating the increasing persecution by the Hitler regime, until Freud and his family fled in 1938. When she left Vienna with her daughters, Dorothy and Marianne, and her husband, Robert Waelder, she went to Boston at the invitation of Helene Deutsch, a close friend who had been a supervisor when she was an analytic candidate.
In Boston, Dr. Waelder-Hall continued her psychoanalytic teaching as a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute from 1938 to 1943. There she conducted a seminar on child analysis and supervised both adult and child analyses. One of her supervisees in Boston was Charles Brenner. She also taught child psychiatry at the Beth Israel Hospital and gave a seminar in the Nursery Training Institute, headed then by Abigail Elliott.
When she divorced Robert Waelder in 1941 and married Duncan Hall, a historian with the British Embassy in Washington, DC, Jenny Waelder-Hall moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where she lived and worked for more than 30 years, until her retirement in 1976.
She joined the Washington-Baltimore Institute in 1943 and remained on its faculty until its division in 1953 into what are now the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. In addition, from 1950 to 1954, she visited the Institute of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, conducting biweekly seminars and supervision there. It was in her vacation home in Sarasota, Florida, in 1973 that the groundwork for an institute for training psychoanalysts in Miami was laid.
From 1954 on, Dr. Waelder-Hall was pivotal in the development of the Baltimore-Washington Institute. She reanalyzed many analysts who were interested in classical analysis and supervised many of the Baltimore members who wanted to learn classical analysis. Her dedication to child analysis stimulated interest and led to the establishment of the Child Analysis Division of the Institute in 1961 under John J. Francis. She also was a founding member of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis.
Dr. Waelder-Hall never wanted any administrative position. She loved clinical work and teaching. Leon Ferber, former student and devoted friend, recalls that “Jenny had a unique ability to conceptualize clinical material, better, I believe, than anyone else, and I've listened to many when I was on the Committee on Institutes. She taught us tact, to be aware of the patient's pain and suffering, and that we were dealing with a person not a disease.”
Over the years, many analysts, some from long distances like Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia, came to learn the art and science of psychoanalysis in the pleasant, plant-filled solarium in Bethesda, from this gracious, wise, and skillful teacher. She brought a sense of history and personified the very origins and fundamentals of psychoanalysis—to which she was so passionately dedicated. Sharp, quick, and very witty, she could make a point with a joke, metaphor, and humor, and always with warmth and gentleness.
She is survived by a sister, Helen Husek of Sarasota, Florida; a daughter, Dr. Marianne von Hippie of Anchorage, Alaska; and six grandchildren. A memorial service to celebrate her life and work was held at the central office of the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis on March 31, 1990. A Memorial Fund has been established there to honor her memory.
* I am particularly indebted to Leon Ferber and John Francis for their help in preparing this article.