Recent radical political and social changes sweeping Eastern Europe have revealed a reawakening interest in psychoanalysis. Over 50 years ago, a bright but brief flourish of analysis appeared in one Eastern European capital city, Prague, until World War II altered Czechoslovakia and the East for half a century.
Psychoanalysis in Prague was established, and later destroyed, as a result of the rise and triumph of Hitler and the Nazis in the 30s. In January 1933, when Hitler assumed the chancellorship of Germany, a host of German analysts joined the few colleagues who had fled earlier. Most moved west, settling in France, Holland, Denmark, Britain, and the United States, but some emigrated eastward, and a small group settled in Prague to begin a new life.
Of the Prague group, the only remaining member is Elizabeth Gero-Heymann, who practices in Manhattan and was recently elected Vice President of the Freudian Society. She recalled the tragic events of the 1930s.
“The times were crazy,” she commented about the ascendancy of the Nazis in Germany. “It was the beginning of Hitler. We all knew something terrible was happening. I knew I couldn't live under Mr. Hitler. The Nazis were horrible. If they didn't like somebody's nose, they would arrest you. My parents had a dog, a Doberman, and I always was afraid he would bark at an S.A. man and something would happen. It was a most frightening time.
“My father was one of the few who took the Nazis seriously from the very beginning. In 1933 there were still cabaret performers who poked fun at the Nazis, and he said, ‘It is nothing to poke fun at. This is damn serious business.’ He was, unfortunately, right.
“Before my marriage to George Gero in 1930 and before I learned anything about psychoanalysis, my main interests were literature, psychology, and the history of art,” Gero-Heymann reminisced. “I studied at several universities: Tubinger, Berlin, and Vienna. My intention was to become a teacher, an identification with a very gifted teacher in high school, who later became a life-long friend.
“I always knew that I wanted to work with people. At 18, in my junior year in high school, I wrote a composition on the creativity of women that I ended with a quotation from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, “ohne Wunder zu heiler und ohne Worke Wunder zu.” Translated, it means: “To heal without miracles and to create miracles without words.” This was a simple but profound comment about transference from a prepsychoanalytic source. In a way I learned from Goethe first, Freud second.
“At age 20, I spent some months in Florence. I learned Italian, and the following year I spent many hours reading Dante's Divine Comedy in Italian. I was groping; I had not found my way. A somewhat indulgent father made this unconventional journey possible.”
With the encouragement of her psychoanalyst husband, Gero-Heymann's interest in psychoanalysis grew. She entered analysis with Frances Deri, who was associated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933, Deri decided to move to Prague, and Gero-Heymann followed her. Separated from his wife, George Gero, who was in analysis with Wilhelm Reich, followed Reich to Copenhagen. Separated from her husband, Wilhelm Reich, Annie Reich first went to Vienna and then went to Prague, where Gero-Heymann met her at the train station. They lived in the same pension and became great friends. As Gero-Heymann recalled, “Reich thought one should change wives every three years.” The marriages of Annie Reich and Gero-Heymann (who shared the same analyst, Deri) ended around the same time. “But to this day, Gero and I remain friends,” Gero-Heymann commented with a reflective warmth so characteristic of her.
In addition to Gero-Heymann, Deri, and Annie Reich, Stef Bornstein (Berta Bornstein's sister), Hannah Heilborn, and Henry and Yela Lowenfeld emigrated from Germany to Prague, where they set up practice and established the Prague Psychoanalytic Study Group. There were no analysts in Prague when the group from Germany arrived; and with their experience in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, they provided the impetus to form the study group. Deri was the original leader; Annie Reich and Bornstein were the faculty.
Gero-Heymann began her analytic training “at the suggestion of Francis Deri. She thought I had a psychological gift. I took part in all the lectures and seminars.” The other students were Heilborn, the Lowenfelds, and three Prague physicians: Richard Karpe, a Czech pediatrician; Jan Frank, a neurologist and psychiatrist originally from Slovakia; and Emmanuel Windholtz, a Slovakian psychiatrist. Later Kristine Olden moved from Vienna and joined the faculty.
Classes at the Prague study group began in the fall of 1933 at Deri's apartment on Jecna Street. “We worked very intensely,” Gero-Heymann recalled. “We met three evenings a week, and we had to prepare for them.” Deri and Bornstein were the first teachers. Deri taught metapsychological and theoretical courses, and Bornstein taught developmental courses. In the third quarter of 1934, Annie Reich began teaching.
Guest analysts traveled to Prague on weekends to present special lectures. The lecturers included analysts who later became luminaries of the 40s and 50s: Edward Bibring, Robert Waelder, Rene Spitz, Paul Federn, Ernst Kris, and August Aichhorn. “Aichhorn had a way of making contact with adolescents and engaging the craziest and most disturbed ones to help them,” Gero-Heymann commented. The Prague Psychoanalytic Study Group officially affiliated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society at the Luzerne Congress in 1934.
Otto Fenichel arrived in Prague in 1935. He had left Berlin in 1933 and settled for a time in Oslo. While in Berlin
he had acquired the reputation of being an excellent teacher and scholar. His seminar, called the “Kinder Seminar” because of the youth of its members, was a renowned course. In April of 1935, Deri left for the United States to settle in Los Angeles, where she had a long and productive career. Fenichel took over leadership of the group.
“Fenichel had a very special gift as a teacher and as a seminar leader,” Gero-Heymann recalled. “He brought people out. For example, he helped me tremendously to overcome a certain shyness I had at that time.” In 1936, Fenichel asked Gero-Heymann to present an overview of Anna Freud's newly published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
In addition to the formal lectures for training, the Prague group offered lectures to the general public. The German-speaking population, especially the large German-Jewish population, had an interest in analysis. (This was of particular importance because none of the German analysts spoke Czech, a particularly difficult language to master.)
Classes continued through the first four months of 1938 in spite of the increased threat of German aggression and impending war. Both Frank and Karpe began teaching.
In March of 1938 the Anschluss of Austria occurred. Germany annexed Austria, and Hitler entered Vienna. The Viennese analysts fled, and psychoanalysis disappeared from Austria. “I was at Fenichel's house for dinner the day Hitler marched into Vienna. We knew that we were doomed—it was clear,” Gero-Haymann remembered.
“Fenichel was a very good man,” Gero-Heymann continued. “Because of him, Edith Jacobson survived. He arranged her escape from Germany. Because of her thyroid condition, she was on leave from prison in a hospital in Leibzig. I went regularly to Berlin to visit my parents. Fenichel asked me to visit Werner Kempner, a gentile analyst in Berlin, who was supposed to visit Edith Jacobson to discuss her escape with her. Kempner, as it turned out, couldn't go because his wife was pregnant and she was afraid something would happen to him. So I decided to go to see Jacobson myself.
“I took a train to Leibzig and discussed the plan with Edith. She would have a consultation with Doctor Sauerbruch, who was a famous doctor in Berlin, and then arrangements would be made to get her out of Berlin to Prague. A former patient of hers went with her on the local train over the border to Prague, where she had a thyroid operation.
“She spent the night with me when we thought the war would break out. It was at the time of the Munich crisis, September 1938; Czechoslovakia was sold out. Following surgery she flew directly to the United States. It was typical of Fenichel to have arranged all the details of her escape.
“Between 1933 and 1938 Prague was a wonderful city, and then of course things changed after Munich,” Gero-Heymann recalled. “I went to the American consulate, but they lost my application for emigration.” Through the help of her friend Kristine Olden, she met a “wonderful woman, Bryher.” Bryher was the pseudonym of Winifred Ellerman, heir to the Ellerman Line fortune and an early and staunch supporter of analysis in Britain. She rescued many from the Nazis during this time. “She helped Jan Frank, me, my brother, and a friend of mind, Urzidil, who was a gifted writer.”
Germany moved into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, forming the German “Protectorate.” When Hitler marched into Prague, Gero-Heymann sent a telegram to Bryher to obtain a permit for her writer friend, who was in great danger because he had published articles against the Nazis in Swiss papers. Bryher asked Gero-Heymann if she, herself, needed permits. Gero-Heymann said she did, and Bryher arranged them.
Gero-Heymann's brother, Frederick, was in immediate peril. He worked for The Bohemia, a liberal German-language newspaper. Everybody on the paper was arrested, but a secretary at the paper removed Frederick's name from the list of staff, which saved him. During the next four months, though, he had to appear before the Gestapo eight times, until final arrangements to leave were completed. Whenever her doorbell rang, Gero-Heymann was terrified. “Those last four months in Prague under Hitler were awful. We knew we had to get out or we were done for. The moment Hitler marched in, I stopped working. You can't treat a patient when you are worried that the Gestapo may come in. You can work with bombs; we all did in England. It's difficult but you can do it. But you can't work with the Gestapo around.”
Gero-Heymann was the last analyst to leave Prague in 1939. Frank and Bryher's lawyer met her at the London train station. She recalls that Frank, in his typically dramatic manner, greeted her with the prediction that the Germans would be in Buckingham Palace in three weeks.
Gero-Heymann remained in England throughout the war and obtained further training with Anna Freud and in a case seminar with Hedwig Hoffer, the wife of
Willi Hoffer. She recalls Edward Glover's generosity in assisting her to obtain a permit to practice analysis in England. Once she obtained the permit, she developed a full practice. When a bomb destroyed her office “some patients resented it very much that I couldn't keep the bombs away—no omnipotence.” The British Psychoanalytic Institute loaned her a room until her office was repaired. “The English never lost their sense of humor,” Gero-Heymann reflected. “An English charwoman said about V-1s (missiles that we also called Hitler's virgins because there was no man in them), ‘I don't like these things. I miss the human touch.’”
Gero-Heymann decided in 1947 to emigrate to the United States. Her brother, Frederick, and his children were there. They were her only surviving relatives. “My father was a doctor. Unfortunately, he had permission to practice until 1938; otherwise he and my mother might have tried to escape. So they got caught. Now after 50 years of reflection I can still attest to what I believed then: my father knew what to do. He and my mother committed suicide together in September 1940, which was certainly better than Auschwitz.”
In New York, Gero-Heymann was able to establish a practice: “Within six weeks I was fully booked.” Her close friends—Lowenfeld, Annie Reich, Jacobson, and Edward Kronold—sent her patients.
Of Gero-Heymann's colleagues in those six years in Prague, Annie Reich had gone to the United States in 1938 and settled in New York City. “Annie Reich was a very lively person, very energetic. After her first stroke, she was handicapped but full of life. She didn't want to let go.” Windholtz, “a very nice, friendly man,” went to San Francisco. He remained close friends with Frank, who came to New York. Karpe settled in Hartford, Connecticut. “Lowenfeld was a very knowledgeable man and a bit on the obsessional side. He and Yela became training analysts here.” Olden also emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City.
“Stef Bornstein was a very crazy lady,” Gero-Heymann recalled. “She knew a lot about the unconscious and nothing about the ego. Stef Bornstein died a natural death in Prague before I left.”
At the end of our talk, Gero-Heymann brought out a letter from the summer of 1945, the last she received from Fenichel, who had married Hannah Heilborn and was then living in Los Angeles. The letter went:
“After a long wait I finally got my citizenship, and with that I had no excuse anymore to postpone my medical internship and renewed study of medicine. So I arranged for an internship … liquidated my practice, and, before the ‘new life’ started, took a long vacation and trip East. … I wanted to talk with the publisher of my book. … I had to meet with many people on the matter of the planned new Freud translation, …which probably will be my main activity during the next six years; I wanted to participate in a Council meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. … But, of course, all these were not the real reasons why I wanted to go. I wanted to meet old friends, and this I did in a very high extent. All of them were nice people, and I liked them as long as I talked with them alone; but it was terrible when they all were together. I hope you in London do not have the same atmosphere of ‘emigration’ around you as the people in New York have. They exclude themselves from American life, build factions and call one another names. …
“By the way, it may interest you that the Council meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association—though it was terrible in every other respect, and psychoanalysis in America is to be supplanted by ‘Dynamic Psychotherapy’ and ‘Psychosomatic Medicine’—has elected Glover an honorary member. …”
Hannah Fenichel, his wife, added, “When Otto started the letter he still was before the internship; now he is in it and it is a terrific strain! Quite a job at his age. Other than that things haven't changed—life here is peaceful and uneventful and pleasant as before.” Shortly afterward, Fenichel, only 48 years old, died from an aneurysm while Hannah was reading to him. Gero-Heymann, like many others, wonders whether the “terrific strain” of the internship contributed to his death. His classic book, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, appeared posthumously that fall.