The recent death of Anna Maenchen marks the passing of the last of the psychoanalysts who founded the psychoanalytic community and began psychoanalytic training in the San Francisco Bay Area.
For those of us who were her analysands and the many others who were her students, she illuminated the essence of psychoanalysis. She was an inspiring and enduring model of a psychoanalyst who was able to combine magnificently an intense dedication to her professional work, a profound enjoyment and lively participation with family and friends, and an active, concerned interest in the world at large. Our strong link with the origins and early history of psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and the other early psychoanalytic pioneers, is not lost at her death precisely because of the remarkable impact of her teaching and her personality on those who were fortunate enough to know her. She was among that group of analysts, compelled by the rise of fascism to leave their homes and work in Europe, particularly Germany and Austria, who were the first analysts in San Francisco. All of us are the fortunate beneficiaries of their teaching. They transmitted with passionate conviction, from their own teachers to their students, the radical spirit and substance of psychoanalysis. They have enabled us, in turn, to become links ourselves between the past and future.
Born in western Russia, in an area that later became Lithuania, Anya had an early life disrupted several times by war, revolution, and political upheaval. She received her early schooling in St. Petersburg and then, after the first World War and revolution in Russia, moved to Vienna to attend the university. After hearing Siegfried Bernfeld's lectures on psychoanalysis (outside the university), she lost interest in academic psychology and obtained her Ph.D. in history with a dissertation on Alexander Herzen, a 19th-century author and revolutionary. Bernfeld referred her to Anna Freud for analysis. Anya was 22; Anna Freud, 29. After her marriage to Otto Maenchen, a scholar in Oriental culture and history, Anya moved to Berlin and resumed her formal psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Institute. In 1933, with the advent of Hitler, the family moved back to Vienna, and she completed her training at the Vienna Institute in 1935. Once again she was uprooted when the Nazis took over Austria. She presented a case study to the last meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society before it was dissolved in 1938.
Arriving in San Francisco in the fall of 1938, Anya joined Bernhard Berliner, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Donald MacFarlane, who was the only American in the earliest group. She was a Training Analyst and Supervisor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and played a central role in creating and sustaining child analysis training in the Institute. She was President of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in 1955-1957. She was a councilor of the Association of Child Analysis and in 1973-1974 served as its president. She was a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association since 1935. She became a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association after being invited as a senior nonmedical training analyst in 1971. She served on the Child Analysis Committee and participated very actively in the scientific programs. She lectured in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley for 25 years, from 1942 to 1968.
Her list of publications includes a number of significant contributions in the field of child analysis: “Inhibition of Thinking and Aggression” ; “On Neurotic Disturbances of Sleep” ; “A Case of Superego Disintegration” ; “Notes on Early Ego Disturbances” ; “The Transmission of Human Values” ; “Object Cathexis in a Borderline Twin” ; “Technique of Child Analysis in Relation to Stages of Development” ; “The Handling of Overt Aggression in Child Analysis” ; and “Anna Freud: The Vienna Years” . There were, in addition, many lectures to a wide variety of audiences and contributions to several panel discussions at meetings of the American: “Symposium on Neurotic Disturbances of Sleep” ; “Psychiatric Problems in the Educational Sphere” ; “Sleep Disturbances in Children” ; “Phobias and their Vicissitudes” ; “The Significance of Intrapsychic Conflict” ; “Prepuberty and Child Analysis” ; and “Problems of Transference in Child Analysis” . In her Plenary Address to the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1974, entitled, “Some Thoughts on the Psychoanalyst Today,” she cogently disussed the psychology of the analyst, the nature of analytic work, and the demands and effects of that work on the analyst. She did not fail to describe its extremely gratifying rewards as well.
We mourn that Anna Maenchen has departed; we rejoice that she will remain with us.