Anny Katan died peacefully at her home on December 24, 1992. She was 94 years old.
In her later years Dr. Anny, as she was affectionately known, expressed two wishes: to “die in harness”—she continued doing analysis into her nineties—and to be known, to be remembered, just as “Anny Katan, Psychoanalyst.”
Psychoanalysis had been a part of her life from early childhood, her family close friends of the Freuds, her father and her uncle, both pediatricians, members of Freud's Saturday night card-playing foursome. One of her favorite stories was of Freud's prophesying her future analytic career when she was but four years old. Her father had described to Freud how Anny had scolded him and predicted his guilt after he had reprimanded her older sister for misbehavior, unaware the child was actually ill.
Dr. Anny described her childhood relationship to Anna Freud, who was three years her senior, as that of an acquaintance, though Young-Bruehl in her biography of Miss Freud reports interactions between the two when the families shared summer holidays in the Alps. As a young analyst Dr. Anny was in the early group working with Miss Freud in Vienna just as child analysis was getting off the ground.
In the mid-thirties in Vienna she was active, along with Edith Buxbaum and Muriel Gardiner, in the antifascist underground, an activity she continued after her marriage to the Dutch analyst Maurits Katan and her move to Holland in 1936. This dangerous work eventuated in the escape from Vienna of a number of analysts, among them Margaret Mahler.
Having survived the war, she and her daughter on false papers, her husband and son in hiding, the Katans, at the urging of Miss Freud, emigrated to the United State and settled in Cleveland. There they established psychoanalysis and guided the Cleveland Institute through the various stages necessary for full accreditation. Dr. Anny's interest in child analysis led to her importation, from Miss Freud's Hampstead Child Therapy Course, of many nonmedical child analytic graduates. With this group to assist, she established what is now the Hanna Perkins Therapeutic Preschool in 1950, the Cleveland Child Therapy Course in 1958, and the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development in 1966. The last has operated from its inception a Child Analysis Clinic which treats, on a sliding-fee scale, between 25 and 45 youngsters in five-times-weekly analysis. The operation of the School and the Clinic put into practice Dr. Anny's dictum that child analysis can thrive only where children are in analysis, and not where there are just committees and reports being written. She knew full well that establishing a training course for nonmedical child analysts would lead to her being shunned by The American and the psychoanalytic establishment, but the perpetuation of an active child analytic movement was what was most important to her.
Dr. Anny is perhaps best known for her papers on verbalization and object removal, but those on adults raped as children, distortions of the phallic phase, and stranger anxiety or distress are quoted to this day.
As pioneer, clinician, theorist, and leader, Dr. Anny well earned the characterization she longed for—“Psychoanalyst”—for in so many ways this unique lady was the consummate and complete psychoanalyst.