Marie Hurwitz Briehl, pioneer child analyst and revered teacher, died at the age of 96 at her home in Mamaroneck, New York, on December 18, 1993. Before moving from Los Angeles two years ago, Dr. Briehl had sustained the child analysis program of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute from its inception in 1950. She left Los Angeles to live near her son, Dr. Robin Briehl, and her granddaughter Lara.
Marie Briehl, née Hurwitz, was bom in czarist Russia, the fourth child of a Jewish family who would immigrate to the United States at the turn of the century. For four years she enjoyed the status of youngest child, and then four more children followed. Now Marie had the opportunity to preside over this new group of siblings.
The warm, loving care provided by Maries parents was matched by that of her favorite relative, Aunt Anna. The frequent speculation that child analysts have in common a doting grandmother or an especially loving aunt is supported by Maries childhood. By the time she was eight, Marie served as her aunt's English teacher and scribe. Simultaneously translating as she scribbled furiously, she wrote letters for her aunt as well as for other Yiddish-speaking neighbors in the community.
Marie majored in English and history at Hunter College and after graduation, in 1917, taught at Hunter College High School. Early on, her prime interest was in the development and education of children in ways that would help them realize their potential for a spontaneous and creative life. Despite academically successful attempts to apply her educational skills in the classroom, however, she soon came to see that conventional education was beset by emotional barriers beyond which teachers, supervisors, and even John Dewey himself could not penetrate. She attended the New School for Social Research, where she heard lectures by Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson. Around this time she met a young architect, Walter Briehl, with whom she shared an interest in the humanities, psychology, and social causes. Soon they were married. Dissatisfied with a career in architecture, Walter embarked on the study of medicine in Vienna, planning eventually to seek psychoanalytic training.
For a while Marie explored the unique Viennese ambience. Seeking more scientific diversion, she began to attend Paul Schilder's psychoanalytically oriented case presentations of very ill patients. Fascinated, she began analysis with him. Within three months, noting her great interest in children, Schilder suggested that Marie transfer to Anna Freud. Now regular visits to Berggasse 19 became part of Marie's life, and
by 1928 she was engaged in the study of analysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, as was her husband.
Professor Sigmund Freud and his daughter shared a common waiting room. Marie would arrive early to read copies of The Nation and The New Republic heaped upon the red plush covered table. On one occasion Miss Freud informed Marie that the Professor would like to ask her a question. “What would be the proper English translation of Schicksalsneurose?” the awe-inspiring man wanted to know. “Should it be Fate or Destiny Neurosis?” The question referred to the title of a paper by Helene Deutsch, whose biography Marie was to write years later in Psychoanalytic Pioneers. Before the meeting was over, the two had explored the etymological niceties in translating, and had wandered into a discussion of Greek mythology.
In the close-knit Vienna Institute, at meetings and seminars, there were no training tracks; faculty and students sat together, interacting freely without regard to levels of training. Teachers were aware of a student's progress, and completion of training was marked by admission to the Institute. Marie's mentors included August Aichhorn, Helene Deutsch, Heinz Hartmann, Eduard Hitschmann, and Hermann Nunberg; her fellow students were Dorothy Burlingham, Edith Buxbaum, Margaret Ribble, and Edith Sterba.
During the early years of Anna Freud's child analysis seminar, a Child Guidance Center was added to the adult clinic of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The seminar members, including Marie, carried on child analysis in this historic clinic.
When Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud saw the need for a progressive, analytically oriented school, they had a small schoolhouse built in the garden of a friend, Eva Rosenfeld. In charge were two relatively unknown young teachers, Peter Blos and Erik Erikson. Children from the analytic community quickly enrolled, and Marie was asked to teach English literature to the children. Here was her first real opportunity to combine pedagogy with her developing knowledge of psychoanalysis.
Upon completion of their analytic education in 1930, the Briehls returned to New York. Marie was an invited permanent guest at the New York Institute, where she participated in courses taught by such luminaries as Bertram Lewin, Gregory Zilboorg, and Sandor Rado. In 1935 Marie presented “Observations of a Boy from One to Three Years of Age” in Rado's seminar; a first in longitudinal psychoanalytic observation, it was the precursor of a methodology that was to become a major child psychoanalytic research tool. She was also asked by George Amaden, chief of psychiatry at Cornell University, to lecture on child analysis, and was appointed by Clarence Oberndorf to the Mount Sinai Mental Health Clinic. All this was occurring while a major storm was brewing in America regarding nonmedical analysts. When the New York Psychoanalytic Society prodded the New York legislature to repudiate the training of lay analysts, Marie became a casualty of this restrictive move. Only in recent years has “the question of lay analysis” been resolved in the United States.
With the rise of Hitler in Germany and Austria, the Briehls, with a deep sense of urgency, bent every effort to help European colleagues reach a haven. They were active sponsors for those who immigrated to the United States, raising money and helping friends, including Margaret Mahler and Edith Buxbaum, get settled. When Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham sought help for their work with war children, Marie was influential in establishing a liaison between the Anna Freud Nurseries and the American Foster Parents Plan.
Following the war, Walter decided to move Marie and their young son to Southern California, where Walter had been stationed as a medical officer. There, in 1946, he became a charter member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute. Marie began private practice and taught child analysis at the Institute.
It was not long before the historic split occurred in the Los Angeles Institute. When in 1950 Walter joined a number of his colleagues in founding the Institute for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California (later the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute), Marie transferred her affiliation to the new group. Holding to her psychoanalytic commitment, she served as the sole child analysis instructor at the fledgling institute, guiding a group of students who responded to her
ability to infuse them with her indefatigable enthusiasm and contagious perseverance.
Two courses—an introduction to child analysis and a continuous case seminar—were given at Maries home. Informal supervision of candidates interested in child analysis followed. Later she was joined by George Mohr, who came from Chicago in 1957 to head the child analysis section. Marie's skill and enthusiastic teaching inspired interested candidates to continue in the field. In 1959 she was appointed a supervising child analyst, and Irene Josselyn commuted from Phoenix to join the faculty. A decade later Marie became the official chair of the child analysis section, remaining so until 1976.
It was Maries view that experience and understanding of child analysis are necessary for the adult analyst; reconstruction in analysis must be understood in terms of the inner life of growing children in all their developmental phases. She thought that candidates should see at least one child or adolescent in analysis in order to broaden and deepen their capacity to empathize. The defensive amnestic aspects of a student's personality, she believed, can be reached better through confrontation with real children and their problems.
Applying her analytic knowledge to education, Marie helped found the Westland School in Los Angeles, the fulfillment of a long-time desire to combine once again her two basic commitments.
For Walter and Marie their work in psychoanalysis was a counterpoint to their unswerving commitment to social and humanitarian causes. Following Walter's death in 1982, Marie was instrumental in the creation of the Walter Briehl Human Rights Association. On April 6, 1991, the Association sponsored a conference, 'The Child as Victim,“ in her honor. She was also active in the Valerie Anne Briehl Foundation, established in memory of her granddaughter, which aids child refugees of the war in El Salvador.
“To have lived in Freud's time, to have had the initiative and sense of adventure, to have gone in search of that which always concerned me, the essential profundities of life, to have been accepted as a student of psychoanalysis and shared the oval table seminars with sages and peers was, as I now think of it, comparatively more simple than becoming part of organized psychoanalysis in the United States. Can one then sit with free gods of knowledge and, despite awe, learn and become part of their search more easily than to become part of the organized machine of men? I think I have had something of this kind of experience, and it has proved life-giving.”