Else Pappenheim Recalls the New York of Fifty Years Ago

Jeffrey: So tell me, what was psychoanalysis like in New York fifty years ago? What were you doing?

Pappenheim: Well, I got to New York in January of 1941. I practiced analysis as much as possible and was also on the staff of an outpatient clinic at Bellevue, working with Abraham Blau, an American analyst. Many patients who had problems with headache attended the clinic, and the treatment was somewhat dynamic. We had social workers who would say, “This patient has an Oedipus complex.”

Jeffrey: How did you get to New York?

Pappenheim: Well, first I came to Johns Hopkins in December 1938, having escaped from Vienna when Hitler invaded. I had an appointment as an unpaid research assistant at Hopkins and worked for Adolf Meyer. The staff rotated through a state hospital, Spring Grove. It was in dreadful condition, but there I received a salary and so I stayed.

I was struck that on the inpatient wards of Johns Hopkins Hospital you never saw a black face. Also, the state psychiatric hospitals were completely segregated. Whites were addressed “mister” or “missus.” Blacks were called by their first names. Once I was reprimanded when I called a black man “mister.” The outpatient clinics at Hopkins were integrated but had separate benches for blacks and whites. Only in Meyer's outpatient clinic did you see black patients sitting alongside white patients. It was a blow to me to see this in this country. It brought back to memory the signs on benches in Vienna—“Aryan Only.”

My close friend from Vienna, Judy Kestenberg, told me that analysts were getting by in New York and that I should try to come. But at that time I was still trying to get an affidavit for my mother, who was still in Vienna, to come to the United States. To get one I needed to prove I had employment, and I had to earn and save money. But

then conditions in Europe made it impossible for anyone to escape.

In time, however, Judy got me an apartment in her building at 27 West 96th Street, right off Central Park West. Also in the building were Annie Reich, Berta Bornstein, and Isidor Silbermann, who had been a classmate in the Vienna Institute. Otto Isakower was next door to us, across the street was Edith Jacobson, and then around the corner were Henry and Yela Lowenfeld. They were all colleagues from Vienna, except for Jacobson and the Lowenfelds, who were from Berlin. Ernst and Marianne Kris, and Paul Federn, who looked like a patriarch, a Biblical prophet, were also on the West Side. Kris was only forty-one or -two but was already well known from his work in Vienna.

Many of the more well-known analysts were on the more fashionable East Side. Florence Powdermaker, a prominent American analyst, said she could never send me a patient if I practiced on the West Side. But because we needed less money, we could see patients for lower fees and build our practices. Like most of my colleagues, I had my office in the house. It was a European tradition.

Ludwig Jekels and Heinz Hartmann were on the East Side. The Hartmanns were a strikingly good-looking couple, and Jekels was perhaps the oldest of the European group. He was a sweet man, whom I had known from my childhood. Many from this older group I had met when a child because my father, a neuropsychiatrist, had become a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1926.

Hermann Nunberg, who to some could be abrasive but was always helpful and nice to me, ran a seminar only for the Viennese analysts. Nunberg was erudite but not a politician, and never achieved the prominence in the New York Institute of some of his peers. We read Freud like we were studying the Talmud. We never got beyond The Interpretation of Dreams. For us it was more comfortable reading Freud in the German; it was a continuation of old times.

Jeffrey: What was the extent of your training in Vienna?

Pappenheim: I had finished my analysis but had only just begun classes when Hitler arrived. I was in the last class to be accepted at the Vienna Institute. The sequence of training was that first one completed analysis, which at that time was much shorter; then one completed classes, which lasted a year; and then one had control cases. So in New York I needed to find cases. In Baltimore the analytic group was extremely nice and took me to meetings, but I had no opportunity to see patients.

Here I had some difficulty with Samuel Atkin, then head of candidate admissions to the New York Institute. The superintendent of the state hospital in Baltimore had given me an unsatisfactory report. The conditions there were terrible. There were wards with ninety patients confined in one locked room, and cases of typhoid were occurring. I had complained to Meyer, who said nothing could be done, and the superintendent learned of this.

Nonetheless I was accepted, and Atkin said I needed a year of seminars as well as supervised cases. Nunberg and Reich were my supervisors. Atkin, who himself came from Russia, felt they were not American enough and so assigned me to Sara Bonnett for a year. Annie Reich was a good friend, but I had no idea until much later that she had been so active in radical leftist politics. One didn't speak of those things at that time.

I presented my required graduation thesis in November 1943, and I became a member of the New York Society in early 1944. I never became

a training analyst, though I applied. I heard that Robert Knight, for what reason I don't know, was the only one who voted against me, but that one vote was enough.

Jeffrey: You were here during the splits: Karen Horney in 1941 and the Columbia group around Sandor Rado in 1944.

Pappenheim: The second society meeting I attended after arriving in New York was the meeting at which Horney left. I sat next to Judy Kestenberg, and what I recall is a nasty argument, with Horney and her followers walking out. Later Zilboorg was dismissed, and Rado left the New York Society. It all left me with a bad impression. But though many meetings were spent over political disagreements, I don't remember any acrimony surrounding scientific presentations.

The New York Society first met here on the West Side. Later they moved to the East Side. They used an auditorium at a private club on West 86th. There was a Horn and Hardart nearby, on the corner of 86th and Broadway—it no longer exists—and all the Viennese would go there after meetings. It replaced the Viennese café.

Jeffrey: What was New York like then?

Pappenheim: More pleasant than now! We lived without any idea that anything bad could happen. Without a care, we would sit in Riverside Park on summer evenings to keep cool. After evening classes on the East Side, we used to walk across Central Park. Occasionally we might hear of a purse being stolen. That was it.

Jeffrey: Did you attend cultural activities?

Pappenheim: I attended recitals at Carnegie Hall. My friends and I sat in the back, which was what we could afford. However, there was not much time for social life. What we did have was parties every Saturday evening. Our group would take turns holding parties at their apartments. This was a small group at first: the Krises, Hartmanns, Kronolds, and myself. After a while it enlarged. Géza Róheim and Sandor Rado—the Hungarians.

Jeffrey: Rado, after breaking from the New York Society, was accepted in the group?

Pappenheim: Yes. He was good friends with Hartmann and Kris. A little later, American analysts started attending the parties. Also the Dutch— Lotte and Simon Weil. Kurt Lewin attended. Max Schur and his wife Helen came, and Fred and Annemarie Weil. Kris knew everybody, and at times three hundred people would attend his cocktail parties on Central Park West. Bettina Warburg, Abe Blau, Clara Thompson came. Oh, yes, even the people involved in the analytic splits were there. We'd talk a lot about analysis.

Jeffrey: The Europeans became very important in the New York Society.

Pappenheim: Yes. The New York Society was small. In 1941 there were only sixty-eight members. But the Europeans not only had numbers; they had great influence. Many of them had written and taught while in Europe. At the time there were not many training analysts here, and the best-trained Americans had studied in Europe. The analysts from Berlin and Vienna had been their teachers and analysts.

Jeffrey: Kris was not a physician but was well accepted in the New York group.

Pappenheim: Yes, he was. Kris was internationally known. He was bright, sociable, and well-read. He spoke with a British accent, and his use of language was very good, unlike Hartmann, who swallowed the end of his sentences and was very hard to understand, even in German. Kris was married to Marianne Rie, quite a lovable and warm woman, the daughter of Oscar Rie, Freud's pediatrician and fellow cardplayer. He also had a wonderful ability to bring something positive out of even the most stupid people.

Jeffrey: By December 1944 everyone knew the war would end in an Allied victory. What was the feeling among the group?

Pappenheim: We were all anxious. We all had left, if not relatives, friends in Europe and did not know their fate. Communication was almost impossible. My father had escaped to Israel, but I did not learn of his death there until it was reported in a newspaper. I got my last letter from my mother in Bonn in 1943, by way of Switzerland. But we didn't talk about friends or relatives. That remained in the background, but the anxiety was not deeply buried.

Jeffrey: How did you learn of your mothers fate?

Pappenheim: The letter she sent said that she and her sister and brother-in-law were planning to take the same trip as a friend. By this I knew they were planning suicide.

Jeffrey: She, like many others, could not come to the United States without an affidavit, which was difficult to obtain.

Pappenheim: Yes, it was a problem. I got mine through the efforts of Judy Kestenberg, who worked at Bellevue and asked Michael Dunn, a lay analyst there, to write one for me. He worked in the circle with Bettina Warburg, Jules Eisenberg, and Gregory Zilboorg, who was studying suicide in policemen. Warburg also was particularly helpful to émigrés, and wrote me a second

affidavit. Later she sent me one of my first analytic patients.

Jeffrey: Physicians had to pass state boards to practice.

Pappenheim: Yes, and this was easier for young analysts who had recently been to medical school. Only four of seventy-five passed in Baltimore. I was one of the four, but I had studied previous exams and had an idea what the written test was about. Europeans, more used to clinical exams, had difficulty with it. In New York there was also an English exam. I don't believe Federn or Jekels ever passed it.

Jeffrey: The Europeans were discouraged from settling in New York and the East Coast. It was felt there were not enough analytic patients to go around.

Pappenheim: There was some pressure from the Americans. Even Lawrence Kubie, who was deeply involved with the émigrés, advised me to go west, and I had not even asked him for anything. In Baltimore I was invited to meet with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge. She too told me there were too many analysts.

Jeffrey: What was the situation with women analysts?

Pappenheim: I was surprised at Hopkins that half the psychiatric residents were women. The other services had very few. I believe at the time only about 5 percent of medical students here were women. This was unheard of in Vienna, where a third of the students were women. In Vienna I was friendly with American women training there, like Lucille Dooley and Edith Jackson, but none told us of the restraints on women in America.

Jeffrey: What was your practice like in those days?

Pappenheim: I slowly built it up to eight patients a day. The younger among us had low-fee patients—two dollars a session. When I raised my fee to five dollars, I felt like a real capitalist.

Jeffrey: Who were some of the other analysts active then?

Pappenheim: Viola Bernard. Eduard Hitschmann, who initially went to Chicago. Fritz Wittels, who came from Vienna in the 1920s and was an important person in the New York Society. Ludwig Eidelberg was more on the periphery. René Spitz. Lili Peller was a child analyst. Kurt Eissler came later from Chicago. Others who came later included George Wiedeman and Frank Berchenko. The people I was friendly with were married and had children. In time they acquired weekend houses, and the social life changed. However, we kept in contact for the rest of our lives.