The Psychoanalytic Century:
A Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth Gero-Heymann



Based on interviews with Abby Adams-Silvan

Elizabeth Gero-Heymann and Abby Adams-Silvan are Training Analysts of the New York Freudian Society.

This interview is reprinted, with thanks, from the Newsletter of the
International Psychoanalytical Association


She was analyzed and mentored by Otto Fenichel, supervised by Anni Reich, a student with the Lowenfelds, a rescuer of Edith Jacobson, a colleague of Rene Spitz, a protégée of Edward Glover and Anna Freud, a wife and ex-wife of Georg Gero, an irritant to Ernest Jones, and a survivor of the holocaust. Still beautiful, elegant, outspoken and courageous, at 97 Elizabeth Gero-Heymann has lived the psychoanalytic century.

Born in Germany in 1903, her life has spanned extraordinary and dramatic changes in our world: from gaslight to computers, from horse carriages to space journeys, and from Freud's "splendid isolation" to worldwide psychoanalysis in the 21st century.

"Crazy," she says, her firm voice still carrying just a little the Berlin accent of her youth; the "c" and the "r" rolled together in a kind of guttural lilt. "It feels a little crazy to live so long. Sometimes I think too long, but..." Then she smiles and shrugs, making the best of the realities of her life as she has learned to do through war, flight, struggle and all the vicissitudes of a very long and very active life.

Lilo, as she is called, may move more slowly and need some help just getting around, but she is in good health and expressive of definite opinions, especially on matters political: local, national, international and psychoanalytic. She is still engaged in some psychoanalytic consultation and supervision, and when she hears a clinical presentation she is first raptly attentive and then startlingly apt in her comments.

Elizabeth Gero-Heymann has been deeply involved with psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts for almost 70 years. Analysts who today are legendary were her analysts, friends, teachers, lovers and would-be lovers. In the tumultuous days of World War II she was both rescuer and rescued. She arrived finally in New York City in 1945, her practice and place were established, she became a member and then Training Analyst of the New York Freudian Society, and found, at last, a new home.

The Berlin of Mrs Gero-Heymann's childhood before World War I, and early adult life before World War II, was by then demolished. But she remembers a city of light, music, dance, theatre, graphic arts, learning; a city where cultural life flourished. She recalls the excitement and pride of going as a little girl to the opera with her mother whenever her father, an obstetrician, was attending a patient in labour.

Like Freud, Lilo's father had been unable to pursue fully his medical career because of anti-Semitism. Obstetrics was not a specialty in which he was really interested, but for whatever dynamic cultural reasons it was open to Jews, and he was a caring, successful practitioner, so Lilo was able to go often to the opera. Later, when she graduated from High School, she learned to type so that she might earn enough money to buy 'non-numbered' tickets, a sort of general admission. She loved the theatre as well, but that was more expensive and she never quite made enough to go as often as she would have wished.

The pleasurable memories give way to sad recollections of the time she was about ten years old. From this time on it seemed as though war, in one way or another, cast a determining shadow on her life. Three days after World War I was declared her father, whom she loved deeply, was drafted into the Kaiser's army. Lilo remembers that she was not allowed on the railway platform to say goodbye, and that she felt a deep and frightened sadness. She did not see him again for over a year. She was left with her older brother and a childlike mother who needed her support.

At first her father fought in the front lines, but he broke an ankle jumping from a cannon wagon and was transferred to work as a physician in a military hospital for contagious diseases where he contracted smallpox. The family believed him dead, but he survived and was invalided home where he fell into a clinical depression which persisted till several years after the Armistice.

Conditions continued to be dreadful. Everyone was hungry, losing weight rapidly, and Lilo recalls eating ersatz sandwiches made out of sawdusty bread and a kind of 'marmalade' made of kohlrabi. For years Germany struggled unsuccessfully against economic conditions that made it, in Lilo's words, "a warm cradle for Hitler." "It was a sad time," she says. "We were hungry, we had no clothes. I had a dress that was partly made out of an old chimney cloth - it was all ripped. I didn't want to leave Germany, but I did want something to eat." Even now, more than 80 years later, her face takes on a pained look of distress at recalling those days. "At school Jewish youngsters were not allowed to laugh," she recalls. "They told us if we laughed then Jesus would fly away."

Even so, Berlin regained its special cultural place. In spite of the desperate depression that followed the horrors of runaway inflation, when almost everyone continued to suffer serious deprivations, its citizens were never starved for the arts. In 1919, when the 16-year-old Lilo went to study at the University of Heidelberg where her brother was a graduate student in philosophy, she was so homesick for her family and her special city that she stayed only one semester. That, however, was long enough for her to have met the great sociologist Karl Mannheim who was to play one of the most important roles in her life.

In Berlin Lilo studied social work, but not too happily. She actually wanted to become a pædiatrician, but felt daunted by an ambience of mounting anti-Semitism and a concern that somehow it would all take too long and be perhaps too difficult for her; medicine was, after all, a man's profession even though in those days women did have access to medical education.

Looking back it seems clear to her that her personal insecurity had psychodynamic roots that might have yielded relatively easily to psychoanalysis. But then Lilo did not know very much about psychoanalysis. She knew the name, but had never read Freud, and she knew of the existence of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Group which included Sandor Radó, Edith Jacobson, Bertram Lewin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and the American Leo Stone, among others. Also, her older brother had gone into analysis in Frankfurt with Karl Landauer, one of the analysts in Freud's circle, and he told her about it. Nevertheless, treatment did not occur to Elizabeth. If anything, she believes that the connection with her brother put her into a state of resistance. Certainly she did not think of going herself into training.

In retrospect it seems certain that she could have done so, even without a university degree. The group was neither anti-Semitic nor sexist, and like all the analytic training groups of those early days in Europe they had only qualifications of character, interest and intellect for inclusion.

Enter Karl Mannheim, returned to Berlin and part of the Heymann family's intellectual/social group. Mannheim was always surrounded by an eager and large group of students and friends, one of whom was the young analyst Georg Gero, a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic group. It happened that Georg complained to Mannheim that he never could see him alone, and Mannheim responded that he would gladly have Georg to dinner if he would agree to include the beautiful Fräulein Heymann.

They met, courted and married, but not before Elizabeth entered analysis as a precondition. Georg insisted because, he said, in a marriage if one is analysed and the other is not it is as though one looks out of a second story window, and the other looks out of the third. Which was which was not specified! The marriage soon came to grief since, analysed or not, Georg remained a "ladies' man", but psychoanalysis became Lilo's life.

So Elizabeth Gero-Heymann began her analysis with Frances Deri, at a time when Hitler was already firmly on the rise to power and it was clear that the situation would become even more desperately dangerous. One by one the cultural and intellectual leaders in Berlin left: the conductor Bruno Walter, the great directors Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator. As soon as they could get exit permits and visas they went, often quite suddenly. Lilo remembers that the Busch Quartet "just disappeared". Some like Von Karajan and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf did stay, but they were clearly sympathetic to Hitler and the Jewish intelligentsia was appalled. But by that time it no longer mattered how they felt; the Jewish patrons were no longer in attendance.

Frances Deri left to join the Prague group. Soon after, in 1933, the year Hitler became Reichschancellor, Lilo left Berlin to follow her. "In those days," she says, "that is what we did. Everyone was trying to leave, but often the first thought was 'can I go where my analyst goes?'" Georg followed his analyst Otto Fenichel north to Oslo where both joined Wilhelm Reich, who was a close friend of Fenichel. Lilo went east to Prague.

In Prague the refugee analysts joined the few already there and worked as a group much like those in Berlin, Most, however, were distracted, waiting anxiously for word that they had been granted visas to a safer haven. When Frances Deri was able to leave for the United States, Lilo was left without an analyst or occupation. Then, to the surprise of the group, Fenichel came to Prague from Oslo, having quarrelled bitterly with Reich over his Orgon theory and the use of the so-called Orgon boxes invented by him in which a patient was to sit in order to be able to achieve optimal sexuality. By mutual consent Fenichel took over the Prague group.

Fenichel agreed to begin an analysis with Lilo. "In those days," she says reminiscently, "there was quite a different attitude towards analytic work. We just did it. We didn't think in terms of 'purity' or ultra-rigidly 'protecting the transference', though of course we understood that the transference was the crucial thing. We trusted the unconscious.

"Fenichel had begun his practice when he was twenty, and he knew more about psychoanalysis than anyone there. I don't think it worried him for a minute that he had been Georg's analyst. We just both got to work." Early in this analysis Fenichel suggested that Lilo herself should study to become a psychoanalyst; she has never regretted following his advice.

The analysis lasted five years. "Very long for those days, but of course not for now. People go on forever now. But I think they forget that self-analysis is important, too. I do it for myself. I've never been back in analysis, but if the work re-stimulates a conflict, if I do or say something that bothers me, I associate to try to find out what makes me say that. That I do easily." It was during her analysis that Lilo's marriage to Georg ended.

The Prague group functioned the same way as all the other groups of the day had, with the exception of the Viennese who of course had the very special situation of Freud's presence and therefore a clear line of seniority. Fenichel was not only Lilo's analyst, but also her teacher and supervisor, There simply were not enough analysts to have the kind of boundaries or structure we have now, for good or ill.

"He was a good teacher," she remembers. "Very generous and just not at all narcissistic. We met at his house. He reached out, encouraged students who were hesitant to speak, and he seemed to never forget anything. He wrote down everything in his diaries, even what he had for dinner or what film he saw. He never wasted a minute. If a patient were late he would sit down and write his diary or the book or a paper. That book is still a classic. It will never be outdated."

The course of study was mostly clinical and pragmatically sequenced, and Annie Reich was Liloâs first supervisor. German was the common language; most, including Lilo, never learned Czech. There were seven students, among them the Lowenfelds, Winholtz, Christine Olden and a pædiatrician from Prague named Karter. Candidates were admitted to training by qualification of character, interest and intellect, not academic degrees, age or profession. "Of course we did not call them 'candidates' then. I don't know how such a word ever got started!"

The group itself was under a kind of "intellectual siege" as Lilo calls it. "We mostly had our social life together as well as our profession. We were more or less isolated. Even the intellectuals did not understand, and the medical community was not at all interested. It was a funny city, both German and Czech, and the two groups tended to be separate and somewhat hostile. Some very gifted people were there then: Kafka, Franz Werfel. My male friend and I belonged to a literary group, and once Thomas Mann even came to speak. Those people were interested in us."

Students and members presented cases to each other and seminars met three times a week at least. Everyone read and discussed Freud's latest publication and their own works-in-progress at regular but informal meetings. "Certainly there was criticism, but we took pride in being careful of each otherâs feelings. And we were taught it was essential to be self-critical."

A student became an analyst when the members more or less intuitively felt he or she was ready, but the real deciding voice was the training analyst. Graduation meant that patients were referred for treatment without supervision. Everyone taught everyone, everyone learned from everyone.

Looking back on it now, Lilo does not think either her analysis or her training suffered because of the very different attitudes that existed at that time, because "we all had to learn from our new experiences every day. There was no choice," she says with a contented smile. "And we had so many different kinds of patients. Everyone had very sick patients. We took whoever came. I remember one who was a very disturbed young man. I worked hard and I listened for his unconscious conflicts. At the end he said it helped him a lot, but he 'wouldn't recommend the treatment to a nervous person!'"

It was after presenting this case and giving a report to the group on Anna Freud's new book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense that Lilo herself became a member. "I worked on that report for months," she remembers. "Even though there were no formal entrance or graduation requirements, a lot of very careful attention was paid. We all knew that, and we worked very hard. Even so, it was the training analyst who had the main word and the final word. That was very different than today."

Perhaps because of the lack of structure, flexible seniority boundaries and intense group identification, there was also minimal internal friction. Perhaps also because the desperately dangerous external political situation grew daily more ominous and made clear the temporary and fragile nature of their own precious group. "And of course we were in love with psychoanalysis."

One by one those who could get visas left: the Lowenfelds, who had also "graduated", Annie Reich - "she was a good supervisor and also very courageous," says Lilo. Fenichel was able to go to the United States, but Lilo could not follow: the American embassy had lost her registration papers. In any case, her analysis was done. "Although," she muses, "he spent much too much time on pre-oedipal matters and not enough on oedipal. That may surprise people who donât think of Fenichel that way at all. He said I knew all about my father and about the importance of the oedipus complex from my studies. In those days we thought just intellectual grasp could be enough. If only it were!"

During her years in Prague Lilo was able to travel relatively safely between Germany and Czechoslovakia. She had contracted a platonic marriage to a young Hungarian ("a very decent guy, he really helped me") so as to obtain a Hungarian passport. Unlike the German documents, Hungarian passports did not specify that the bearer was Jewish. She had therefore been able to visit her parents from time to time in Berlin. These visits were both precious and deeply painful. Lilo's brother, who had moved with his wife and two children into Lilo's tiny Prague apartment, did not dare to go with her since he travelled on a German Jewish passport. Meanwhile, every effort to rescue her parents failed.

Nor was life in Prague really safe for Lilo. Once police arrived at her door at 6:30 in the morning, searched her apartment and took her, still in her pyjamas and not allowed to call anyone, to headquarters. She was accused of being a spy, and was terrified. "But," she goes on, "when I asked them why they thought that, one of the guys said 'sie sind doch hubsch', which means 'you are pretty', and I said, 'so, is that now forbidden too in Prague?' and didn't let them know how scared I was. Imagine. I think they really believed that I had to be a spy because I was pretty! My friends found out what happened and called someone important and got me out, but after that..." Her voice trails off.

Not very much is known about the acts of heroism that analysts undertook for each other in those days. The late Mary O'Neill Hawkins, for example, a Protestant American studying analysis in Vienna, put herself consistently in danger helping Jewish analysts escape across the Austrian frontier as well as transporting money and documents for them. René Spitz, who had a Hungarian passport, carried valuables and money across borders for various analysts, at great risk to himself. So much so, says Lilo, that "he never told anyone how he did it. It was safer if we didn't know and I still haven't figured it out." There were others, of course, who acted heroically, and whose roles are better known, such as Muriel Gardiner, the model for the fictionalized heroine of the book "Code Name Mary."

Lilo herself makes little of how she helped to rescue Edith Jacobson. Suffering from severe diabetes, Edith, who was one of the first graduates of the Berlin group and also an analysand of Fenichel, had hoped to remain in Germany. She had moved from Berlin to Leipzig, but was arrested some time later by the Nazis and imprisoned when she refused to give information about a patient. Unable to obtain her medication, she became seriously ill, and was granted leave from prison provided she remained in Leipzig. "After all," says Lilo in response to the obvious question, "they were not all monsters, not all brutes. That jailer was a decent person."

Hearing all this, Fenichel worked out a plan whereby Edith would request permission to go to Berlin for a consultation with a medical specialist. Once in Berlin she would keep her appointment, but then she would be spirited away on a small branch railroad line that ran directly to Prague. Lilo went to Leipzig to tell her the plan, to which she agreed, but she was too weak to travel alone. One of the Christian members of the analytic group was to accompany her, but his pregnant wife was terrified and Lilo volunteered. "It was very dangerous and I was very frightened. My parents waited at the station for us. They didn't object but of course they knew." She sighs. "I hope the jailer was not punished for her escape. He was a decent person," she repeats. "Decent" is a word Lilo uses often.

In any case, Edith eventually arrived in the United States, living a long productive life. Perhaps the analytic world partially has Lilo to thank for Jacobson's "Self and the Object World" and "Depression," as well as the seminal paper on depersonalization that grew out of Edith's own experience as a prisoner.

Hitler moved into Austria in 1938, and the analysts in Lilo's group were frantic; "but still we worked." Then in 1939 they watched as Nazi panzers rolled through the streets of Prague, a terrifying sight. Then the work stopped. "We were completely exposed and helpless, and you cannot help others when you feel that way. Everything dissipated. All we could do was shop because we knew we would soon have nothing. I baked a lot. No meetings, no discussions. Nobody could work with the fear of the Gestapo. With bombs yes, but with Gestapo no. That's when we heard that it had been a patient who had denounced Edith Jacobson."

Then came the time when Lilo and her parents knew she had made her final visit. It was 1939, after Kristalnacht, and she and her brother had visas at last. They were leaving Europe: he for the United States, and she for England. She was the last of the analytic group to leave.

Lilo and her brother went first to Berlin, and once again the family gathered at the train station for frightened and sorrowful farewells, but this time it was Lilo who was travelling into the unknown and her father who was left behind with her mother. Lilo says it was the saddest experience of her life as the train moved forward away from those figures on the platform. She knew somehow that they would never be together again.

Lilo remembers that she promised to send a telegram when they arrived in Holland. This depended on their being allowed to remain on the train as it crossed Germany, which was by no means certain. In the event, the Nazis did take all their money but let them cross the border. Once there the Dutch gave them whatever they needed as they travelled to the Channel. "We sent our telegram and at least my parents had the comfort of knowing we were safe," she says, the feelings still intense.

In September of 1940, aware of the hopelessness of the situation, Dr Heymann offered every family member the means to suicide, which they accepted. "It was the only way. By then the camps were certain," she says without any particular emphasis. Only one aunt survived, having escaped to Geneva. Lilo's parents themselves chose to die together as Hitlerâs world closed in on them.

Lilo was practising in London when she received her last letter from her father. "I made a bad mistake. I was so glad to hear something that I read the letter between patients. It was terrible. He didnât actually say what they were going to do, but it was obvious just the same. The parting at the train station was the saddest, but listening to my next patient was the hardest."

Lilo had arrived in London penniless, but she had a cousin there who was able to make her a very small allowance. Happily, her English was excellent. "I finally appreciated the 'conversation walks' with Miss Spestal, an English fraulein my mother forced on me, but it did take a lot for me to think it was important," she says drily. "And of course, we studied it in school."

Once in London, Lilo tried to contact Ernest Jones, then the President of the British Society, but he was out of town so she contacted Edward Glover, the Vice-President. Glover, who had influence at the Home Office, saw to it that she obtained a work permit, was allowed to attend meetings at the Institute, and took her to Anna Freud.

A short time later she gave a case report at the Hampstead Clinic (now the Anna Freud Centre) and afterwards Miss Freud asked her how long she had been in analysis and questioned her closely about it. "I think she made the judgment to put me on the staff mostly because of my analysis, although she also liked the case report. And of course I knew a lot about her work because Fenichel had made me report on 'The Ego' book in Prague. But she questioned me mostly about my analysis. Nothing was very formal then, anywhere, so such decisions were always made on a personal basis. And for Miss Freud then the personal treatment was the most important."

On staff at Hampstead Lilo did not feel she really enjoyed the work with children, but she did take considerable satisfaction in parent guidance and the adult work that grew from it. In any case, she says, "most of the children there were not really analysable because they were war orphans and severely traumatised.

"I remember one little child, Sylvia. She was terribly traumatised. She just walked around stiffly, repeating over and over 'isn't it a shame? Isn't it a pity?' All I did for her was to make her a little more relaxed, a little less terrified. Hansie Kennedy who supervised me said that later we would have called her schizophrenic."

"But it wasn't a child analytic training program as it is now. They ran the nurseries and treated the children. It wasn't always good. Sometimes while they were trying to understand analytic concepts they forgot about common empathic good sense, like scolding a traumatised child for trying to run to her mother who worked in the basement. But everyone was learning there, too, and they found out a lot that they wrote about. It was all just being discovered.

"I was also supervised on a child case by Dorothy Burlingham, but we did not like each other and it was difficult. She seemed very cold and distant to me, and could become very angry if she thought I did something wrong. And I thought I had no real talent for child work, so it could be very unpleasant."

Lilo may not prefer "child work" as she says, but I think it clear that someone who can help a severely obsessional robotic child to be "a little more relaxed and a little less terrified" is hardly untalented!

As an analyst trained in Prague, analysed by Fenichel and introduced by Glover, Lilo was also accepted as a member of the British Society. Unwittingly, however, she had incurred the anger of Ernest Jones who, she remembers, "sat staring not very pleasantly at me one night at an analytic meeting shortly after I arrived in London. During the interval I introduced myself and he not very nicely said, 'I wish you had come to me before.' I said 'Yes, I did try to do that but you weren't there, so I called Dr Glover.' He was angry and said I should have waited. I think he never forgave me, and did not understand that after all I was desperate and had no time to wait. He was not such a nice man, not only to me."

Patients were referred by Glover and by the Institute, and Lilo had quite a full practice in London, albeit not such a well-paying one. She managed as best she could, sharing lodgings and office space. As in Prague many analysands were seriously disturbed, a circumstance that Lilo continued to experience as a challenge. One of her first, a paranoid man referred by the Institute "wanted to marry me or kill me," she says with equanimity.

"The transference was intense," she goes on in a serious tone. "He came once at night after one of the rocket attacks. It was very late, but my landlord came up and rang my bell and said he thought I'd better go down. My patient said he wanted to make sure I was still alive, and he was making a terrible scene. I thanked him for his concern and said I would see him the next day as usual. But he demanded I take him upstairs for a session, and when I wouldnât he yelled and screamed." She pauses contemplatively. "It was typical for him. A very intense transference," she says again.

"I was not afraid of him," she answers my question. "But I was afraid for him. Even though he threatened, I did not think he would really hurt me. For him to kill me or to marry me was the same. When I left England, the Institute referred him to a man, and then all his symptoms returned, of course. But you have to remember, in those days not everyone knew so much, even though Freud had written his papers on paranoia and repressed homosexuality."

One gets the impression that Lilo has been able to survive so much because she has learned to deal with intense and even terrifying experiences with considerable equanimity and an extraordinary sense of proportion. "It wasn't very pleasant," she says of the bombs and rockets that fell night after night. ÎBut we all worked with it. Nothing was as bad as the fear of the Gestapo. Many, like me, had lost almost all or even all their family. We were glad to do our work. And to survive. Of course it was lonely, especially at first, but you must not stop trying and working. There was a war on, you know, and we were in the war zone. That was the reality.

"Sometimes you had to interrupt a session to go to a shelter with the patient. It was a little hard on the transference, but you just worked with it. The transference is the essential part, even when that happened. I had one patient, a Scottish gentleman who had been relieved from the army because of agoraphobia, who tried to jump out the window during a raid. He became quite hysterical. I had to hold him back. It was very interesting, the claustrophobia that came out."

In order to handle the very difficult cases, Lilo discussed her work at a seminar for members of the Institute. Everyone had some very sick patients. "Not everyone wanted to participate," she remembers, "but we all thought of the work as analysis, or at least analysis as much as possible, no matter how disturbed the patient." She felt especially helped by Willi Hoffer and his wife, Hedwig ("excellent clinicians, especially her"), and by Alex Bromley, a Russian émigré trained in London and supervised by Anna Freud, who later went to New York. "He grew up in the wild East, on horses," she says nostalgically. "Near the Chinese border. He was several months in a Turkish prison that was not so nice for him. You see, it was a very varied peer group."

Interpersonal life within the British Society was not at all like Berlin or Prague, however. By the time Lilo arrived the war outside was reflected in a vicious intramural battle. The enemy camps were the followers of Freud versus the followers of Melanie Klein. So intense was the hostility that, if a Kleinian met a Freudian in the hall, they would not in any way acknowledge each other, but turn their backs and stride away. "It was nasty, very nasty," says Lilo in a disgusted tone. "They would not go to each other's meetings. They would not learn from each other." This, obviously, is one of the worst things Lilo can say. Analysts are supposed to listen and learn.

It seems to have been all rather complicated. Ernest Jones was known to have put his children in treatment with Melanie Klein. There were rumours that Glover was in love with Mrs Klein's daughter, Mellita Schmideberg, who was very beautiful and who was said to hate her mother and did not attend her funeral. "I did not test it out, but I was pretty sure that Anna Freud would be furious if I went to Klein's meetings so I didn't. I heard she was only sort of a medium good speaker herself, sort of 'oily', but it was too bad not ever to have any personal contact with her.

"Actually," she goes on, "there were three groups then, as there are now. Ella Sharp led a kind of middle group and she was a very good teacher. She was a professor at the University, I think, and very kind and sensible. I didn't know her well, but I liked her and her writings.

"Sometimes it was all very confusing. It seemed as though everyone was in analysis with everyone and that the self-criticism I was taught was not so much there then. And it was hard because Glover turned against me when he wanted a more intimate relationship and I did not. I worked hard but I was still very poor. I really wanted to be in America where my brother and my special man friend were. I was never really happy in Prague or London, and Berlin could never be the same for me, though I loved it. Also you have to remember what was happening outside the Institute and Hampstead. You woke up in the morning and didnât know if your friend had been killed by a bomb during the night."

Lilo obtained her visa to the United States after the war in Europe ended, in 1945. She prepared her patients and left them in the care of analysts who, she says, "understood the heart of the work, the transference. Some were other Freudians. Not everyone was great but okay. I had a best friend who was a Jungian and she understood transference and I trusted her the most, and she saw a lot of my patients.

"I think character in an analyst is most important. Being bright is too, of course, but someone who wants to be an analyst must be decent and caring, not all objective and cold. That was a model that came from the fifties. You have to show you are a caring person, because after all most patients did not have the best care as children. So itâs in a little way reparative, an emotionally reparative treatment. But we must not ever forget the essential nature of the transference and also itâs essential absolutely that itâs not acted out by the therapist.

"I saw a lot of that everywhere. Of course, sometimes it is just ignorance and the therapist thinks it is really helping the patient. They just don't understand how dangerous it can be and self-indulgent. Again we have how important it is to be self-critical. Another most important thing is the wish to help, but without self-gratification, except that it is gratifying to know you help. You have to do it for the patient, not for becoming important or well-known. You must not be an analyst to prove your own wonderfulness or greatness. Those are all the things I looked for, for the patients I was leaving. That is what I look for now.â

Lilo flew to the United States. "Flying interested me," she says, her eyes still lighting up at the idea of doing something new just because it is "interesting". "But I felt again a refugee, again a new country, a new beginning. It was a little difficult, but this time there were friends waiting.

"I found a place to live, a small, small place I could afford. My living room was the waiting room and the only bedroom had to be my office. Then René Spitz sent me my first patient. It was someone from a very prominent family, but the side that was not so rich. That was all right. It started me, it was the first money I earned here, and he told others to send me patients. Ed Kronold, who was not internationally famous but who came to be known truly as 'the analyst's analyst', had a wife who was an obstetrician. She had a patient waiting for me, so right away there were at least two. The Lowenfelds and Edith Jacobson sent patients, too. The one Edith sent tried to commit suicide, but I had only seen her once and certainly had given no interpretation, so I didnât feel too guilty.

"By then I had a great deal of experience, and besides there were not enough analysts in those years. I built my practice pretty quickly, even though at first I was not part of a regular institute. At that time the New York Psychoanalytic Society was really the most important, but I never even tried to join. I knew that without a medical degree I could never be admitted. (It's different now, of course.) But my friends who were physicians like Ed Kronold and Edith and Spitz and Bromley became members and then referred to me, and then others did as well." Georg was there, too, and they remained colleagues and friends.

Eventually Lilo met Shirley Feltman, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Through Dr. Feltman, Lilo was introduced to the New York Society of Freudian Psychologists (now the New York Freudian Society), one of the so-called "lay" psychoanalytic institutes and membership societies that trained non-medical psychoanalysts. In a kind of symmetry of fate, another member of that Society and Institute is Eva Landauer, the daughter of Karl Landauer who had analysed Lilo's brother so many years ago.

Lilo was welcomed into that Society and Institute where she became a training analyst. Although she had never been actively "political" within a professional group, there came a time some years later where she felt she had to take a forceful stand on an issue of considerable internal contention and importance. Although she very much dislikes speaking publicly, she made a particularly moving statement to a large membership meeting.

As a direct result, at age 87 Lilo was elected and then re-elected Vice-President, an office she actively and forcefully filled. During her tenure she was on occasion known to ponder a decision or a query and render her opinion in a statement that began, "Well, Fenichel would have said..." surely bringing to the NYFS a unique benefit of institutional and academic guidance by that legendary figure.

With generosity of spirit and of time, Lilo has always offered help to whomever asked, whatever their circumstances might be. Because she is the person she is, new friends have always come into her life, though so very many have gone. With Lilo, one does not concentrate on endings, but on the essential nature of continuity.



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