FRIEDLÄNDER-FRÄNKL, KATE (1902-1949)

Kate Friedländer, psychoanalyst and physician, was born in Innsbruck, Austria in 1902, and died February 20, 1949, in London.

Kate Friedländer's birthplace was one of the most anti-Semitic parts of Austria, and her parents were middle-class Jews. Her two brothers both died in early childhood, and she had a gifted younger sister whom she greatly admired.

She obtained her medical degree at the University in 1926, but frustrated by the narrow outlook in her native town, she left for the Weimar Republic and settled in Berlin. There she became an assistant to Professor Karl Bonhoeffer at the University psychiatric clinic (The Charité), where many of the young doctors were interested in psychoanalysis. In 1930 Kate Fried-länder obtained her second medical degree. She was interested in neurology and in 1932 published a paper titled "A Clinical Entity to be separated from Multiple Sclerosis." She wrote other papers, including one on general paresis and the social integration of those who had been treated for this condition with malaria therapy. This reflected her keen interest in social affairs and strong social conscience, an interest reflected in her involvement in the Juvenile Court in Berlin. Her interest in delinquency lasted all through her professional life. Two of her early papers, "The Somatic Origin of Anxiety" (1933) and "The Biological Basis of Freud's Theory of Anxiety" (1935), proclaimed her deep interest in this subject.

Friedländer's achievements in Berlin, and her pleasure in them, were overshadowed by the success of the Nazis. Together with her husband and two-year-old daughter, she emigrated to London in 1933, to become first an associate and then a full member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In 1936 she took her third medical degree in Edinburgh, and in 1943 her D.P.M., in London. Her husband became increasingly mentally ill and, although she fought hard to save her marriage, the first steps toward an eventual divorce were taken in 1935.

Although her interests were wide, Kate Friedländer's contributions to psychoanalysis developed along two main lines, one linked closely with Edward Glover and the other with Anna Freud. In the 1930s she had already pursued her interest in delinquency and joined Glover in the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency; she published a book, The Psycho-Analytic Approach to Juvenile Delinquency, in 1947. With the arrival of Anna Freud she was greatly stimulated by her work with children and by the eventual creation of the War Nurseries. It was she above all who persuaded Anna Freud to found the child training course, in which she took an active part and which later became an integral part of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic—an enterprise that would have delighted her had she lived to see it.

It was her remarkable vision and energy that led her to set up Britain's first Child Guidance Clinic—that of West Sussex, of which branches were opened in Horsham, Chichester and Worthing, supported by enthusiastic students who had worked in the Hampstead Nurseries. These are the achievements for which she is best remembered. She played as well a full part in the life of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and submitted a number of written statements to the special meetings on the Controversial Discussions. But when Edward Glover, whom she strongly supported, resigned from the Society in 1944, she withdrew as well.

She was a keen and active sportswoman, an adventurous swimmer who defied tide and uncongenial weather, fond of tennis, skiing, ice-skating, and mountaineering. She died, with a great deal still to offer, on February 20, 1949, from carcinoma of the lung with brain secondaries, at the early age of forty-six, with her second husband, a well-known radiologist, at her beside.

Clifford Yorke

See also: Controversial Discussions; Great Britain.

Bibliography

Friedländer, Kate. (1940). On the longing to die. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 21, 416-426.

—— (1941). Children's books and their function in latency and pre-puberty. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 26.

——. (1945). Formation of the anti-social character. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 189.

——. (1949). Neurosis and home background, a preliminary report. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 3-4, 423.

King, Pearl H. M.; and Steiner, Riccardo. (1991). The Freud-Klein Controversies, 1941-1945. London-New York: Tavistock Publications-Routledge, New Library of Psychoanalysis.