GELEERD, ELISABETH (1909-1969)

Psychoanalyst Elisabeth Geleerd was born on March 20, 1909 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and died May 25, 1969 in New York.

Elisabeth Geleerd's parents were Moses and Bertha (Haas) Geleerd. The eldest of three children, she and her two younger brothers, Yap and Benedictus, grew up in comfortable circumstances in Rotterdam where her father's business was outfitting ships. When she was nine or ten her mother died of tuberculosis and she was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. This was an unhappy experience and she returned to her father's house in her early teens. Several years later Yap also died of tuberculosis. The deaths of her mother and brother influenced Elisabeth's decision to study medicine at the University of Leyden. Her father supported her ambition to become a physician.

After receiving her M.D. in 1936, she moved to Vienna in order to undertake psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where her analyst was Anna Freud. In 1938 the deteriorating political situation led her to move to London, where she completed her analytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis, the training arm of the British Psychoanalytic Society. In 1940 she arrived in the United States and worked for several years at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas before finally settling in New York in 1946. That same year she married the prominent psychoanalyst, Rudolph M. Loewenstein.

In 1947 Geleerd was appointed a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and, as a member of the Educational Committee, played a formative role in the development of the Child and Adolescent analysis program at the Institute.

Recollections of Geleerd invariably note her intelligence and beauty. Her countenance has been described as neoclassical and delicate, her temperament as sensitive, searching and romantic. The congruence between her face and her character, each mirroring the other, left an indelible impression on her friends and colleagues. She was by all accounts an empathic therapist, but her approach to patients was based on a thorough grasp of psychoanalytic theory and technique. In a series of papers on the psychodynamics of childhood schizophrenia, the developmental vicissitudes of adolescence and the psychological states of fugue and amnesia, she delineated the defenses the ego utilizes in its attempt to master early, often overwhelming trauma originating in the mother-child relationship. She also sought to suggest new techniques for treating seriously disturbed children and adolescents.

Nellie L. Thompson

See also: Loewenstein, Rudolph M.

Bibliography

Geleerd, Elisabeth R. (1958). Borderline states in childhood and adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13, 279-295.

——. (1964). Child analysis: Research, treatment and prophylaxis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44, 242-258.

Kabcenell, Robert. (1970). Eulogy for Elisabeth Geleerd. Unpublished. A.A. Brill Library, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Tartakoff, Helen. (1970). Obituary Elisabeth Geleerd Loewenstein. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51, 71-73.

Thompson, Nellie L. (1997). Elisabeth Geleerd. In Jewish women in America: An historical encyclopedia, Volume One. (pp. 501-502) (Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, Eds.) New York: Routledge.