Anny Katan, M.D.

1898-1993

Anny Katan was born and raised in Vienna where she received both her medical and psychoanalytic training.  She and her husband, Maurits Katan, M.D., had barely settled in Holland when WWII broke out, forcing him into hiding, and her into living under a false identity until the war’s end.  At that time, at the urging of Anna Freud, the Katans came to Cleveland to participate in the revising of the medical school curriculum and to establish psychoanalysis here.  They arrived in Cleveland in 1946.

In Volume I of our Journal, Child Analysis: Clinical, Theoretical, and Applied, Dr. Anny (as she was routinely called) related information about her background and about the early years of child analysis.

I grew up often literally sitting on Freud’s lap when I was very little.  My mother had two brothers, the older one a lawyer, the younger one, Oskar Rie who was a pediatrician like my father and was the Freuds’ pediatrician.  My uncles and my father were Freud’s Tarok partners and the Saturday night card parties were often at our house.

In one of my earliest memories, I was about four years old, maybe a bit younger, and I remember my father coming home in a fury.  He was talking to my mother and I didn’t understand but kept hearing the word, “Sigmund.”  Much later I told my father memory and asked what had been the matter.  He said, “I had been in the Society of Physicians in Vienna, and Freud was going to give a paper on hysteria.  He said that hysteria was not a sickness of the body; it was a sickness of the mind and the emotions.  He said that the symptoms of hysteria were formed by different sorts of conflicts that a person had, that often these were sexual conflicts and they were all unconscious.  He said that if you could bring the conflict to consciousness, the person would lose the symptoms because they could handle the conflict in a different way when it was conscious.  The other thing he said was that it is not true that only women are getting hysteria, that he had treated many a man who had hysteria.  At that moment the whole Society of Physicians, nearly all men, howled, booed, whistled, screamed, and did not let him finish his lecture.

Dr. Anny grew up a childhood friend of Anna Freud who was two years her senior.  She was always interested in Freud’s work and by the time she was 16, in 1914, she had already read everything he had written by then.  As a young adult Anny joined with others interested in applying analytic theory and technique to working with children as they met with Anna Freud who would discuss with them her early child cases.  The group included Dorothy Burlingham, Willie Hoffer, August Aichorn, Editha Sterba, and Jenny Waelder Hall, among others.  It time all were inspired to begin treating children, as well.  From the beginning, their work involved meetings with the parents of their patients, frequently as often as weekly, especially for prepubertal children.

By the time that World War II was approaching Anny had married Maurits Katan and had moved with him to Holland.  It was there during the War that she developed the “treatment-via-the-parent” approach that we still use at Hanna Perkins in our work with preschool age children.

A mother came to me to ask for help with her four year old daughter.  She had come a long distance, first by walking, then taking a bus, then a train, then a street car, and then still more walking.  She told me her little girl had had no troubles until two or three weeks earlier when she had started to wet the bed, this after having been clean and dry for two years.  The mother had no idea what was going on.  She said maybe the little girl had bad dreams as sometime she was up at night now.  But, otherwise, she couldn’t see that there was anything in the little girl that had changed.  The mother said that if I could help her little girl, she would bring her once or twice a week, but that was the most she could do.

I thought that a walk, a bus, a train, a street car, a walk again – all to take a four-year old to see a lady she had never seen before…How long would it take, thought to get the relationship we would need to then get to work?  Suddenly, I heard myself saying to this mother, why don’t you come twice a week yourself, and we will see what we can understand together.  Perhaps we can understand what has made her start wetting.  So she came and we talked about how she could talk to her little girl (who was able to let her mother know of some things that she had seen that had confused and frightened her).  The symptom stopped soon after.  Of course, I knew well Freud’s work with the parents of Little Hans.  That and this case made me feel that if one got children about the age of three or four, before problems had become fully internalized, if one could get the mother to help and get the conflict fully conscious, some of these children could be helped by way of their mothers.

After arriving in Cleveland Dr. Anny was soon beset with requests for her help and experience.  Recognizing early on the need for more trained analysts, she made the decision that, rather than treating children, she would analyze and train others.

She met Eleanor Hosley, then Director of the Cleveland Day Nursery Association and after Anny became involved consulting with parents of children at the University Hospitals Nursery School they determined to have such an arrangement in place for the parents of all of the children who attended there.

Dr. Anny began to train and recruit others to help her.  Dr. Jane Kessler and Miss Marion Barnes were among her first American trainees.  Then, throughout the early 1950s upon recommendations from Anna Freud, graduates of her Hampstead Child Therapy Course came to Cleveland to join the effort.  They included Erna Furman, Alice Rolnick, Joanna Benkendorf, and Elizabeth Daunton.  As others came but soon moved on to other cities Dr. Anny came to recognize the need for more formal training.  Thus, in 1958, with the above mentioned analysts and Dr. Robert Furman to assist her, Dr. Anny formed what endures to this day as the Hanna Perkins Course in Child Psychoanalysis.  Through that course, which has now trained more than 50 analysts, with more than 20 more currently in training, and through the Hanna Perkins School and Psychoanalytic Child Therapy Clinic, the legacy of Dr. Anny Katan continues.