Edith buxbaum biography

Edith Buxbaum, Latency and Me:

Between the Oedipus Complex and Adolescence:

The "Quiet" Time  - Letter to Edith

by

Esther Altshul Helfgott, Ph.D.

This essay appears in slightly different form in the Journal of Poetry Therapy, Sept 2005

Abstract: Through poetry, journal writing and epistle, the author employs her biographical study of Dr. Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982), Viennese-born Seattle psychoanalyst and disciple of Freud, to explore her own childhood grief, failures and guilt. She juxtaposes her experiences, as a Jewish girl growing up in Baltimore , Maryland , with the Freudian basis of one of Buxbaum's clinical case studies on the latency period. While the author  appreciates psychoanalytic theory, she questions Buxbaum's contention that Latency period (approximately ages six to ten) is anything but quiet.

Dear Edith,

I guess you're wondering why

I've chosen to write a biography about you

"Why me," I hear you say.  

•

Dr. Roland Kaufhold

Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982): Pioneer of Psychoanalytical Pedagogy and Anti-Fascist Activist - from Vienna via New York to Seattle, Washington

Translator: Hamida Bosmajian, Professor of English, Emerita

             Seattle University 

To Hilde and Ernst Federn (Vienna)

To Rudolf Ekstein (Los Angeles and Vienna)

Summary:

Psychoanalytical pedagogy became an exceptionally productive critical social reform movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Until it was repressed by fascism, the "social locus" (Bernfeld) of this movement was first and foremost in Vienna. Most of the psychoanalytical pedagogues escaped successfully into exile, primarily to the United States. There they were able to preserve their tradition, in spite of the dominance of "medico-centrism" (Paul Parin) in the United States, until they ventured back to German speaking countries at the end of the 1960s. Among the most important of the Viennese psychoa

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I have always had an ambivalent relationship to The Academy. On the one hand inom love research; on the other grabb, when inom am actively engaged in a research project, as I am now, inom feel separated from the community in which inom live. So when The Seattle Starawakened from its sixty-five year-old sleep, inom offered to write a column on “Writing and the Biographical Process.” inom thought it would give readers a chance to share in the nitty-gritty of what one writer does during the day; and it would help me feel less isolated in the particularities of my writing life.

Let me introduce you to my writing “subject,” Viennese-born Seattle child psychoanalyst Edith Buxbaum, Ph.D (1902-1982). After escaping the Nazis in 1937 and working as an analyst and teacher in New York city for ten years, she moved to Seattle to help build the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute. Her pedagogical influence extended to the Ryther Child Center, the Little School of Seattle (now of Bellevue) a