Arquivo P41 - Ilse Hellman collection

Ilse Hellman grew up as the youngest of three children in a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. Her parents, Paul and Irene Hellman, were active in encouraging the arts and promoting talented musicians.

After completing a two-year course specialising in juvenile delinquency, Ilse Hellmann went to France and worked from 1931 in a home for young offenders near Paris. At the same time, she attended evening classes in psychology at the Sorbonne. From 1933 to 1935 she remained in Paris working at a centre for children with difficult backgrounds.

On returning to Vienna in 1935, Hellmann studied psychology under Charlotte Bühler. After graduating in 1937, she followed Bühler's invitation, to join her in a study of retarded children in London. During the Second World War Ilse Hellmann worked with children evacuated from London to escape the air raids. From 1942 till the end of the war, she joined Anna Freud to work at the Hampstead War Nurseries. The further development of these "war babies", separated from their parents and living in the therapeutic community of Hampstead, continued to be an object of her research during the following decades.

In 1942 Ilse Hellman began her psychoanalytic training at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis, her training analyst was Dorothy Burlingham. She became an Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1945 and a full Member in 1952.

From 1955 onwards she was a training analyst and one of the leading figures in the Anna Freudian Group. After joining the staff at Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, she conducted simultaneous analysis of mother and child. For some years she was in charge of the department for adolescents at Hampstead and directed, together with Liselotte Frankl, a research project on adolescence.

A collected works entitled 'From War Babies to Grandmothers: Forty-Eight Years in Psychoanalysis' was published in 1990.

After the war, Ilse Herman married the Dutch art historian, Arnold Noach (?-1976), who had survived the Nazi occupation of Holland. Their daughter Margaret (Maggie) Noach (1949-2006) was a well-known literary agent.