Fonds M - Manuscripts, Transcripts & Offprints

Esther Bick was born in Poland and moved to Switzerland where she studied briefly with the psychologist Eugen Bleuler. She later moved to the United Kingdom and was elected a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1953.

Kurt Eissler was born in Vienna on 2 Jul 1908. He was a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society when the Nazis took power in Austria in 1938, after which he emigrated to Chicago. In 1943 he served in the US army as a Captain in the Medical Corps and following the war he settled in New York. He was known as a Freudian scholar and historian and for his work in founding the Sigmund Freud Archives, which are deposited with the US Library of Congress. He died in New York on 17 Feb 1999.

Otto Fenichel was born in Vienna in 1897. He chose to study medicine with the aim of eventually working in psychoanalysis. In his teens he had already read some of Freud’s work and began presenting his ideas on sexuality and sexual ethics to fellow students. In 1918 he was invited as guest speaker to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, where he gave a paper 'On a Derivative of the Incest Conflict'. He moved to Berlin in 1922 to complete his training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He also furthered his psychiatric and neurological knowledge by working with Bonhoffer and Cassierer. Two years later he joined the Institute’s teaching staff and began to publish numerous psychoanalytical papers. He left Germany in 1933 when the National Socialist Party came to power. He was invited by Norwegian psychoanalysts to work in Oslo, where he remained teaching for two years. In 1936 he moved to Prague and took over the chairmanship of the Prague Study Group. Finally with Czechoslovakia threatened by invasion he fled to Los Angeles where he was welcomed by the Psychoanalytic Study Group. He died suddenly in 1946, survived by his wife Hanna Fenichel (née Heilborn).

Barbara Lantos was a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society and moved to London in 1935. She became active within the British Psychoanalytical Society, including as a supporter of Anna Freud during the Controversial Discussions.

Erich Simenauer was a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, an honorary guest of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He published numerous papers on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and on literature, art and ethnology.

Edoardo Weiss was born in Trieste, Italy in 1889. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1914. In Vienna, he met Freud who suggested an analysis with Paul Federn. During the First World War, Weiss served as a physician in the Austrian Army. Weiss became the first psychoanalyst to practise in Italy after the First World War. In 1931 he established a group in Rome, which would later become the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. In 1939 he fled fascism, arriving to work at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, USA. Two years later he joined the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He worked on psychosomatic medicine and remained a follower of Paul Federn. He died on 14 Dec 1970.

Donald Woods Winnicott was born in Plymouth in 1896. He entered the University of Cambridge in 1914, where he studied biology and later medicine, and then completed his medical studies at St Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1923, he married his first wife, Alice Taylor, and in the same year became a physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London. Around this time, he also entered analysis with James Strachey; this analysis was to last until 1933, after which Winnicott began an analysis with Joan Riviere. In 1927, he was accepted for training by the British Psychoanalytical Society, qualifying as an adult analyst in 1934 and as a child analyst in 1935.

During the Second World War, Winnicott worked with disturbed evacuee children. His experience as a psychiatric consultant to the Government Evacuation Scheme provided an impetus towards new thinking about the significance of the mother's role. During the war years, he collaborated with Clare Britton, a psychiatric social worker, and they married in 1951.

After the war, Winnicott was physician in charge of the Child Department of the Institute of Psychoanalysis for 25 years and served two terms as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He was also a member of UNESCO and WHO study groups and lectured widely and wrote as well as having a private practice. He continued to work at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital into the 1960s and was still working and teaching when he died in 1971.

Edward Glover was born on 13 Jan 1888 in Lesmahagow, Scotland. He began his medical career specialising in tubercular medicine, before his older brother James introduced him to psychoanalysis. Both brothers went to Berlin in 1920 to be analysed by Karl Abraham; Edward Glover became an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1921 and a full member in 1922. When his brother died in 1926, Edward Glover took over many of his roles within the Society and by 1940 he was a member of all the main committees of the Society and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Originally a supporter of Melanie Klein, he became one of her opponents during the Society's Controversial Discussions in the 1940s and subsequently resigned from the Society in 1944. Following this, he was granted honorary membership of the American and Swiss psychoanalytic societies. He died on 16 Aug 1972.

Catherine Elizabeth 'Karin' Stephen was born in 1890. She was a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and married Adrian Stephen (brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) just before the First World War; as conscientious objectors, they spent the war working on a dairy farm. After the war, they both became interested in training as psychoanalysts. In order to qualify, they trained as doctors and went into analysis with James Glover until his untimely death in 1926, when Karin went to Sylvia Payne and Adrian to Ella Sharpe. They were accepted as associate members of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1927; Adrian became a full member in 1930 and Karin in 1931.

Karin entered private practice as a psychoanalyst. She gave the first course of lectures on psychoanalysis ever given at Cambridge University; these were highly successful and formed the basis of a book for medical students. She was active on the Public Lectures Committee of the British Psychoanalytical Society but was sometimes critical of the society and contributed to the Extraordinary Business Meetings held during the Controversial Discussions.

During the Second World War, her husband, angered by anti-semitism, abandoned his pacifist stance and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an army psychiatrist. Karin became a driver in the Queen’s Messenger Flying Squad Food Convoy. Karin Stephen suffered from increasingly severe deafness and from manic-depression; following the death of Adrian Stephen in 1948, her health deteriorated and she committed suicide in 1953.