Freud-Tiffany : The Best Possible School

In Vienna of the mid-1920s, Anna Freud, the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, the youngest daughter of the American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, created what Erik Erikson later called "the best possible school." As notable for its historical role in psychoanalytic innovation as for its founding faculty - Peter Blos, August Aichhorn, Marie Briehl and Eva Rosenfeld in addition to Erikson himself - the Hietzing School yielded groundbreaking theories still in use today.

The school developed within the creative environment of inter-war "Red Vienna" and the spread of social democracy, with its deep impact on low-income housing (Adolf Loos), social welfare practice (Julius Tandler), music (Alban Berg) and, of course, psychoanalysis.

While Hietzing lasted only five years, it laid the groundwork for the Jackson Nursery in Vienna, the Hampstead War Nurseries and Child Therapy Clinic in London, Pioneer House in America and a long list of psychoanalytically-informed programs for children and adolescents.

To restore Heitzing to its rightful place in the history of psychoanalysis, this copiously illustrated edition of original essays by international scholars offers a renewed vision of the school's origins, its day-to-day experience and its enduring influence on our understanding of the developing mind.