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Maenchen papers
SFCP.MSS.003
SFCP.MSS.003
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Table of contents
Title: Maenchen papers
Identifier/Call Number: SFCP.MSS.003
Contributing Institution:
San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
Language of Material:
English
Physical Description:
4.25 Linear feet
10 cartons
Date (inclusive): 1941-1984
Abstract: The Maenchen papers consist of correspondence, child analysis documents, manuscripts and reprints authored by Maenchen, and
child analysis manuscripts collected by her. There are also notes created by Maenchen, case studies collected by her, and
miscellaneous documents. The materials within the collection span the years 1941-1984 and offer valuable insight into her
career as a psychoanalyst.
creator:
Maenchen, Anna, 1902-1991
For use by researchers and students of psychoanalysis subject to archive rules and regulations.
Subject to copyright restrictions.
'The San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis Archives' Record Unit/Accession # and/or Collection Title.
Anna Maenchen (1902-1991) was born into a Jewish landowner family in Kaunas, a small Lithuanian town near Kovno. Her father
died when she was one year old in 1903, and she grew up in Russia, studying in Odessa, St. Petersburg and Kovno before moving
to Austria and attending the University of Vienna beginning in 1921. She studied psychology and history in the philosophy
department, where lectures by Sigmund Bernfeld led to contact with Anna Freud. She graduated in 1925 with a doctorate; her
thesis was on Alexander Herzen and the problem of development in Russia.
She married in 1927. Her husband, Otto Manchen-Helfen, was a Viennese historian and sinologist. She went with Maenchen-Helfen
to Russia, where he took a senior position at the Marx-Engels institute in Moscow from 1927-1930 and wrote a book about the
Asian part of the Soviet Union. Anna was interested in Russian educational methods, and visited the children in the Moscow
laboratory of the Russian Psychoanalyst Vera Schmidt. In 1930 her husband began working as a lecturer at the University of
Berlin, and she settled briefly in that city, where she joined the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. When the Nazis took control
of the country three years later, she moved back to Vienna. She became a candidate in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where
Anna Freud was her training analyst, and became part of Anna Freud’s ‘inner circle’. In 1936, she published an essay on thought
inhibition and aggression from castration anxiety. 1938 the S.S. searched her apartment, and she hid with Mary O’Neil Hawkins,
a psychoanalytic candidate. Later that year she emigrated with her son to the U.S. After a stay in New York and Alameda, she
moved to Oakland, then to Berkeley. She lived for much of her life in Berkeley and was a training analyst at the San Francisco
Psychoanalytic Institute. She died in 1991 at the age of 88.
The Maenchen papers include correspondence, an assortment of child analysis documents, manuscripts and reprints authored by
her, child analysis manuscripts collected by her, notes written by her, case studies collected by her, and miscellaneous items.
The materials in the collection span the years 1941-1984 and feature work done by both Maenchen and her contemporaries in
psychoanalysis. The correspondence is arranged by date and includes the years 1949-1976. The vast majority of the correspondence
covers professional activities such as committee meetings and her involvement with psychoanalytic organizations. The child
analysis documents include committee reports, details about child analysis training at institutions throughout the U.S., and
separate folders containing materials relating to both the APA Committee for the Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents
and the APA Committee on Child Analysis, two organizations that Maenchen was involved with. There are also four folders of
manuscripts and one folder of reprints authored by Maenchen covering the years 1941-1984. Also in the collection is one folder
of reprints authored by an array of psychoanalytic authors that are inscribed to her. Additionally, there are a number of
manuscripts that she collected over the years authored by a variety of people in the psychoanalytic field. A smaller collection
of professionally-oriented notes written by Maenchen and case studies (predominantly of children) written by others also make
up the collection.
The collection has been arranged in the following series: Correspondence, Child Analysis Documents, Maenchen Manuscripts,
Maenchen Reprints, Child Analysis Manuscripts, Maenchen Notes, Case Studies, Miscellaneous, Child analysis manuscripts (oversized),
and Miscellaneous (oversized).
Subjects and Indexing Terms
American Psychoanalytic Association.
Child analysis
Children -- Research
Correspondence
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis -- Case studies
Reprints