Anna Kris Wolff 1931–2019

Anna Wolff was the kind of friend everyone wants and the kind of teacher everyone needs. She would listen carefully, consider seriously what you were telling her, whether it was about yourself or a patient. Then, in no uncertain terms, she would tell you what she thought. Her response went to the core of the issue at hand in often surprising ways. Her friend and colleague Dr. Warren Poland put it best, “What she said was always original, from a fresh slant, always seeming to arise from her sense of the immediacy of the moment in the clinical process; yes, informed by theory but never originating there.” There was never anything inauthentic or artificial about her.

Anna’s name was not widely known among psychoanalysts. She contributed very little to the psychoanalytic literature. She had an abhorrence of public speaking. She was a private person. She worked quietly out of her office in her home with its large, beautiful garden, of which she was very proud, on Channing Street in Cambridge, MA. She was happy there. Forced to move several times as a child, she commented: “In my grownup life, I have always wanted to stay put in one place and have a house that I could keep as my own and not have to leave.” There she was surrounded by artwork that her father Ernst, an art historian as well as analyst, had purchased. In her quiet elegance, she exemplified the many talented analysts whose outstanding work often is not fully recognized because they choose to avoid the limelight.

Anna was the daughter of Ernst and Marianne Kris, analysts themselves and friends of the Freuds. Of her mother, Anna said, “She was very honest and able to tell difficult things to people. And she would always do it in a thoughtful way so that they learned, and weren’t hurt by it.” Anna was cut from the same cloth. “I don’t think I ever was in Anna‘s presence when I didn’t go away feeling better about myself and the world,” a colleague reported.

Anna was born in Vienna in 1931. Despite the growing danger around her, she remembered somehow feeling secure. But she also remembered not being able to go out to the park with her mother who was “Jewish looking” though Anna and her brother Anton, with their blonde hair, were allowed out with others. In 1938, her family fled Vienna, first to London, where Anna was separated from her family during the London bombing, and then to New York City in 1940. Anna attended the Fieldston School, going on to Radcliffe and Harvard Medical School. Her residency was at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Children’s Hospital of DC. She did her psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute where she became a training and supervising analyst, serving on many committees and becoming a central figure on the Library Committee. For nearly twenty years, she reviewed and recommended books, worked on historic exhibits, researched and wrote biographies of BPSI’s early members, assessed rare books, and participated in various archival research projects.

When young, Anna was married briefly to Dr. Carl Wolff, a psychiatrist. She had no children. But that did not stop her from loving the children of others: her two nephews, the offspring of friends, and the children in her own practice. Her special interest in youngsters led her to the Putnam Children’s Center where was involved in longitudinal studies of atypical children. For many years she was a sought-after supervisor in the Beth Israel and Mclean child psychiatry programs. She also taught a popular child psychotherapy observation seminar. When asked about Anna’s child work, Dr. Judy Yanof, who studied and taught with her and became a very close friend, wrote:

Her real gift was in being able to talk with children about their inner worlds in a language they could immediately understand. She had a fundamental grasp of where they were developmentally, and a deep, empathic creativity about how to address what troubled them. It was not just her words, but the music in the words, and...