Bornstein, Berta (1899-1971)

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BORNSTEIN, BERTA (1899-1971)

Child psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein was born in 1899 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Krakau (today Kraków, Poland), and died on September 5, 1971, in Maine in the United States.

Shortly after her birth, Bornstein's parents settled in Berlin, where her father was an engineer. The eldest of four children, she had one sister and two brothers.

As a young educator of handicapped children (Fürsorgerin ) in Berlin, Bornstein was just twenty years old when she began analytic training with Hans Lampl and Edward Bibring. She participated in the child seminar directed by Otto Fenichel from 1924 to 1939 at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and by 1929 was working closely in Vienna with Anna Freud. Bornstein's loyalty to both Fenichel and Anna Freud never wavered. She lived in Berlin, Vienna, Prague and, after leaving Europe shortly before War World II, in New York.

Bornstein brought innovative techniques to child psychoanalysis. She emphasized the precocity of children and so was able to reduce the time required to win their confidence. In her view, psychoanalysis of children ought to proceed by way of analysis of the defenses. "The introductory phase of child analysis was dropped when Berta Bornstein developed the analysis of defenses," stated Anna Freud in 1971 (Blos, 1974, p. 36).

Bornstein pioneered a new understanding of latency. She revealed the dynamics of defense mechanisms and the progressive claims of identification and sublimation. Bornstein was opposed to the widespread view that latency is an "ideal" period during which instinctual conflicts do not exist. She suggested that latency could be divided into two stages: from five and half to eight years of age, and from eight to ten. The common factor is development of the superego as it struggles against incestuous and pregenital wishes expressed through masturbation. The first phase of latency, Bornstein believed, is favorable for psychotherapy.

Bornstein wrote only a few papers, but her clinical cases are models of technical and theoretical clarity. Bornstein's last analytic work, concerning "Frankie," a child of five-and-a-half years with symptoms of phobia, insomnia, and urine retention, would be validated in a follow-up analysis of the patient as an adult, conducted and presented by Samuel Ritvo in 1965. She was a widely admired teacher who taught not only at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute but also at the Menninger Clinic and Yale University. She was a member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society. The name of her younger sister, Steffi, is frequently mentioned in accounts of the history of psychoanalysis; she was also a child analyst but died prematurely, in Prague, in 1939.

Simone Valantin

See also: Lehrinstitut der wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Primary identification.