Ross, Helen (1890-1978)

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ROSS, HELEN (1890-1978)

Helen Ross, a psychoanalyst and administrator, was born March 16, 1890, in Independence, Missouri, and died August 10, 1978, in Washington, D.C.

One of seven children, Helen Ross was born into a family that highly valued education. Her older brother supported her college education, and after her own graduation from the University of Missouri in 1911, she worked for five years as a school teacher to enable her younger siblings to continue their education. During this period she augmented her income by teaching English to immigrants in a Jewish settlement night school in Kansas City. In 1916 she began graduate work in sociology and economics at Bryn Mawr. Ross gave up her graduate studies, however, at the urging of Pauline Goldmark, one of the famous Goldmark sisters, whose sister Alice was married to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, to accept a job as a field agent for the U.S. Railroad Administration, whose women's division was headed by Pauline Goldmark. For two years she traveled all over the United States, investigating the working conditions of women working on the railroads and, she emphasized in a memoir, making sure they were getting equal pay for equal work.

In 1914 she and an older sister established a summer camp for girls in Michigan, which they ran together for the next thirty-four years. Ross later wrote that the constant contact with "the everyday problems of normal children" sharpened her interest in human development and made her eager to deepen her understanding of personality development. This led her to an interest in psychoanalysis, and in 1929, at the urging of Franz Alexander who had recently arrived in Chicago, she went to Vienna. There she was analyzed by Helene Deutsch and began a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Anna Freud. In particular, Ross was instrumental in the establishment of the Hampstead Clinic through her efforts to secure ongoing financial support for the clinic from the Marshall Field Foundation in Chicago. She also assisted in the translation of August Aichhorn's Wayward Youth.

After returning to Chicago in 1934, she began a private practice and acted as a consultant to a number of social agencies. She also wrote a newspaper column, About Our Children, for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ross used her influence as a consultant to social welfare agencies and her newspaper column to convey in clear and intelligent language the insights of psychoanalysis to teachers, social workers, and parents. In 1942 she began a fourteen-year tenure as the administrative director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1956, at the request of the American Psychoanalytic Association, she and Bertram D. Lewin undertook an extensive survey of the training programs of seventeen American psychoanalytic institutes. The resulting book, Psychoanalytic Education in the United States (1960), reviewed, among other topics, the history of psychoanalytic education, presented a detailed analysis of candidates in training and how they were selected, analyzed curriculums for both adult and child analysis programs, and discussed the role of the teaching and supervising analyst in psychoanalytic training. The thoroughness of their survey, combined with its dispassionate tone, created a climate that allowed many institutes to closely examine and make changes in their educational programs. This was a considerable achievement and the success of the survey probably owes something as well to the deep respect and affection that their colleagues felt for Ross and Lewin.

After completing this project Ross moved to Washington, D.C., and became a faculty member and supervising child analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and also served as a psychoanalytic consultant, teacher, and supervisor at other institutes. Helen Ross's contributions to psychoanalysis as a supervisor, writer, consultant, and administrator were considerable. Anna Freud, in a touching letter to one of Ross's sisters after her death, described her own sense of deep loss by gracefully noting the personal qualities that made Ross such a formidable and beloved figure. "For me it means that something inexpressibly precious has gone and will never come again. Helen's rare combination of goodness and cleverness, firmness and gentleness, tolerance and sharpness of judgment, friendship and undemandingness was hers alone. I hope she knew how much not only I, but many other people felt about her." These personal qualities were accompanied by an indomitable intellectual curiosity and a determination that took her from the Midwest of Missouri and Kansas east to Bryn Mawr and finally to Europe and Vienna, where she found her vocation in one of the most vibrant intellectual movements of the twentieth century.

Nellie L. Thompson