An Evening with Elizabeth Danto

Brill Library Book Series:

An Evening with Elizabeth Danto

Monday, February 4, 2019

7:30 pm

Presenter: Elizabeth Ann Danto

The Friends of the Brill Library invite you to an evening with Elizabeth Danto, who will discuss the book Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the ‘Best Possible School’ (Routledge, 2018) as well as screen a short film Anna Freud and ‘The Conscience of Society’.  The book and the film were jointly produced by Elizabeth Ann Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss.

Modernism, creativity, the freedom to grow as a “free and self-reliant human being” – with these beliefs, Anna Freud, the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, the youngest daughter of the great American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, founded Vienna’s Hietzing School in the mid-1920s. To Erik H. Erikson who taught there, it was “the best possible school” and today its true significance, as both the teachers and the students remember it, comes to life in this lushly illustrated book. Four historic photographs of Sigmund Freud are showcased here for the first time, along with never-before-seen vintage photographs and unpublished archival material. Nine essays, written expressly for this volume, confirm the depth to which interwar Vienna’s commitment to social democracy formed the backdrop for a Freud/Burlingham modernist psychoanalytic platform. Bringing together the historic Freud and Tiffany legacies as never before, this lively book restores Hietzing to its rightful place in the history of so many ideas with which we are still working today.

Regarding the film Anna Freud and ‘The Conscience of Society’:

Drawing on a wealth of still and video archival materials, this 15 minute digital exhibit brings to life the fascinating intersection of psychoanalysis and education. Out of the cultural and political ferment of inter-war Vienna emerged the Hietzing School, founded in the 1920s by Anna Freud and Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. The original impulse, however, occurred in Budapest, on September 28, 1918, when Sigmund Freud asserted that “the conscience of society will awake.” Anna Freud was present for one of the most consequential papers of Freud’s career, and from that day forward, she pursued a life of teaching and discovery that merged psychoanalysis, research on child development and programs designed to meet the educational and psychological needs of the young child. The breadth of the film’s images come from a range of private and public collections in Europe and America, and narrative is drawn from her own writing on theory and practice, from the 1920s through the 1960s, from Vienna to London.

Dr. Danto’s book is available for purchase on the Barnes and Noble, Karnac, and Routledge websites. She will be happy to sign copies at the event.

No CME or CE credits will be offered.