Scope and Content Note
The papers of Freudian psychoanalyst Elisabeth Rozetta Geleerd (1909-1969) span the years 1927-1969, with the bulk of the items concentrated in the period after 1945, when Geleerd moved to New York City. A native of the Netherlands, Geleerd completed her medical degree at the University of Leyden in 1934. From 1936 to 1938 she received psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Institute for Psychoanalysis. The Nazi persecution of Jews forced Geleerd to leave Austria for England in 1938, where she specialized in the analysis of children at the London Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic. To escape the war, Geleerd immigrated to the United States in 1940. She worked at both the Menninger Clinic and the Southard School in Topeka, Kansas, until 1945, when she moved to New York. The next year she opened a private psychoanalytic practice and married fellow analyst Rudolph Maurice Loewenstein. For the next two decades she maintained a successful practice and worked to improve educational standards for the training of analysts by serving on an educational committee and as an instructor at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Geleerd died unexpectedly in 1969. Included in her papers are correspondence, writings, miscellaneous biographical information, and other material pertaining to her work and to the history of psychoanalysis--particularly child analysis--during her lifetime. The papers are arranged into the following series: Correspondence , Professional Papers , Subject File , and Writings .
With the exception of some immigration and naturalization papers and a few patient files, the collection contains no documentation of Geleerd's early life in the Netherlands or her training in Vienna and London in the 1930s. The papers primarily chronicle her life in the United States, particularly after 1945. Among the prominent correspondents in the Geleerd Papers are Princess Marie Bonaparte, Dorothy T. Burlingham, Anna Freud, Marjorie Harley, Otto Isakower, Ernest Jones, Robert P. Knight, Margaret Mead, and Karl A. and William Claire Menninger. Subjects discussed in the Correspondence series range from family and personal affairs to professional matters. Some material is in Dutch and German.
The series entitled Professional Papers provides insight into Geleerd's involvement in psychoanalytic organizations on the local, national, and international level. She was particularly active in the American Psychoanalytic Association, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and the New York Psychoanalytic Society in the areas of child analysis, education, and professional standards. The patient case files primarily come from the time during which Geleerd lived in England and Kansas.
The Subject File contains material relating to Geleerd's personal life and includes biographical information, classroom lecture notes, newspaper clippings, condolence letters, diplomas and certificates, bank records, expense accounts, insurance records, investments, tax records, photographs, legal records, travel information, and medical records. Of particular interest are the Freud-Burlingham reports issued during World War II by the Foster Parents' Plan, a clinic run by Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham for young London children whose lives were disrupted by the war.
The Writings series contains more than fifteen papers by Geleerd on various psychoanalytic themes. Also included are unidentified manuscripts, invitations to give talks or write papers, and numerous papers discussing writings by others, and drafts and offprints of writings by others. Subjects discussed include adolescence, neurosis, masturbation, depression, denial, the ego, Sigmund Freud, separation-individuation, and the mother-child relationship. The collection contains book reviews and correspondence of Geleerd's best-known edited work, The Child Analyst at Work.