|
Hedda Bolgar
Hedda Bolgar (August 19, 1909 – May 13, 2013) was a psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, California, who maintained an active practice when she was over 100 years old.[1] She saw patients four days a week at age 102.[2] Early lifeBolgar was born in Zurich, Switzerland, on August 19, 1909. At age 14, Bolgar became a vegetarian.[2][3] She was the only child of Elek Bolgar, a Hungarian historian and diplomat, and Elza Stern, a reporter who was one of the few women to cover World War I.[4] Elek and Elza Bolgar were communists; they cancelled her ninth birthday so they could take part in a civil uprising in Hungary.[4] Career in ViennaBolgar studied at the University of Vienna.[4] She studied under Charlotte Bühler and earned her doctorate in 1934.[5] She knew Anna Freud and attended Sigmund Freud's lectures.[6] In the mid-1930s, Bolgar developed the "Little World Test" (also known as the "Bolgar—Fischer World Test") with her close friend Liselotte Fischer.[7] It was a nonverbal, cross-cultural test similar to the Rorshach Ink Blot Test or the Thematic Apperception Test.[7] When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Bolgar fled Vienna.[4] Career in the United StatesAfter arriving in the US, Bolgar trained at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and taught at the University of Chicago.[4] While in the Midwest, Bolgar gave training on the "Little World Test."[7] Bolgar was chief of psychology at Mt. Sinai Hospital (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center). She helped found the California School of Professional Psychology, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies and the Wright Institute Los Angeles, a postgraduate training center and clinic.[4] When Bolgar was 95, she helped organize a three-day conference called "The Uprooted Mind: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Living in an Unsafe World."[4] In 2012, at the age of 102, Bolgar was still seeing patients four days a week.[2] At 102, she gave a lecture on "Dogma and Flexibility in Psychoanalytic Technique" before the New Center for Psychoanalysis, a Los Angeles group that offers advanced education to therapists.[4] Personal lifeBolgar's husband, economist Herbert Bekker, joined her in the U.S. in 1940 and the two moved to Los Angeles in 1956.[4] The couple had no children.[4] Bekker died in 1973.[4] Bolgar died on May 13, 2013, at the age of 103.[8] When she died, she was likely the oldest active member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and probably the oldest practicing psychoanalyst in the United States.[8] Quotes
See alsoReferences
External links
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
