Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn

Dr. Helen Schoenhals Hart, born in Detroit, received her Masters Degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 1968 and went to Germany on a DAAD fellowship. Encountering psychoanalytic ideas there, she changed both specialty and language to train as an analyst at the Sigmund-Freud-Institut in Frankfurt, simultaneously earning a medical degree. She served for many years as a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV), was a member of the Executive Council of the German Psychoanalytic Association, and was president of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Association (FPV) from 1986 to 1990. For over two decades she worked intensively with the London Kleinians (Herbert Rosenfeld, Ron Britton, and others) and was instrumental in promoting Kleinian ideas in Germany. Since moving to California in 2008 she has maintained a psychoanalytic practice in San Rafael. She is a training and supervising analyst at SFCP. Helen has contributed to the German journals Psyche and Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis, to the American journals Psychoanalytic Inquiry and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and to The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. For 25 years she was a consulting editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, guest-editing a 1994 issue devoted to “Contemporary Kleinian Psychoanalysis” (Vol. 14, no. 3). Her articles on triangular space and symbolization have attracted wide notice.