Anni Bergman, Therapist Who Listened to Children, Dies at 102

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Anni Bergman, Therapist Who Listened to Children, Dies at 102

Anna Emilie Rink was born on Jan. 10, 1919, in Vienna. Her father, Ernst, owned a manufacturing unit. Her mom, Marta (Haas) Rink, a homemaker, died of influenza when Anni was 10 two sisters also died from the ailment. Her father died when she 17. The family members was well off, and Anni was cared for by a family personnel that involved a chauffeur, a cook dinner and a nanny.

She left Vienna in 1939, traveling by ship from Italy to Los Angeles.

“When she would tell of her escape from the Nazis,” her son Tobi stated, “people would say how terrible and horrifying it have to have been to be torn from residence and thrown as a young woman all by yourself into an not known entire world. She constantly instructed people today that on the opposite, she was leaving a sheltered and repressive globe powering and embarking on a great experience. She was going to America!”

In Los Angeles, Anni located function as an au pair and assistant to Christine Olden, a psychoanalyst who, like Anni, was from Austria, and attended the University of California, graduating with a bachelor’s diploma in music. (She would later on generate a master’s degree at the Bank Avenue University of Education and learning.) Among the group of European expatriates who designed up Dr. Olden’s circle was Peter Bergman, a Polish-born activist, publisher and author who had worked to aid individuals escape the Nazis. Anni and Peter fell in like and married shortly following shifting to New York in 1943.

Anni labored as a audio teacher at a progressive school in the East Village and co-wrote a children’s primer on actively playing the recorder. Peter opened a publishing firm, the Polyglot Press, in a 4-story brick townhouse in Chelsea. When he acquired the creating, the family moved in.

Dr. Bergman’s office environment was on the top floor, and she decorated it with zest and flair, with flower-patterned wallpaper, brightly coloured textiles and cabinets overflowing with publications and other collections.

With its riot of shades and objects, remaining in her place of work “was like stepping into a magical entire world,” claimed Sebastian Zimmerman, a psychiatrist and photographer who incorporated Dr. Bergman in “Fifty Shrinks,” his 2014 e book of portraiture exhibiting therapists in, as he place it, their pure habitats. Dr. Bergman discussed that she experienced built her office environment to be “a secluded globe wherever the young children have the complete liberty to specific on their own and explore.”