Elsa First July 1936-February 2018: A Memorial Statement

With warmth and great sadness, the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy (JICAP) extends our condolences to those closest to Elsa First: her dear daughter Shoshana First and her sister, Gail Farber, extended family, as well as friends, colleagues (nationally and internationally), students, and former patients, for whom Elsa was a profound, recognizing presence and generous guiding light. Elsa was a member of the editorial board of JICAP since its inception, an esteemed colleague, important supporter of our mission, and a mentor and friend to many of us.

Elsa was a psychoanalyst who studied with Anna Freud in the 1960s at the Hampstead Clinic (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) in London. Upon her return to the United States, Elsa’s presence in New York City, as an exquisitely attuned British-trained child psychoanalyst, rapidly brought her teaching and speaking invitations from numerous psychoanalytic training programs, with which she remained affiliated for decades. Along with this recognition came a steady stream of requests for clinical consultation and supervision. Elsa's sensitivity and capacity to use psychoanalytic developmental understanding to grasp the subtleties of clinical work with children and adults provided valuable insights to those with whom she worked, and always in a deeply respectful manner.

Among her many professional affiliations, Elsa was a full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association as a training and supervising analyst for adults and children (New York Freudian Society), a member of the faculty and supervisor in the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program at the William Alanson White Institute, an associate in clinical psychiatry and faculty member in the Parent Infant Psychotherapy Program of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, and an adjunct clinical professor in the NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, where she supervised and taught a course on contemporary British Kleinian psychoanalysis and seminars on childhood trauma.

A life-long child advocate, Elsa used her psychoanalytic developmental perspective in the service of understanding and addressing the effects of war and violence (structural, social, and interpersonal) on children and adolescents in her native New York and around the world. Joining international psychoanalytic efforts initiated in the Southern Cone of South America, she made valuable technical contributions supporting efforts led by families, communities, and global organizations to help children grow up well in the face of life-long assaults on their ability to do so.

In perhaps her last professional publication, she (First, 2015) reflected upon the experience of two adolescents who had lived in Gaza during its protracted state of siege (2008–2012). Elsa had interviewed these two adolescents four years apart, seeking to understand the impact living under siege had on their development and capacity for resilience. This article was completed several years after Elsa sustained a debilitating stroke, which compromised her expressive language ability, and the interviews had occurred several years prior. With the assistance of friends and colleagues, Elsa’s active engagement in her life’s work as a psychoanalyst and social activist on behalf of children was able to continue, and it was vital to her to remain a productive contributor long after she was physically unable to continue seeing patients or actively teaching.

Elsa published in the psychoanalytic literature and was sought out by the mainstream media as a reviewer of books by prominent psychoanalysts. In 1978, her review in the New York Review of Books, entitled “A Good Doctor,” brought to life The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl by D. W. Winnicott (edited by Ishak Ramzy; First, 1978).

In speaking of this review of The Piggle, Jessica Benjamin, a close friend, upon whom Elsa’s thinking clearly had a significant influence, noted, “You will find so many essential ideas about implicit relating, two-person experiencing with the therapist as a form of healing, recognizing the patient’s experience rather than interpreting it, the analyst knowing that ‘his response was helping him to recognize something in the patient’” (Benjamin, 2018) . These ideas were later to find their voice in the work of many prominent contributors to the development of a newly evolving relational psychoanalytic tradition in the United States.¹

Elsa’s contribution in this regard is insufficiently recognized: Her mentoring of many in New York; her British psychoanalytic training, rooted in the contributions of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott; all of the British object relations analysts; and, of course, Anna Freud, brought a depth of understanding of this work to the thinking of those in the United States, who had been intensively exploring the similarities and differences between various American schools of psychoanalysis (e.g., interpersonal psychoanalysis, self-psychology, aspects of ego psychology) and the British School.

The JICAP will be working with colleagues of Elsa to compile her written works, with the intention of publishing a collection in her honor. As an initial step, we are reprinting here a commentary we feel offers a perspective of the richness of her approach to child clinical work and the essence of her sensibility.

The commentary in this issue by Elsa First appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy (2010), Christopher Bonovitz (guest ed.), Hey Toy Man: Multiple Perspectives on a Case of Dramatic Play, 9:1. Elsa First’s contribution, Playing Who We Are Together: Commentary on Henry Kronengold’s “Hey Toy Man” follows.

Notes

1. Emmanuel Ghent, (1992, 2015) in his extensive foreword to the edited book Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis (Skolnick & Warshaw, 1992, 2015), described the historical backdrop, social context, and theoretical roots of what eventually evolved into a new psychoanalytic tradition, relational psychoanalysis. The contributions of Jay Greenberg, Stephen Mitchell, Emmanuel Ghent, Philip Bromberg, and Bernard Friedland, all founding faculty of the New York University postdoctoral program relational track, were noted as well as the intellectual atmosphere of the university, which led to an intense exploration of the similarities and differences between various American schools of psychoanalysis (e.g., interpersonal psychoanalysis, self-psychology, aspects of contemporary ego psychology) with the British schools of thought.