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 facility. Her mom, Marta (Haas) Rink, a homemaker, died of breast most cancers when Anni was 10; two sisters died of influenza. Her father died when she 17. The household was effectively off, and Anni was cared for by a family workers that included a chauffeur, a cook dinner and a nanny.
She left Vienna in 1939, touring by ship from Italy to Los Angeles.
“When she would tell of her escape from the Nazis,” her son Tobi mentioned, “people would say how horrible and frightening it must have been to be torn from home and thrown as a young woman all alone into an unknown world. She always told people that on the contrary, she was leaving a sheltered and repressive world behind and embarking on a great adventure. She was going to America!”
In Los Angeles, Anni discovered work 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 earn a grasp’s diploma at the Bank Street College of Education.) Among the group of European expatriates who made up Dr. Olden’s circle was Peter Bergman, a Polish-born activist, writer and author who had labored to assist individuals escape the Nazis. Anni and Peter fell in love and married quickly after transferring to New York in 1943.
Anni labored as a music instructor at a progressive college within the East Village and co-wrote a kids’s primer on enjoying the recorder. Peter opened a publishing firm, the Polyglot Press, in a four-story brick townhouse in Chelsea. When he purchased the building, the household moved in.
Dr. Bergman’s workplace was on the highest ground, and she or he adorned it with zest and aptitude, with flower-patterned wallpaper, brightly coloured textiles and cabinets overflowing with books and different collections.
With its riot of colours and objects, being in her workplace “was like stepping into a magical world,” mentioned Sebastian Zimmerman, a psychiatrist and photographer who included Dr. Bergman in “Fifty Shrinks,” his 2014 ebook of portraiture exhibiting therapists in, as he put it, their pure habitats. Dr. Bergman defined that she had designed her workplace to be “a secluded world where the children have the complete freedom to express themselves and explore.”
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