KATAN, ANNY ROSENBERG, M.D.

KATAN, ANNY ROSENBERG, M.D. (1 May 1898-24 Dec. 1992), child psychoanalyst, established the Hanna Perkins School (1951) in Cleveland and pioneered the use of psychoanalysis with emotionally disturbed CHILDREN AND YOUTH. Dr. Katan, who taught child analysis at the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University (1946-64), also helped establish the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute (1960) and, with Robert A. Furman, and Eleanor Hosley, organized the CLEVELAND CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT (1966). Katan was born in Vienna, Austria, and grew up with close family ties to pioneer psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna. A nurse during WORLD WAR I, Katan graduated from the Medical College of the University of Vienna (1923) and studied under Anna Freud at Vienna's Psychoanalytic Institute. She was among the first child analysts in that city.

In the mid-1930s Katan married psychoanalyst MAURITS KATAN. They had one child, Annemarie Angrist. Anny Katan also had a son, Klaus Angel, by a previous marriage. The Katans moved from Austria to the Netherlands just prior to WORLD WAR II. As Jews, they went into hiding in 1939 to avoid Nazi persecution. Using false papers to survive, Anny Katan worked in Anti-Fascist movements and helped others flee. After the war, she served as chief psychoanalyst of the Child Guidance Clinic of The Hague in the Netherlands before coming with her family to Cleveland in 1946, at the suggestion of Anna Freud and through the efforts of Dr. Douglas Bond. Bond was building a department of psychiatry at WRU. The weekly meetings of Cleveland-area child analysts, begun by Katan in her CLEVELAND HEIGHTS home, continued in 1995. In 1993, the Katans' library was donated to the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development as the KATAN ARCHIVES.


Katan Archives, Center for Research in Child Development.

See also MEDICINE and WOMEN


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