My colleague and friend Eglé Laufer, who has died aged 96, was a psychoanalyst who worked for more than 50 years at the Brent Centre for Young People (BCYP) in north west London, where she was president.
Eglé began providing psychoanalytic therapies to adolescents at BYCP when it was created by her and her husband, Moe (Moses) Laufer, in 1967. She remained completely dedicated to psychoanalysis, and even into her 90s was participating in two weekly clinic meetings at the centre.
Over the years Eglé also carried out important research into adolescent breakdown that identified the importance of having dedicated spaces, such as BCYP, to consider teenage development. With Moe she suggested that mental breakdowns among teenagers were often related to a rejection of the adolescent body.
She was born in Vienna to Sigrid, an Austrian child psychiatrist, and her husband, Imre Vajda, a Hungarian economist. Her parents divorced in the early 1930s when Eglé was still young, and when her mother married Edwin Pribram, an aircraft engineer, she moved to London at the age of seven with her new family.
Eglé graduated in mathematics and physics at King’s College London, but then decided to become a psychoanalyst, and did her training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis during the 50s. First she worked with young women in the obstetrics department at University College hospital, and then became a training analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society.
In 1947 she had married Sigurd Zienau, a theoretical physicist, with whom she had a child, Nick. They divorced in 1960, and she married Moe in 1965.
Two years later, with a group of psychoanalysts led by Moe, Eglé founded the BYCP to provide free psychotherapy and to focus on adolescent breakdown – at a time when mainstream psychoanalysis was disregarding the treatment of adolescents.
Together, Eglé and Moe created Adolescent Exploratory Therapy (AET), a tailored version of traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy for vulnerable, hard-to-engage young people. With her work at the BCYP, which provided AET for 374 young people last year alone, Eglé and Moe’s reputation spread further afield, and and similar services for adolescents have been created in Geneva, Milan and the US.
Moe died in 2006. Eglé is survived by Nick and by four grandchildren, Jenny, Eva, Emilie and Raphael.
