Lydia Tischler: Child Psychotherapy pioneer and courageous innovator in child & family mental health

MINDinMIND

Lydia Tischler was one of the first child psychotherapists to train with Anna Freud. Her advocacy for children began early and in traumatic circumstances in concentration camps where she spent her teenage years caring for younger children during the Second World War. She came to the UK as a refugee and embarked on a seventy-year career that’s been marked by courageous innovation.

"One of the ways you can mother yourself is to mother other children", Lydia tells Jane O’Rourke in this interview. Lydia’s mother was tragically murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After qualifying, Lydia became the first Child Psychotherapist at the Cassel Hospital in London where mentally ill mothers and their babies were treated. She went on to transform their treatment by establishing a family unit, saving many seriously at-risk children from being taken into care.

Her contribution to the teaching and organisation of child psychotherapy has also been significant. She has been a key figure at the British Psychotherapy Foundation and Association of Child Psychotherapists but her contribution to the mental health of children internationally is also impressive. For the last thirty years as co-founder of the European Federation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, she has established adult and child therapy trainings and services in Central and Eastern Europe.

Remarkably although she is now in her 90’s, she is still supervising and teaching. Lydia began by telling Jane O’Rourke about how her early experience of loss and helping other traumatised children in the concentration camps, led her aged only 23 to begin training as a child psychotherapist with Anna Freud.

Go to www.mindinmind.org.uk for more information about Lydia Tischler and to sign up to our email list to be notified of future podcasts

Interview recorded 2019

Filmed & edited by Izzy Cooper

Post-video Production Pawel Chichonski

Tributes for Lydia Tischler

The Association of Child Psychotherapists welcomes the film on Lydia Tischler and talked to Ann Horne, ACP Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist about Lydia:

'From the time she arrived in the UK, age 16, in Windermere in 1945, by way of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt (Terezin), Lydia Tischler has lived a life advocating and innovating for the mental health of children and families. Trained by Anna Freud, she was the first child psychotherapist at the Cassel Hospital where, with her future husband, she established the Family Unit which admitted whole families whose functioning had completely and dangerously broken down – ‘the family as in-patient’.

In ‘retirement’, she was co-founder of the European Federation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, ensuring that many countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in rediscovering their psychoanalytic histories, also developed child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy trainings. And she joined the organising staff group of the British Association of Psychotherapy (now IPCAPA - Independent Psychoanalytic Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy Association at the British Psychotherapy Foundation), an enabling and loved teacher, tutor and supervisor.

It is not surprising that she is an Honoured member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists; the profession owes her much. For the MINDinMIND viewer who is meeting her for the first time, you are fortunate! A woman of generosity and wisdom, integrity and energy, Lydia is someone we all hold near to our hearts'.