Hedda Bolgar

Bolgar was born in Zurich, Switzerland, on August 19, 1909. At age 14, Bolgar became a vegetarian.[2][3] She was the only child of Elek Bolgar, a Hungarian historian and diplomat, and Elza Stern, a reporter who was one of the few women to cover World War I.[4] Elek and Elza Bolgar were communists; they cancelled her ninth birthday so they could take part in a civil uprising in Hungary.[4]

Bolgar studied at the University of Vienna.[4] She studied under Charlotte Bühler and earned her doctorate in 1934.[5] She knew Anna Freud and attended Sigmund Freud's lectures.[6]

In the mid-1930s, Bolgar developed the "Little World Test" (also known as the "Bolgar—Fischer World Test") with her close friend Liselotte Fischer.[7] It was a nonverbal, cross-cultural test similar to the Rorshach Ink Blot Test or the Thematic Apperception Test.[7] When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Bolgar fled Vienna.[4]

After arriving in the US, Bolgar trained at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and taught at the University of Chicago.[4] While in the Midwest, Bolgar gave training on the "Little World Test."[7] Bolgar was chief of psychology at Mt. Sinai Hospital (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center). She helped found the California School of Professional Psychology, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies and the Wright Institute Los Angeles, a postgraduate training center and clinic.[4]

When Bolgar was 95, she helped organize a three-day conference called "The Uprooted Mind: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Living in an Unsafe World."[4] In 2012, at the age of 102, Bolgar was still seeing patients four days a week.[2] At 102, she gave a lecture on "Dogma and Flexibility in Psychoanalytic Technique" before the New Center for Psychoanalysis, a Los Angeles group that offers advanced education to therapists.[4]

Bolgar's husband, economist Herbert Bekker, joined her in the U.S. in 1940 and the two moved to Los Angeles in 1956.[4] The couple had no children.[4] Bekker died in 1973.[4]

Bolgar died on May 13, 2013, at the age of 103.[8] When she died, she was likely the oldest active member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and probably the oldest practicing psychoanalyst in the United States.[8]

• "I've lived through revolutions, famine, war. Things like that."
• "There was a war, and I had vanilla ice cream for lunch."
• "I started a lot of things at 65."[9]
• "The day the Nazis came to Vienna, I left. I had been very active in anti-Nazi politics and it really wasn't safe for me to stay. They came in on a Sunday and I decided Sunday was a good time to leave because on Monday they'd start working. They'd probably find the person who wrote those terrible articles about them pretty quickly."[10]
• "Women must be agents of their own lives. They must not be dependent on someone else to provide for them."[11]

• List of people from Los Angeles
• Lists of centenarians

• "The Beauty of Aging - Hedda Bolgar".
• Video and tribute to Hedda Bolgar
• Hedda Bolgar Psychotherapy Clinic, Wright Institute Los Angeles