Celebrating the Holidays and Our Faculty
The institute held its annual Holidays party this year in the West Village to celebrate the analysts from a cross-section of the city’s institutes and other professionals who help us with our mission throughout the year.
Musical accompaniment was provided by Alessandra Belloni, a specialist in southern Italian folk and spiritual music.
The event was held at Alma Mathews House on West 11th St., thanks to our treasurer, Brian Peterson, and his wife, Katie. The building’s history is in synch with Harlem Family’s mission of providing supervised long-term analytic play-therapy services to children in underserved communities.
For in the early 20th century, one of the two old brownstones that comprise the building served as a home for immigrant women and girls. From 1888 to 1926, Alma Mathews herself worked with new immigrants arriving in New York City.
Institute director Michael Connolly spoke to the gathering about the roots of the Harlem Family Institute’s model of free clinics in the 1920s Berlin and Vienna of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.