Hedda Bolgar Interview

Editor's Note: Ms. Bolgar died on May 18, 2013, at the age of 103. We spoke with her in 2008.

Like most Americans, psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar was terrified as she watched the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

But Bolgar is not like most Americans. Then 91 years old, she had already lived through two world wars and countless revolutions and counterrevolutions. As a young child, she hardly saw her mother, who was a war correspondent in Budapest during World War I. Her father went underground to help start the Russian Revolution. A strong public critic of the Nazi regime by age 28, Bolgar fled Vienna the day Hitler arrived in 1938, fearing for her life.

So why, she asked herself, did she feel such intense fear on September 11, even though she was 3,000 miles from New York? Bolgar did a little self-analysis and realized that as a child she was never allowed to admit to being scared. "I suddenly realized that I was at last free to feel fear," she wrote in an essay in the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry. "I felt deeply grateful for the liberation that for me has been the hallmark of old age."

It's no surprise that Bolgar titled that essay on aging, "When the Glass Is Full." For her, getting old has been a fabulous journey. "I don't see why people are so afraid of being old," she said at the age of 97 in an interview for The Beauty of Aging, a forthcoming film about women over 80 who are leading active, engaged lives. "It seems to me that what people see is only the loss or the deterioration or the 'minus.' They don't see that there are tremendous gains."

In fact, some of Bolgar's biggest accomplishments have been since she "retired." In 1970, she cofounded the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. Four years later, she founded the Wright Institute in Los Angeles, a nonprofit mental health training and service center that includes the Hedda Bolgar Psychotherapy Clinic, which treats people who can't afford quality mental health services elsewhere.

Now eight months shy of her 100th birthday, Bolgar still teaches, sees patients half-time, and works out with a personal trainer. She talked to Caring.com about the issues that are important to her elderly patients, why she likes old age, and what she hopes for in 2009.

With the holidays in full swing, I feel compelled to ask you: What is a good present for a 99-year-old?

I'll tell you what I do about presents. I have everything I need and then some. Most of us don't need things anymore. But there's a lot of need in the world. I usually have a Christmas Eve party and this year I'm going to tell my friends, "If you want to give me something, make a donation to Doctors Without Borders."

What do you hope for in 2009?

For myself, nothing. What comes, comes. Beyond that, I hope that Obama can do a little of what he's promised. I want Guantanamo closed on January 21. I want poverty to be a consideration. I'm not terribly worried about the enemy -- I'm more worried about what we have or haven't been doing.

You no longer take new patients because you've said you don't want to "desert" them if you die. How old are your patients?

From the mid-40s to 88. The older patients are delighted to find somebody older than they are, because I can understand what they're going through.

What are the most common issues for your older patients?

The major fear is of losing independence -- that they won't be able to move around, they won't be able to decide what to do because somebody who is taking care of them makes the decisions. If I have any fear, it's that.

Some people, of course, never had a great deal of independence, particularly women. Some people actually look forward to losing independence: 'I won't have to do anything, I'll be told what to do and I'll do it, and it'll be great.' Some of those who have too many responsibilities now think it will be wonderful not to have to make decisions. So it goes both ways.

The other great fear is of illness. That's partly because it's a loss of independence, but also because of being in pain and not being able to do a lot of things that you could do before.

Do you have advice for people who are worried about illness or who are ill and can't do what they used to?

I generally talk about the fact that there's very little point in living in the past or living in the future -- that what is today, is. Try to take the day or week as it comes, and not look back with a great deal of nostalgia or look into the future with a great deal of fear, and sort of assume that things fall into place and happen whether we are afraid of them or not. Some worries are natural, of course, but they're not always very valid and they certainly don't make life any better. If you can accept how it is, I think you can enjoy old age.

Assuming that a person is not sick or in great pain, what are the secrets to happiness in old age?

The most important thing that keeps people going is to keep connections going -- connections to people, to interests, to the world outside. I go to concerts, the opera, museums, though not as much as I used to because I have trouble walking on carpets. There was a wonderful Matisse exhibit and there were Matisse rugs all over the place, and they are about three inches thick. I sank in! I was very tired at the end.

There's an old and I think very invalid assumption that you can't make friends in old age. My husband died a long time ago and I've been alone for 30-odd years, but I've always had very close friends. I've lost a lot of people, but I also have very young friends and very recent friends.

Cats are also important in my life. I have two now, but I usually have more. I couldn't live without animals, but cats especially.

Why is it so important to stay connected?

Because if you don't, the world becomes empty and you think about nothing but, "When am I going to die?"

Do you think most older people are afraid to die?

Some people are afraid. Some people don't think about it because they have no answers and because none of us can imagine nonexistence. It depends very much on your relationship with your body. Personally, I have a very hard time imagining living without a body. On the other hand, I also have a feeling that there's some form of consciousness left.

For a long time, I felt that I really should sort of face death and deal with it, but it just didn't come. I just couldn't do it. Finally I decided that there's no moral obligation to do it. Death is a fact and it's a mystery, and there's not much you can do about it.

Then I started fantasizing about how I would want to die. Now I tend toward thinking I would like to be very conscious when it happens. It's an experience, and there's nothing like it, and I want to be there when it happens. On the other hand, I don't like pain. If all I am is in pain and the only thing that matters is to somehow control the pain, then maybe I'll feel differently.

You've written that old age has been a kind of liberation for you.

There's a great deal of liberation in old age. I always say, "No one can do anything to me anymore!" You're not ambitious, you don't have any goals that you absolutely have to reach. There's a lot of freedom.

Are you still active politically?

About four years ago, I started a three-day conference on psychoanalytic perspectives on living in an unsafe world. It was the first time we got all the psychoanalytic institutes together. We've done conferences since then on torture and the environment. So I'm still very active in that, and I was also active in the last election -- not as much as I would have been normally, but I can't drive at night. That's my one big loss of independence.

Do you notice a difference between the kinds of problems patients bring to you now and the kinds of problems they came in with 30 years ago?

The patient population has changed. In a way, they have much deeper problems of never having felt that they had a self, an independent self. I hear that a lot. I work with a lot of people who were completely overshadowed by their families, but I didn't see that so much 30 years ago. Then it was more concrete symptoms that they wanted to get rid of. I haven't seen symptoms in I don't know how long because there's much more awareness about mental health. And there's more tolerance for different behavior, such as homosexuality. We used to see a lot of sexual problems that people don't have now.

I definitely see much more depression now. People just managed to get through life with it before. Today people don't think it's normal if they're depressed. We also expect much more of relationships. Women were unhappy in their marriages, but that wasn't a reason to go see a therapist. Now it is.

You got your PhD in psychology at the University of Vienna in the 1930s. Was Freud there at the time?

I knew Anna Freud, but Freud was a very old man by the time I was old enough to be involved. I heard him once and he was already very sick. He'd had his last of I think 23 surgeries for cancer of the jaw.

Tell me about why you left Vienna.

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. I had already arranged to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago several months later, but they said that, considering the political events in Austria, they'd be happy for me to start whenever I got there.

Did your family stay in Austria?

My family stayed for a while and then went back to Hungary. I lived in New York for a couple of years and that's when my friends and my husband and my mother came out. Of course, I did everything in the world to get them out.

Looking back, is there anything you really wish you had done?

My husband and I weren't married at the time that I left Austria, but we had been close for many years. He didn't feel like he could just take off the way I did. He was Jewish and his parents didn't want to leave Austria. He had to stay and take care of the family.

When I went to say good-bye to them, I said, "Will you please go to the American consulate and at least apply for a visa? You may not get it right away, but you'll be in line." His mother patted my head and said, "We appreciate your concern, but you're hysterical." His father said, "This is Austria, not Germany. Maybe there won't be much left other than work, but that's not the worst thing in the world."

The one real regret I have is that I never got my husband to talk about the fact that his mother died in Auschwitz. His father also died -- a so-called "natural" death in another concentration camp that was not an extermination camp. My husband never wanted to talk about it. By that time, I was a psychoanalyst and everybody else was talking to me about things, and he just wouldn't. I've always had the feeling that I should have insisted more. It was something he carried and I'm sure it was terribly depressing.

Do you have children?

I don't have biological children, but I have four adopted daughters. Whenever we talk about it, they say, "We adopted you." They were all teenagers or older when they came to me at rather critical times in their lives. They all had living parents at the time, but they were useless, so my husband and I sort of raised them. They all went on to have children, and their children have had children, so now I have a lot of nonbiological great-grandchildren.

One of the girls I met after I moved to Los Angeles from Chicago. Her father, who was the director of the psychology department where I worked, came to my office one day and said, "You know, my daughter is visiting for Christmas and I'm so busy. Can you take her to lunch?" So I took her to lunch and I heard her life history and how she had to be here because it was Christmas but she was dreading the time here.

I said to her, "You said you like the ocean" -- we had a house on the ocean at that time -- "why don't you come stay with us for a few days?" She came and got very sick when she was supposed to go back to Chicago, so she stayed a little longer. A few months after she returned, her analyst called me from Chicago and said, "She doesn't need an analyst. She needs a mother. I'm sending her to you." So that's how we got her. She stayed with us for a while and then she went back to school and got her PhD and met her husband. Her wedding was at our house, of course.

What are the best things you did in your life?

The best thing was probably marrying my husband. We were married 33 years, and he died at the dinner table, 3,000 miles from Los Angeles, on a vacation. The other thing was starting the Wright Institute. It has been a source of constant joy and gratification.

What do you plan to do for your 100th birthday?

I'll be 100 in August, if I make it. The two institutes I started want to have a big party for me. And the International Psychoanalytic Association meeting is in Chicago then, so I want to go back for that.

Is there anything you wish you had known about aging?

Not really. I didn't feel that I had to be told what to expect. I come from a family with longevity -- my mother lived to 96, my father and grandfather to 88. Nobody ever talked about getting old. They just happened to get old, and so did I.

Image of Hedda Bolgar courtesy of www.beautyofaging.com.