Margaret Lowenfeld

Margaret Frances Jane Lowenfeld (4 February 1890 - 2 February 1973) was a British-born pioneer of child psychology and psychotherapy, a medical researcher in paediatric medicine, and an author of several publications and academic papers on the analysis of child development and play. Margaret developed a number of educational techniques which bear her name and have achieved worldwide recognition.

Early Years
Margaret Lowenfield was born in Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge, London on 4 February 1890. Her father, Henryk (Henry) Loewenfeld, who was from Silesia, had arrived in England in the early 1880s. Although almost penniless he soon became a wealthy businessman through a variety of ventures, including the buying up of rundown theatres in the West End of London and starting a brewery selling non-alcoholic beer in Fulham at the time the temperance movement took hold. He married, Alice Evans who was British in 1884. Margaret was educated locally at a Church of England school and later attended Cheltenham Ladies College in Gloucestershire, England along with her older sister, Helena Rosa Wright who went on to be an influential figure in Birth Control and Family Planning.

Medical training and mission work
Margaret followed her sister by going to the London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women in Bloomsbury, London and having passed the intermediate MB exam was able to achieve the minimum requirement to practice medicine by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Later that year she got a job at the Royal Free Hospital followed by a short period at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. In 1917 at the second attempt she passed the MRCS (Eng.) and LRCP (Lond.) examinations and her MB, BS (Lond.) in 1918 and took up an house surgeon posting at the South London Hospital for Women.

Her further training was interrupted when she was asked in late 1918 to join a mission to her ancestral home in Chrzanów where there had been outbreaks of typhus, dysentary, cholera and influenza. The varying health condition of the children was a major influence on the direction of her later career as she began speculating about what enabled some children to survive and even flourish in spite of traumatic experiences. Margaret came back to England for a short period during which war broke out between Poland and Russia. She returned to Warsaw to set up a medical department for prisoners of war. Margaret also took charge of improving sanitation and later undertook refugee work.

In 1921 Margaret came back to London and as a result of illness came into contact with Wilfred Trotter, a pioneer of both neurosurgery and social psychology. Through this association Margaret was later to develop an interest in Psychodynamic psychotherapy