Kay Field, 87, a psychotherapist, educator and founding director of the teacher education program at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, died of complications from hip replacement surgery on Thursday, Jan. 31, in her Hyde Park home.
Known as a “teacher of teachers,” Mrs. Field and her faculty worked with more than 500 elementary, junior high and high school teachers in the Chicago area over 27 years, providing psychoanalytic insights for handling students’ emotional problems and disruptive classroom behavior.
“Teachers need to learn how to spot the warning signs children send out, but few are trained to do that,” Mrs. Field said in a 1977 interview.
Former students called her work pioneering. Instead of listening to lectures, teachers met in groups and discussed problems they experienced in the classroom. Teachers gravitated to Mrs. Field, a woman who empathized with their feelings of frustration about the effects of broken homes, drugs and crime on students in urban schools.
“Before she did this, people thought of teaching and learning as cognitive only, instead of emotional,” said Nancy Marks, a former student and faculty member in Mrs. Field’s program. Later, other educational institutions across the country modeled similar teacher-training programs after hers, Marks said.
Mrs. Field edited two collections of articles on psychoanalysis and education. She wrote for mental-health journals and lectured at colleges and mental-health facilities nationwide on the emotional components of teaching and learning.
She also maintained a private psychotherapy practice and served as a consultant to Chicago social and youth services agencies.
Though Mrs. Field’s parents discouraged her interest in college, she was the valedictorian of her class at Tuley High School in Chicago and won a full academic scholarship to Northwestern University, said her son Robert.
After graduating with a master’s degree in psychology from Northwestern, Mrs. Field and her husband, Edmund, moved to Delaware. She taught at a private elementary school in New York before returning to Chicago in 1948.
She worked as a child psychologist at the Children’s Home and Aid Society of Illinois before completing a clinical training program in child therapy at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
She and Sadie Nesbitt, a fellow student at the institute and an elementary school teacher on the West Side, helped train the institute’s first group of teachers in 1965.
Though the teacher education program ended in the 1990s, Mrs. Field never fully retired from her work as a psychotherapist. She saw her last patient two weeks before she died.
Her husband of 58 years died in 1994. Survivors include another son, L. Jay Field. Services have been held.
