Born to an upper-middle-class family in Rotterdam, Geleerd studied psychoanalysis in Vienna, then London, under Anna Freud.

Elisabeth Rozetta Geleerd was born on March 20, 1909, in Rotterdam[1] in an ethnically Jewish atheist family as the eldest of three children to Moses, a ship chandler, and Bertha (née Haas).

[4] Geleerd's studies at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute[2] were deemed by her friend Helen Tartakoff as "a revolt from tradition even in the 1930s".

[5] At the same time, her father and surviving brother moved to the South of France and to Switzerland respectively to flee increasing Nazi presence in the Netherlands, severing her remaining ties to her home country.

[6] During her time in London, Geleerd acted as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill and worked with French war refugees at the Tavistock Clinic in Swiss Cottage.

[8] In the late 1940s or early 1950s, she spent six months at Mount Sinai Hospital helping to establish their child psychiatry department.

Her contemporaries in the field of child psychoanalysis also criticized the department, finding it of poor quality compared to the hospital's work in adult mental health.

[15] She was particularly critical of the permissive Kleinian position of granting children "all possible freedom of observation", believing much stricter therapeutic methods were needed for treatment.

[16] Various reviews described the book as "an excellent portrait of classical child analysis", but lacking focus due to its status as a compilation of pre-existing papers;[16] as a "lucid introduction" to the subject, but slightly too complex for a fully unacquainted audience;[17] and as "admirably" defending itself against contemporary critiques of psychoanalysis as a field.

[1] Geleerd's clinical focus was on severe psychological disturbance and psychosis, seeking therapeutic solutions to mental health issues more complex than the neuroses.

[3] Geleerd died in New York City on May 25, 1969, at the age of 60,[2] less than a month after presenting a panel at the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.