Preface

In response to Jung's promise to bring to the Weimar Congress in 1911 “many conspicuous representatives of the feminine element” from his coterie in Switzerland, Freud retorted that his Viennese group has “nothing to compare with the charming ladies you are bringing from Zurich” (McGuire 1974, 440, 442). The amused, knowing, even leering tone assumed by both men in this exchange underscores the ambiguity of how the earliest female participants in the psychoanalytic coteries were both perceived and received by the groups to whose membership they aspired. Despite the undercurrent of anxiety in the epistolary banter of Freud and Jung, however, the “feminine element” in important ways provides the impetus for the psychoanalytic movement. As John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi write, “Psychoanalysis, like feminism, emerges as a response to the ‘hysterical woman”’ of the late nineteenth century, and it becomes the “cure” for the very illness out of which it arises (1992, 5).

The premise of this special issue of American Imago is that the place of the early women analysts deserves continued and sustained exploration—historically, theoretically, and clinically. Freud's disclaimer of having any “feminine element” in his Vienna cohort as “charming” as Jung's can in retrospect only be read ironically, as a warding off of the knowledge of the “dark continent” with which he was already imbued. As the papers by Madelon Sprengnether, Mary Bergstein, and Rosemary Balsam collectively demonstrate, Freud by 1911 had already recruited three early female analysts—and there is a sense in which he himself brings the total to four! Nellie Thompson's paper extends the trajectory by documenting how Freud's disavowal of the feminine element becomes an anguished legacy enacted in the theories and the life of one of his most devoted followers, Marie Bonaparte. Finally, Judith Vida's review essay takes up two landmark books on Melanie