Helene Deutsch (1884–1982)

Mourning remains a mystery of the soul. On 29 March 1982 Helene Deutsch died at the age of ninety-seven in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of her more remarkable clinical papers, 'Absence of grief' (1937), can begin to commemorate her contribution to psychoanalysis. Freud had such high standards about people (and she was a favourite of his), that he neglected the way human beings can fail to experience emotions intensely felt in great literature. Helene Deutsch's tolerance led her to expand pre-existing analytic thinking.

She was born Helene Rosenbach in Przemysl on 9 October 1884; for those who knew her longest, she was called by her Polish diminutive, 'Hala'. Her physical weakness in her last couple of years came as a shock. She had retained such vitality so long that it seemed she would reach one hundred with no trouble.

When the architect Walter Gropius died at an advanced age, it turned out that he had left instructions that his firm hold a champagne party. For Helene, however, her friends and associates, from old Vienna as well as Poland, are dead and scattered; and her pupils in America—where she made her home for almost half her life—are necessarily spread out by the size of the country. Yet when Anna Freud received her honorary degree from Harvard University in 1980, she paid a visit to see Helene.

Some material about Helene's life and work is already known. She got her M.D. in 1913 from the University of Vienna, was analysed by Freud in 1918–19, and became President of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society from 1939–41. Freud had maintained that people have bodies, and Helene took the point one step further, insisting on the essential differences between men and women. The outrage that Freud aroused still surrounds Helene Deutsch's name.

She should speak for herself, so there be no doubt what a force she was. Here are some passages from letters she wrote to her husband Felix in Vienna on her having first moved to Boston to help found—having l