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Helen Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life by Paul Roazen is a biography that attempts to consider the interplay of the life circumstances and personality of a major psychoanalyst and her clinical contributions, most notably the two-volume The Psychology of Women. Roazen is knowledgeable about psychoanalytic theory and familiar with the world of the early analysts about whom he has written several books. For this biography he interviewed Deutsch extensively and was granted access to private materials.
Helene Deutsch was born in Przemysl, Poland, in 1884, the youngest child of Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach. Wilhelm Rosenbach was a prominent lawyer, and his family belonged to the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. Her mother, Deutsch maintained throughout her life, was bitterly disappointed by the birth of her last daughter because she already had two daughters and one unpromising son. If her mother actively resented and disliked her, her father's special affection and encouragement were Helene's emotional mainstay, and her father was to remain for her a most powerful source of identification. To escape her difficult and polarized home life, Helene began a relationship at the age of fourteen with a well-known Polish socialist. This consuming but also masochistic liaison with a married man lasted for many years until Helene felt able to break it off shortly before her marriage.
Against her parents' wishes and at times without their financial support, Helene decided to complete premedical requirements and to enroll in the medical school at the University of Vienna—an unusual undertaking for a woman of that time. Psychiatry appealed to her as offering a near ideal union of her scientific and humanistic interests. As a young psychiatrist, Deutsch studied under Kraeplin in Munich and worked in Wagner-Jauregg's clinic in Vienna. When physicians were absorbed by the military during World War I, Deutsch was appointed one of the the assistant directors of the clinic, a position unavai