You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dorothee Steffens was a long-standing Professional Member of the Society of Analytical Psychology who served as the Journal's translator into German of abstracts and of the Burghölzli Hospital Records of Sabina Spielrein, responsibilities she carried out meticulously and graciously.
When I was charged with contacting people who were or had been working with Dorothee to inform them that she had died, I kept hearing many of the same words: ‘beautiful’, ‘generous’, with ‘a huge heart’, ‘loving’ but ‘tough’. The shock and the immediate grief were universal.
Dorothee worked with her patients, her supervisees, her colleagues, with her whole self. It was a beautiful, intelligent, humane, strong, compassionate and perceptive self. She was utterly devoted to those few who were fortunate enough to be close to her either as a patient, a friend, a supervisee or a loved one—and she was tough with them. She said what she thought, told the truth, forthrightly and with love. All of these are what we strive to be as analysts and although I know that there was never any question that she kept the appropriate boundaries of a psychoanalyst, she possessed the truly exceptional quality to give all of herself without reservation.
We were all aware of her mordant and incisive wit, and her assertiveness. She was not someone to suffer fools gladly. She was highly mature yet not invulnerable. The cruelties and insensitivities of others hurt her deeply. Her aesthetic sensitivity, her physical loveliness, her strength and endurance, her elegance, her dignity and her genuine modesty and humility were well known to all who knew her; also her integrity and her loyalty, her joie de vivre and her wicked laugh. All of you who knew her knew all of that.
Dorothee is gone but she will remain alive in all of us in all her inner and her outer beauty.
Corinna Peterson was born in 1923, the youngest by many years of five brothers and sisters. Her father was a he