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.
The life and work of the pioneer of child psychoanalysis, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, have passed unnoticed for more than half a century. Mentioned in passing by Helene Deutsch and Anna Freud, commented on a little less succinctly by Melanie Klein, it was not until 1974, fifty years after her death, that Colette Chiland translated the text on her techniques into French and wrote an article about her (see Hug-Hellmuth, 1921, and Chiland, 1975).
In 1988, the author ran a research group on this subject and the result was two theses, written by Marcel Boix (1990) and Dominique Dujols (1990) at the end of their psychiatric studies. In that same year, in Zurich, Angela Graf-Nold’s book was published in German, a 374-page work dedicated entirely to Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and to the history of the beginnings of child psychoanalysis. Apparently Jungian in inspiration, the work is concise and well researched. The author asserts that Mrs Hug-Hellmuth was chosen by Freud to represent him in the field of child psychoanalysis because of her great—perhaps too great—fidelity, her ‘absolute orthodoxy’. She is presented as being incapable of deviating one iota from the Freudian line, and therefore as more or less manipulated by those supporting the ‘orthodox’ line. The work is extremely well documented, even if the author’s argument did not convince us.
In 1991 a book by George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen on the life and work of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was published in English. These authors insist on the rich personality of Hug-Hellmuth and aim to rehabilitate her in the psychoanalytical world. They reproach Graf-Nold for a lack of any significant archive material and for only using autobiographical allusions published by Hug-Hellmuth herself in her works.1 We should also mention an article by Wolfgang Huber in 1980, Loïse Barbey-Thurnauer’s article in the Journal de la psychanalyse de l’enfant in 1989, and finally, a short, four-page, chapter in Silvia Ines Fendrick’s work Fiction des origines (1