Chapter 7 Eugenie Sokolnicka: Psychoanalysis is Introduced to France1

Eugenie Kutner was born on 14 June 1884 in Warsaw into a cultivated Jewish family. Her father was a banker and her mother a militant Polish nationalist.

The Jewish population in Poland at this time was large and, although it suffered from the prevailing antisemitism, it actively took part in the nationalist and democratic struggles of the Poles, since Poland had been carved up between the powerful neighbours Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Eugenie grew up in an environment where the process of assimilation was in full swing and thus identified herself more with the sufferings of a country reduced to slavery than with her own Jewish background. Several members of her family had taken part in the various Polish uprisings against the occupying powers. Her paternal grandfather had served in the Polish army in 1830; her father’s brother had been deported to Siberia after the 1863 uprising. Her mother played such an important role in the movement leading to the 1863 uprising that she was honoured with a state funeral by the Polish government when Poland was finally reunified in 1918 (Pichon, 1934).

As with all children from a wealthy background, Eugenie’s education was mainly carried out at home. She was given a French governess, who taught her French. Later on she did the equivalent of secondary-school studies and passed her baccalaureate. In her autobiography, Helene Deutsch mentions the difficulty she herself had had at the same time, in the same city, of persuading her family that she had the right to go to university.

Before she was 20, Eugenie was in France, studying science and biology at the Sorbonne in Paris (Pichon, 1934). She also attended the lectures of Pierre Janet at the Collège de France. Psychologist, pupil of Theodore Ribot, a doctor in psychiatry and pupil of Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet was the leading exponent of psychology in France. Believing that it was he who had in fact fi