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Lost and silenced voices pervade the women's biographies in this book. The women profiled here were born from 1860 to the period of World War I. Their stories intertwine and often share common experiences of misogyny, growing antisemitism and the tumultuous sociopolitical circumstances of their time. Inspired by the Sabina Spielrein and Early Female Psychoanalysis Conference , this work is a testament to the enduring relevance of these issues. This book serves as an unyielding reminder of their challenges and what we must remember.
Early Women Psychoanalysts explores four themes through the biographies of 14 analysts. The themes represent forces that influenced their subject's contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. The four parts reflect the life trajectories of each analyst. The book's first theme, ‘Wife, Love, or Muse’, deals with how three analysts' lives were overshadowed by their relationships. Starting with Sabina Spielrein herself, John Launer and Ana Tomčić present her as a scientist advancing her field. In doing so, they deftly move away from popular psychobiographical discourses of her as a man's ‘other woman’. They discuss Spielrein's primary papers, which contribute to psychoanalytic thinking and foreground her evolutionist approach and aspirations towards integrating evo-biology and psychoanalysis. At first, the portrayal of her evolutionist endeavour appears tenuous as Spielrein does not articulate her overarching theory. To overcome this, Launer and Tomčić explain terms like ‘crossing’, which she adopted in ‘Some Analogies between Thinking in Children’ (2019[1923]), tracing the word's origin to geneticist Gregor Mendel (p. 31). Although tenuous, these links provide a plausible argument.