Josephine Jackson, M.D.

Josephine Jackson, M.D., the second woman member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, was proposed for membership on November 26, 1912, and voted into membership on January 28, 1913. She resided in Pasadena, California, and was not present the evening of her election to membership; indeed it would be ten years before she attended her only meeting of the society. The minutes of the society do not indicate who proposed her for membership. A year earlier, on November 28, 1911 Beatrice Hinkle, M.D., had become the first woman member of the society. But Hinkle, like several other women who joined the early society, did not retain her membership. Originally from San Francisco, Hinkle was a public-health doctor who had been impressed by how differently people responded to an outbreak of bubonic plague there. Following this experience she began to practice suggestion, an early form of psychotherapy. In 1905 she moved to New York, and her interest in psychoanalysis prompted her to travel to Europe, where she attended the 1911 Weimar Congress and began an analysis with Jung. Her membership in the New York Psychoanalytic Society lapsed and when she returned to New York in 1915 and attempted to rejoin the society, she was blackballed by four members, probably because she was viewed as a Jungian.

At the 1915 meeting at which Hinkle was renominated for membership, the name of Mary K. Isham was proposed for membership by C. P. Oberndorf and A. A. Brill. Isham graduated from Wellesley, did postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, and became a fellow in philosophy and psychology at Bryn Mawr in 1899. After finishing medical school in 1904, she practiced as a psychiatrist in Ohio before moving to New