Early Women Psychoanalysts is a collection of papers dedicated to women we are indebted to but have mostly never heard of; women who were instrumental in spreading psychoanalytic ideas and in the founding of the Russian, Polish, French, Hungarian, and British societies.
This treasure trove of personal and professional biographies tells many lesser-known stories of how psychoanalysis became what it is today. From the vote on the question of accepting women as members of the psychoanalytic societies, the effects of Adler's and Jung's split from Freud on women's careers, the question of lay psychoanalysts, the development of child analysis, feminist analysis, to the tradition of seeing psychanalysis as almost an identity. It also stands out in giving due respect to the ‘motherly’ labour of women in psychoanalytic institutions even today: organising societies and training seminars, translating, disseminating, teaching, and, mostly, treating patients – making psychanalysis alive both on and off the couch.
All of the women represented in the book were born between 1861 and 1913, and most of them were Jewish. The argument in the book does not connect psychoanalysis and Judaism as such. It clarifies, however, how psychoanalysis offered women a space that was (relatively) free from both gender and religious discrimination, where they could be who they set out to be: scientists, educators, theorists, healers.
As the book is mostly historical rather than psychoanalytical, it does not give a detailed analysis of the theoretical innovations made by these women vis-à-vis their male counterparts or their predecessors beyond the first three papers. These are dedicated to the more ‘famous’ women in the book: Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Beata Rank. It highlights Spielrein's contribution to neuroscience and developmental linguistics (Klara Naszkowska); Andreas-Salomé's theory of ‘Dual Orientation Narcissism’ and thinking of art and psychoanalysis (Shira Dushy-Barr); and Rank's innovative thinking about the role of women
in advancing human culture (Lena Mgnone). All three chapters insist on removing these women from the shadow of the men in their lives. Perhaps the most fascinating and representative story is that of Beata (Tola) Rank. It is a tale of the power of the spirit and the soul, a story of a woman who managed to get a professorship even when, as Magnone reveals, it is likely that she never even finished her secondary education. She was married at 22, became a mother at 23, and started attending meetings of the psychoanalytical society in 1919, at age 24. By age 27 she had translated Freud's ‘On Dreams’, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ and the ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ into Polish, started a psychoanalytical publication series in Polish, and was accepted to the Viennese Psychanalytic Society as a full member based on a paper about the place of women in the development of human society, presenting an idea that would not blossom again until the 1970s. Based on Freud's Totem and Taboo, she created her psychanalytical myth in which matricide proceeds patricide, and women try to take back power, only to be subjugated by their wifely and motherly roles by the famous ‘horde of brothers’. She is also the mother of the ‘phallic mother’, who is both an object of desire and of identification. Like many other women in this collection, her career took off after her divorce and leaving Europe. In the USA and in her forties she was analysed by another female student of Freud's, Mira Ginzburg. She then started practising as a psychoanalyst and became an expert in psychosis in children.
The second part of the book is dedicated to women who did not take their psychoanalytic education into a consulting room but into the world. All the chapters are gripping, but perhaps the most radical of the women represented in this part is Margarethe Hilferding. Candice Dumas writes that Hilferding was the first woman to become accepted as a member of the famous Wednesday meetings that created the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (VPS) and the one who triggered the vote about accepting women to it. She was also the fifth woman to get a medical degree from the University of Vienna. Nevertheless, her paper on ‘The Basis of Mother Love’ was met with resistance in the VPS. Hilferding dared to claim that there are mothers who are disappointed by their newborn babies
and that motherly love is not innate but grows through interaction with the child. She insisted not only that mothers are sexual beings, but also erotically invested in their nursing children, attempting an explanation for the disappearing sex drive of young mothers. Hilferding became the president of the Adlerian Institute but was never actually–a practising psychoanalyst. When the Nazis stripped her of her professional identity and the Gestapo invaded her home, she started working for the Jewish hospital in Vienna and then cared for both the bodies and souls of the inmates at Theresienstadt. On 24 September 1942, a day after she arrived at Treblinka, she was murdered, probably alongside Freud's three sisters.
In another chapter, Pamela Cooper-White interviews Leonid Kadis, a man who went to 25 archives in seven countries to follow the tracks of a woman who was thought to have almost made it a mission to leave no paper trail. Tatiana Rosenthal was the first child psychoanalyst, before Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and was educated in Zurich like many of her generation. Out of the 84 students who graduated with a medical degree in 1910 in Zurich, 52 were Russian women, and many of those were Jewish. The merit of Zurich was that it accepted both women and Jews. Rosenthal was a pioneer of sex education, setting some principles that are still going strong today, such as being truthful with children, letting children have a separate bedroom from parents, and avoiding corporal punishment (which she sees as a gateway to sexual fetishes). She was also the first to create a psychoanalytical profile of Dostoyevsky.
The third part of the book is dedicated mostly to Polish and Hungarian psychoanalysts. In 1937, 48 per cent of psychoanalysts in Hungary were women. Until the 1920s women had difficulty getting into higher education in Hungary because they were women. From the 1920s to the 1930s it was because they were Jewish. Unsurprisingly, most women discussed here got their degrees before the 1920s. The great mother of the Budapest school was Vilma Kovács, born in 1879. A woman who, in the words of Anna Borgos, who wrote the chapter about her, did everything a woman was not supposed to do at that time: she got divorced, had a profession and an income, smoked, and learned to drive. She was Ferenczi's close friend and analysand, and opened her clinic in
1920. Kovács, more than anyone else, was a pioneer in psychoanalytical training, which became mandatory in 1922. She trained all the women who appear later in the book. She died in England in 1940, nine months after the death of her daughter and student, Alice Balint.
The holocaust casts a long dark shadow over the life of every analyst in the book save Andreas-Salomé, who had the good fortune to die before it, and Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska (chapter 7, by Edyta Dembińska and Krzysztof Rutkowski) the first woman to join Freud's Wednesday seminars in 1909. She was Polish and Catholic, and so escaped the fate and many of the hardships which the others suffered.
A special local mention goes to the head of the hosting committee in London of Austrian colleagues, Barbara Low, the only woman who participated in founding the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. She was the first person to publish a psychoanalytical textbook, Psychoanalysis: A Brief Account of Freudian Theory, in 1920. Her greatest theoretical contribution was the Nirvana Principle, the organism's tendency to keep stimuli to a minimum, taken up later in Freud's death drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Some not-so-forgotten mothers are missing from this book, especially Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, and Karen Horney, all born, like Spielrein, in the 1880s. Understanding their lives and interests in the context of other women of their generation would have been an important contribution. Klein suffered from the lack of educational opportunities for women in Vienna as did the others (she was not wealthy enough to travel). Before coming to England, she moved to Berlin where she met Abraham, who was kind enough to see the merits of this divorced young mother who lacked formal education. Without him, she may not have been the woman we know so much of today. Karen Horney was excluded from the book, perhaps as she was neither Eastern European nor Jewish. Helene Deutsch's biography also falls into the pattern we encountered of psychanalysis being a personal and intellectual outlet for women's talent. This Polish Jew was Freud's student and assistant and a founder of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. Her interest in the psychology of women was in line with her female contemporaries,
and she too was forced to flee Europe. I am not mentioning all this to discredit the book or the work done by the less famous women described in it, but to shed light on how even the brightest stars were part of a shared socio-historical phenomenon.
The early twentieth century, with its unique challenges and opportunities, comes alive in the book and reminds us that it takes a village to raise a Klein. What all these women had in common was an insistence that women are subjects: as daughters, as wives, as mothers, as widows, and as individuals. They are our analytic mothers, who raised the flags of female sexuality, reproductive rights, and the complexities of motherhood and we, as if we were the post-Oedipal boys of Freud, simply forgot about them.
Early Women Psychanalysts, edited by , is published by Routledge (2024),