Olga Knopf was born in Vienna in 1888, graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School in 1916, and served as a field surgeon in Bulgaria during WW I. After the war she specialized in gynecology and began working with Alfred Adler. It was as a gynecologist that she came into contact with Victor Tausk, who brought his pregnant fiancée H.L. to her office in an effort to find a way to end her pregnancy. After Paul Roazen's Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (Knopf, 1969) was published, Olga Knopf wrote a letter to Anna Freud describing this meeting and a subsequent encounter with H.L. several months later, because she thought these contacts would shed light on Tausk's suicide. Knopf's letter was published in Kurt R. Eissler's book, Victor Tausk's Suicide by the International University Press in 1983.
In 1930 Knopf emigrated to the United States and published two books: The Art of Being a Woman (Blue Ribbon Books, 1932), and Women on Their Own (Little, Brown, & Company, 1935). Both are even-handed, sophisticated discussions of the educational, professional and social progress women had made, tempered by an acknowledgment of the psychological barriers that may impede individual women. Knopf's commitment to the principle of equality is encapsulated in
her avowal that “there must be no restriction on the development of any capacity in women, no matter how little ‘feminine’ the resulting activity may seem.”
She wrote Women on Their Own because of her alarm at the worsening political situation in Europe, where the rise of Fascism had eradicated the progress of women in Germany and Italy. While she did not envision the same threat to women in America, she felt it was urgent that women take stock, pause and analyze the lives they were leading, the progress they had made, and clarify their aims for the future in order to protect and strengthen their progress. How Knopf's views on women influenced her clinical work is unknown, but undoubtedly the realities of the outer world were present in her consulting room.
Towards the end of her life Knopf wrote Successful Aging, published by Viking in 1975, and a little known paper, “Sexual Assault: The Victim's Psychology and Related Problems” in 1978 in The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine. It grew out of her participation in a research project at Mount Sinai Hospital and School of Medicine whose aims were to understand the myriad ways rape impacts on its victims psychologically and to design ways of alleviating the psychological trauma of rape.
Olga Knopf died shortly before her 90th birthday in 1978. The late Edward Joseph, a colleague from NYPSI, published an obituary of Knopf in the newsletter of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, whose closing lines captured the essence of Knopf's personality:
As a person, she was a fiercely independent woman with natural charm. She had no hesitation in expressing her point of view and could accept disagreement as an inevitable part of the intellectual exchange in which she took such pleasure.
Nellie L. Thompson, Ph.D., is a historian and member of NYPSI, where she is the curator of the Archives and Special Collections of the A.A. Brill Library. She serves on the Board of the Sigmund Freud Archives and American Imago.