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Each life story is unique, yet each also entwines with other stories, sharing recurring themes linked to issues of gender, Jewishness, women's education, politics, and migration.
The book's first section discusses relatively known analysts such as Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Beata Rank, remembered largely as someone's wife, lover, or muse; and the second part sheds light on women such as Margarethe Hilferding, Tatiana Rosenthal, and Erzsébet Farkas, who took strong political stances. In the third section, the biographies of lesser-known analysts like Ludwika Karpinska-Woyczynska, Nic Waal, Barbara Low, and Vilma Kovács are discussed in the context of their importance for the early Freudian movement; and in the final section, the lives of Eugenia Sokolnicka, Sophie Morgenstern, Alberta Szalita, and Olga Wermer are examined in relation to migration and exile, trauma, loss, and memory.
With a clear focus upon the continued importance of these women for psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as discussion that engages with pertinent issues such as gendered discrimination, inhumane immigration laws, and antisemitism, this book is an important reading for students, scholars, and practitioners of psychoanalysis, as well as those involved in gender and women's studies, and Jewish and Holocaust studies.
List of contents
Introduction: Progressives, in Their Day and in Ours Part One: Beyond Wife, Lover, Muse 1. Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Medical Science 2. Lou Andreas-Salomé: An Unacknowledged Psychoanalytic Theorist of Art 3. Beata 'Tola' Rank: Out from the Footnote Part Two: Beyond Psychoanalyst: Feminist, Marxist, Director of a Jewish Foster Home 4. Margarethe Hilferding: Women's Rights Activist Ahead of Her Time 5. What Do We Know about Tatiana Rosenthal? An Interview with Leon Kadis 6. Erzsébet Farkas: An Unknown Heroine and Her Wartime Mission in a Jewish Foster Home Part Three: Beyond the Homeland 7. Ludwika Karpinska-Woyczynska: The Forgotten First Female Freudian 8. Nic Waal: Speaking in Tongues 9. Barbara Low: 'The little bit of pioneering' or the Beginnings of British Psychoanalysis 10. Vilma Kovács and the Community of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis Part Four: Beyond the Holocaust 11. Eugenia Sokolnicka and Sophie Morgenstern: The Intertwining of Life, Work, and Death 12. Thinking Cure: Jewish Psychoanalyst Alberta Szalita, from Warsaw to New York 13. Olga Wermer: From Galician Archives to Memory and Postmemory
About the author
Klara Naszkowska, PhD, is a cultural historian focusing on Jewish women and exploring intersections of gender, ethnicity, politics, emigration, and memory. In 2019, she received a Fulbright Fellowship for a research project about Sabina Spielrein.
Summary
Each life story is unique, yet each also entwines with other stories, sharing recurring themes linked to issues of gender, Jewishness, women's education, politics, and migration.
Report
'Written by experts in their fields and with a strong introduction, Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance is dedicated to the early European women psychoanalysts. Often ignored by males in their fields and, later, by historians, these women enhanced the study and practice of psychoanalysis, offering us invaluable histories of Jewishness, gender, World War II, the Holocaust, trauma, and memory studies. A must read!'
Marion Kaplan, author of Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Professor Emerita of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
'With an exemplary combination of scholarly originality and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume provide definitive introductions to the lives and legacies of fourteen women, from the famous to the forgotten, who forged psychoanalysis in the smithy of their souls. An invaluable resource for every serious student of the field.'
Peter L. Rudnytsky, Head, Department of Academic and Professional Affairs, American Psychoanalytic Association
'This wonderful, scholarly collection fills a hole in psychoanalysis's early history. Detailing the lives of little-known women psychoanalysts (nearly all of whom were Jewish), it provides a rich, in-depth glimpse of their personal evolution while beautifully explicating the impact of cultural, political (and especially antisemitic) forces on them.'
Joyce Slochower, PhD, ABPP, NYU Postdoctoral Program, author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; 2014), Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006; 2014), Elephants Under the Couch: Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken (in press); co-editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, 'De-idealizing Relational Theory: a Critique from Within' and 'Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique' (2018)
'What is extraordinary about Klara Naszkowska's edited volume is not simply its focus on the lives and work of neglected, marginalized, and yet seminal women psychoanalysts. In addition, the chapters vivify ways in which a malignant mix of misogynistic, antisemitic, fascistic, and longtime sociocultural norms both hobbled, yet also galvanized some of the greatest psychoanalytic voices of all time.'
Emily A. Kuriloff, PsyD, author of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2016). Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Director of Clinical Education Emeritus, William Alanson White Institute, New York
