Early Women Psychoanalysts:

History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance 

is an edited collection of essays that emerged from our conference "Sabina Spielrein and Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis". The book offers in-depth explorations of 14 biographies

(see the table of contents below). 

 

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Critics Reviews:

 

'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.' 

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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.' 

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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

 

 

Table of contents:

 

Progressives, in Their Day and in Ours

Klara Naszkowska

 

Part I: Beyond Wife, Lover, Muse

 

Ch. 1 

Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Medical Science

Ana Tomčić and John Launer

Ch. 2 
Lou Andreas-Salomé: An Unacknowledged Psychoanalytic Theorist of Art
Shira Dushy-Barr

 

Ch. 3 

Beata “Tola” Rank: Out from the Footnote

Lena Magnone

 

Part II: Beyond Psychoanalyst: Feminist, Marxist, Director of a Jewish Foster Home 

 

Ch. 4 

Margarethe Hilferding: Women’s Rights Activist Ahead of Her Time

Candice Dumas

 

Ch. 5 

What Do We Know about Tatiana Rosenthal? An Interview with Leonid Kadis

Pamela Cooper-White and Leonid Kadis

 

Ch. 6 

Erzsébet Farkas: An Unknown Heroine and Her Wartime Mission in a Jewish Foster Home

Dóra Szabó

 

Part III: Beyond the Homeland 

 

Ch. 7 

Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska: The Forgotten First Female Freudian

Edyta Dembińska and Krzysztof Rutkowski

 

Ch. 8 
Nic Waal: Speaking in Tongues

Håvard Friis Nilsen

 

Ch. 9 

Barbara Low: “The little bit of pioneering” or the Beginnings of British Psychoanalysis

Richard Theisen Simanke

 

Ch. 10 

Vilma Kovács and the Community of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis

Anna Borgos

 

Part IV: Beyond the Holocaust 

 

Ch. 11 

Eugenia Sokolnicka and Sophie Morgenstern: The Intertwining of Life, Work, and Death

Ursula Prameshuber

 

Ch. 12 

Thinking Cure: Jewish Psychoanalyst Alberta Szalita, from Warsaw to New York 

Ewa Kobylińska-Dehe

 

Ch 13 

Olga Wermer: From Galician Archives to Memory and Postmemory
Klara Naszkowska

 

General Bibliography 

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