Helene German

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Helene Deutsch (born October 9, 1884 in Przemyśl , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; died March 29, 1982 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ; née Rosenbach ) was an Austro-American psychoanalyst . She was the first female psychoanalyst to specialize in female psychology and female sexuality.

Live and act

As the youngest daughter of an assimilated Jewish family - her father Wilhelm Rosenbach was a lawyer - Deutsch grew up with no religious ties to Judaism. With the socialist politician Herman Lieberman , she founded an organization for women workers in Przemyśl and accompanied him to the congress of the Socialist International in Stockholm in 1910 .

From 1907 she studied medicine in Vienna and Munich and received her doctorate in 1912 at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna. In the same year she married the doctor Felix Deutsch and took an unpaid position as an assistant doctor at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Vienna with Julius Wagner-Jauregg and assisted in his research into malaria therapy for the treatment of progressive paralysis .

In 1917 their son Martin Deutsch was born, who became a well-known physicist. In 1918 she worked on the conflicts that she perceived and caused by motherhood and being a woman in an analysis by Sigmund Freud . However, he broke it off because he thought he could not find any evidence of a neurosis in her.

As a student and colleague of Freud and since 1918 a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association , she was the first woman who dealt more intensively with the “psychology of women”. In 1923 she went to Berlin to continue her education and to go through a training analysis with Karl Abraham . In 1935 the family fled Austria, which was ruled by Austrofascism , and moved to the USA. In Cambridge (Massachusetts) she worked as a recognized psychoanalyst until her death in 1982.

Continuing the Freudian approach, Helene Deutsch took over Freud's ideas of the Oedipus complex , penis envy , castration anxiety and narcissism , but emphasized the anatomical differences between the sexes and was mainly concerned with the specific effects of these psychoanalytic concepts on the female psyche and sexuality.

Autobiographical experiences flowed into her work on the psychology of women and female sexuality. In 1973 her autobiography Confrontations with myself was published (in German translation: self - confrontation ). In the early 1970s she took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War . In 1975 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

  • Psychoanalysis of female sexual functions . Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich: International Psychoanalytical Publishing House, 1925
  • Confrontations with Myself . New York: Norton, 1973
    • Self-confrontation. The autobiography of a great psychoanalyst . Munich: Kindler, 1975

literature

  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 1 Munich: Saur 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 212 f.
  • Elke Mühlleitner: Biographical Lexicon of Psychoanalysis. The members of the Psychological Wednesday Society and the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association 1902–1938 . Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992 ISBN 3-89295-557-3 , pp. 75-77
  • Jutta Dick & Marina Sassenberg: Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993 ISBN 3-499-16344-6 .
  • Uwe Henrik Peters : Psychiatry in exile: the emigration of dynamic psychiatry from Germany 1933–1939 , Kupka, Düsseldorf 1992, ISBN 3-926567-04-X , p. 72 f.
  • Josef Rattner : Helene Deutsch . In: Classics of Psychoanalysis . 2nd edition Beltz / Psychologie Verlags Union, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-621-27285-2 . (First edition 1990 and T. Klassiker der Tiefenpsychologie ), pp. 250–268.
  • Paul Roazen : Helene Deutsch. A Psychoanalyst's Life, Doubleday, NY 1985.
    • Paul Roazen: Freud's favorite Helene Deutsch. The life of a psychoanalyst . Publishing house Internat. Psychoanalysis, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-621-26513-9 .
  • Inge Stephan: Helene Deutsch In: Hans Erler u. a. (Ed.): "Because of me the world was created". The intellectual legacy of German-speaking Jewry. 58 Portraits Campus, Frankfurt 1997, ISBN 3-593-35842-5 , pp. 185-191
  • Elke Mühlleitner: German, Helene. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 130-132.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME German, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenbach, Helene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Przemyśl , Galicia
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1982
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts