Early Women Psychoanalysts History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance

Introduction: Progressives, in Their Day and in Ours  

Klara Naszkowska

Part One: Beyond Wife, Lover, Muse  

1. Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Medical Science 

Ana Tomčić and John Launer

2. Lou Andreas-Salomé: An Unacknowledged Psychoanalytic Theorist of Art 

Shira Dushy-Barr

3. Beata "Tola" Rank: Out From the Footnote  

Lena Magnone

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

4. Margarethe Hilferding: Women's Rights Activist Ahead of Her Time 

Candice Dumas

5. What Do We Know About Tatiana Rosenthal? An Interview With Leon Kadis 

Pamela Cooper-White and Leonid Kadis

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

Dóra Szabó 

Part Three: Beyond the Homeland 

7. Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska: The Forgotten First Female Freudian 

Edyta Dembińska and Krzysztof Rutkowski

8. Nic Waal: Speaking in Tongues 

Håvard Friis Nilsen

9. Barbara Low: "The Little Bit of Pioneering" or the Beginnings of British Psychoanalysis 

Richard Theisen Simanke

10. Vilma Kovács and the Community of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis  

Anna Borgos

Part Four: Beyond the Holocaust 

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

Ursula Prameshuber

12. Thinking Cure: Jewish Psychoanalyst Alberta Szalita, From Warsaw to New York 

Ewa Kobylińska-Dehe

13. Olga Wermer: From Galician Archives to Memory and Postmemory 

Klara Naszkowska

Biography

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.

'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