Helene Deutsch, the feminine in psychoanalysis

Helene Deutsch was the first woman in the history of psychoanalysis to dedicate herself to the study of female psychology. and the first to direct the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. Her contributions qualified the excessive masculine focus that psychoanalysis had had until then and served as input for the later work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Helene Deutsch is considered one of the best teachers in history of psychoanalysis. He trained a significant number of psychoanalysts with notable success. As a woman, she rebelled against the mandates of her time and she always demonstrated that she possessed the will and character to live by her own criteria and standards.

Her contemporaries defined her as an extremely beautiful and intelligent woman. To these virtues we should add her proverbial discipline and perseverance. Not only was she famous among her European colleagues, but He also wrote several of the most important pages of psychiatry in United States.

Helene Deutsch, an independent woman

Helene Deutsch was the youngest of four children, born in 1884 in a small town called Przemyśl, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and currently belongs to Poland.

He came from a fairly open-minded Jewish family; his family did not spare in providing access to education private at home, at a time when it was not usual for women to study.

His father was a lawyer and Helene was his favorite. Her mother, on the other hand, was an authoritarian and distant woman, who did not express affection towards her daughter. Although Helene Deutsch was a bright child, her character was depressive. This was due to his mother’s coldness and the fact that her older brother tried to rape her.

At 16, she became the lover of Herman Liebermann, a man much older than her who was also married. This caused a great family and social scandal; However, Helene barely paid him any attention.

Her lover was a prominent leader of social democracy and he had a stormy relationship with her. She, however, followed him when he was elected parliamentarian in Vienna. In that city, Helene Deutsch met Rosa Luxemburg, a woman who served as a model to advance her thinking and her studies.

Studies and challenge

In 1907, Helene Deutsch began studying medicine at the University of Vienna. At that time, there were only seven women on the faculty and Helene was one of them.

Shortly after, she ended her relationship with Libermann and He moved to Munich to specialize in psychiatry under the direction of Emil Kraepelin.. In 1912 he obtained his degree and, almost simultaneously, his interest in psychoanalysis began to awaken.

That same year, she married Felix Deutsch, an internist who served as Sigmund Freud’s personal physician. Ella Helene began working as an assistant physician at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Vienna, in which She was assigned the women’s section. This experience in the clinic would trigger all of her subsequent study. From this moment on, Helene would decide to immerse herself in the study of female psychology.

Helene Deutsch began a psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, but after a year, he indicated that it should be interrupted, since he could not find signs of neurosis in her. Later, a new analysis was made, this time, with Karl Abraham in Berlin. In 1917, she gave birth to his only child, Martin, who later became a noted physicist.

Helene Deutsch’s contribution

Helene Deutsch was never a dissident from classical psychoanalysis. He assumed the essential concepts of the theory, but providing a different approach.

She tried to apply all of these concepts to female psychology specifically, becoming the first psychoanalyst to write a book on this topic. Mostly, He placed emphasis on the study of narcissism, trying to see how it was expressed or manifested in men and women.

Furthermore, Helene dared to address issues related to female eroticism and It opened psychoanalysis to a new field that, to date, had not been treated: motherhood.

She urged Freud to further explore female psychology and gave a constructive interpretation to supposed female passivity, which she defined as an introspection that facilitated intuition.

Together with his family, Deutsch emigrated to the United States in 1935. She settled in Boston, where she began working as an associate psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital..

His work psychology of women It became one of the indispensable classics of feminist thought. Her husband died in 1964 and she died in 1982, at age 97. Her name and her work were always highly valued in the United States and Europe.

Helene Deutsch showed the world that women can perform successfully in any field., who are not so different from men and tried to open the way to female psychology. A field of study that, as is normal in a man’s world, had barely been explored.

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