Helene Deutsch

Helene Deutsch (; ; 9 October 1884 – 29 March 1982) was a Polish-American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud. She founded the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1935, she immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she maintained a practice. Deutsch was one of the first psychoanalysts to specialize in women. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life and education

Helene Deutsch was born in Przemyśl, then in Austrian Galicia, to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach, on 9 October 1884. She was the youngest of four children, with sisters, Malvina, and Gizela and a brother, Emil. Although Deutsch's father had a German education, Helene (Rosenbach) attended private Polish-language schools. In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Helene grew up in a time of resurgent Polish nationalism and artistic creativity, Mloda Polska. As a result, Helene empathized with the works of Frédéric Chopin, and Polish literature, insisting on her Polish national identity, out of allegiance to a country that she and her siblings viewed as invaded.

Deutsch studied medicine and psychiatry in Vienna and Munich. She became a pupil and then assistant to Freud, and became the first woman to concern herself with the psychoanalysis of women. Following a youthful affair with the socialist leader Herman Lieberman, Helene married Dr. Felix Deutsch in 1912, and after a number of miscarriages, gave birth to a son, Martin. In 1935, she fled Germany, immigrating to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Helene Deutsch's husband and son joined her a year later, and she worked there as a well-regarded psychoanalyst up until her death in Cambridge in 1982.

Family

Father

Deutsch often reported that her father was her early source of inspiration. Her father, Wilhelm, was a prominent Jewish lawyer, 'a liberal and a specialist in international law' during a time when anti-Semitism was rampant. Being able to shadow her father led Deutsch to contemplate at one time becoming a lawyer, until she learned that women were excluded from practicing law.

Mother

Deutsch's relationship with her mother Regina was distant and cold. While she adored her father Helene hated her mother and claimed her mother 'shared none of her husband's intellectual interests'. Helene considered her mother's interests to be social and materialistic. Helene often said that her childhood home was dominated by her mother's overwhelming concern for social propriety and status. Helene considered her mother 'uncultured, intellectually insecure, and a slave to bourgeois propriety'. Although Helene at times yearned for the love of her mother, she never received what she desired. Instead, any maternal affection came from her sister, Malvina, and a woman in the neighborhood affectionately called 'the Pale Countess.' During her childhood, Helene recalled being looked after by 'nine different nurses'. She hated feeling dependent on her mother, and these feelings often led her to 'daydream that someone else was her real mother.'

Siblings

Deutsch's sister, Malvina, was the person from whom she received maternal affection. When their mother decided to beat Helene, Malvina was the one to caution beatings away from the head. Malvina, however, was herself the subject of the limited view of a woman's role in society. Helene Deutsch and her sisters were expected to marry early in life and to marry socially appropriate men. Although a gifted sculptor and painter, Malvina was forced to marry the man chosen by her parents as 'more appropriate,' instead of the man of her dreams.

Deutsch's brother Emil, however, offered abuse rather than affection. Emil sexually abused Helene when she was around four years old, and continued to torment her throughout her childhood. Deutsch singled out schizoid personalities who 'seem normal enough because they have succeeded in substituting "pseudo contacts" of manifold kinds for a real feeling contact with other people; they behave "as if" they had feeling relations with other people ... their ungenuine pseudo emotions'. More broadly, she considered that 'the "generally frigid" person who more or less avoids emotions altogether ... may learn to hide their insufficiencies and to behave "as if" they had real feelings and contact with people'.

It has been suggested that it was 'Helene's tendency to love by identifying herself with the object, then experiencing that love as betrayed and running to the next object ... [that] she herself explored in her various studies on the "as if" personality'. Indeed, Lisa Appignanesi has written that 'her memoir sometimes fills one with the sense that she experienced her own existence to be an "as if" — living her life first "as if" a socialist in her identification with Lieberman; "as if" a conventional wife with Felix; "as if" a mother ... then "as if" a psychoanalyst in the identification with Freud'.

On women

'Helene Deutsch, who was to make her name with her writings on female sexuality' became paradoxically something of an Aunt Sally or straw man 'in feminist circles...her name tarnished with the brush of a "misogynist" Freud whose servile disciple she is purported to be'. In 1925 she 'became the first psychoanalyst to publish a book on the psychology of women'; and according to Paul Roazen, the 'interest she and Karen Horney showed in this subject prompted Freud, who did not like to be left behind, to write a number of articles on women himself'. In his 1931 article on "Female Sexuality", Freud wrote approvingly of 'Helene Deutsch's latest paper, on feminine masochism and its relation to frigidity (1930), in which she also recognises the girl's phallic activity and the intensity of her attachment to her mother'.

In 1944–5, Deutsch published her two-volume work, The Psychology of Women, on the 'psychological development of the female ... Volume 1 deals with girlhood, puberty, and adolescence. Volume 2 deals with motherhood in a variety of aspects, including adoptive mothers, unmarried mothers, and stepmothers'. Mainstream opinion saw the first volume as 'a very sensitive book by an experienced psychoanalyst .. Volume II, Motherhood, is equally valuable'. It was, however, arguably 'Deutsch's eulogy of motherhood which made her so popular ... in the "back-to-the-home" 1950s and unleashed the feminist backlash against her in the next decades' — though she was also seen by the feminists as 'the reactionary apologist of female masochism, echoing a catechism which would make of woman a failed man, a devalued and penis-envying servant of the species'.

As time permits a more nuanced, post-feminist view of Freud, feminism and Deutsch, so too one can appreciate that her central book 'is replete with sensitive insight into the problems women confront at all stages of their lives'. In the same way, one may see that 'to cap the parallel, Deutsch's psychoanalytic preoccupations were with the key moments of female sexuality: menstruation, defloration, intercourse, pregnancy, infertility, childbirth, lactation, the mother-child relation, menopause ... the underlying agenda of any contemporary women's magazine – an agenda which her writings helped in some measure to create'. In The Psychology of Women, Helene discussed the concept of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage as a result of psychological factors, with a critical factor involving the 'pregnant woman's unconscious rejection of an identification with her own mother.'

The story of Mrs. Smith is strikingly similar to that of Helene's, as if she, herself, were speaking through Mrs. Smith. Through the story of Mrs. Smith, Helene argues that a successful pregnancy is possible when there is a loving relationship between mother and daughter, which 'smoothly socializes daughters into becoming mothers themselves.' She often felt herself to be Freud's daughter, claiming that Freud had inspired and released her talents. Deutsch claimed, however, that Freud tended to focus "too much on her identification with her father" and her affair with Lieberman. After one year, Freud terminated Deutsch's analytic sessions, to instead work with the Wolf Man. While at the Hague Congress, Deutsch presented her paper on The Psychology of Mistrust. In it, she claimed that lying was a defense against real events, as well as an act of creativity. Helene felt relaxed while working with Abraham and enjoyed his 'cool analytic style and his objective insight without any reeling experience of transference.' That same year, Deutsch created and became the first President of the Vienna Training Institute.

The following year, in 1925, Deutsch published The Psychoanalysis of Women's Sexual Functions, and the awareness of the inferiority of the clitoris would force the little girl to grow passive, inward, and turn away from her 'active sexuality'.

Deutsch was cautious about rigid adherence to the "Freudian method", which she regarded as an area of ongoing inquiry rather than a fixed system that could be mastered through routine training. SShe was also active as a training analyst and teacher; her seminars, often based on case studies, were attended by many students and sometimes extended late into the night. At this time, Deutsch began to turn her attention back to men's psychology and narcissism in both sexes.

In 1963, Deutsch retired as a training analyst in part due to her husband, Felix's, declining health and memory loss. In 1963, Felix Deutsch died. Her relationship with Felix, up to that point, had always been a little bit strained. Through numerous affairs, like the one she had with Sándor Rado, Deutsch had always felt that Felix was more of the mother figure than she.

Following Felix's death in 1963, Deutsch turned her attention toward the sexual liberation of the 1960s and Beatlemania. She argued that these two events were due to fathers "taking a back-seat in childrearing".

On 29 March 1982, Deutsch died at the age of 97. In her last days of life, she remembered the "three men closest to her, combining Lieberman, Freud and her father into one man". In her autobiography Deutsch wrote that during the three main upheavals in her life, her freedom from her mother; "the revelation of socialism"; and her time with psychoanalysis, she was inspired and aided by either her father, Lieberman or Freud.

Works

Psychoanalysis of the Sexual Functions of Women, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig/Wien/Zürich, 1925 (Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse No. 5). Translated to English in 1991, .
The Psychology of Women, Volume 1: Girlhood, Allyn & Bacon, 1943, .
The Psychology of Women, Volume 2: Motherhood, Allyn & Bacon, 1945, .
Neuroses and Character Types, International Universities Press, 1965, .
Selected Problems of Adolescence, International Universities Press, 1967, .
A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo, 1969, .
Confrontations with Myself, Norton, 1973, .
The Therapeutic Process, the Self, and Female Psychology, 1992, .

Notes

References

Helene Deutsch: Selbstkonfrontation. Eine Autobiographie. Fischer-TB, Frankfurt am Main 1994,
Jutta Dick & Marina Sassenberg: Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993,
Paul Roazen: Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life, N.Y., Doubleday, 1985, .
Paul Roazen: Freuds Liebling Helene Deutsch. Das Leben einer Psychoanalytikerin. Verlag Internat. Psychoanalyse, München, Wien 1989,
Gilles Tréhel: "Helene Deutsch (1884–1982): théorisations sur les troubles psychiatriques des femmes pendant la Première guerre mondiale," L'Information psychiatrique, 2007, vol. 83, n°4, pp. 319–326.
Gilles Tréhel: "Helene Deutsch, Rosa Luxemburg, Angelica Balabanoff," L'Information psychiatrique, 2010, vol. 86, n°4, pp. 339–346.
Gilles Tréhel: "Helene Deutsch (1884–1982) et le cas de la légionnaire polonaise," Perspectives Psy, 2013, vol. 52, n°2, pp. 164–176.

External links

Papers of Helene Deutsch, 1922–1992. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Helen Deutsch in Psychology's Feminist Voices Archives
Leo Baeck Institute Repository