Helene Deutsch and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis

As the author of the bestselling The Psychology of Women (1944–1945), she was counted among the dozen leading American psychoanalysts during the Hartmann era. She was also the most controversial figure: in the 1970s, this pioneer of women’s emancipation, one of the first female students at the University of Vienna, and the first psychoanalyst who devoted herself entirely to the field of female psychology became a target of attack by second-wave feminists who accused her of blind loyalty to Freud’s supposedly misogynistic theories. This lecture, based on archival research from both sides of the Atlantic, will outline how the century-spanning life of Helene Deutsch offers a unique feminist perspective on the transnational social and cultural history of psychoanalysis.