Becoming Helene Deutsch. Psychoanalysis, Migration, and Feminism
The project aims to complete a book manuscript on Helene Deutsch (1884–1982), the most fascinating and controversial figure of the entire cohort of Central European Jewish refugees who significantly impacted the postwar American intellectual landscape. Looking beyond the customary success story, the book accounts for her experience of persecution, exile, and loss, while also addressing the struggles this Jewish immigrant, a trailblazer for women’s liberation and a committed socialist, must have faced in postwar America defined by McCarthyism, antisemitism, and the conservative backlash against women’s rights. It also explores the role Deutsch may unknowingly have played in turning Freud’s subversive philosophical thought into an American disciplinary tool, a therapy in service of reactionary public policy. Through the century-spanning life of one woman psychoanalyst, the ambition is to present a unique feminist perspective on psychoanalysis’s transnational social and cultural history.
Lena Magnone is a sociologist and literary scholar interested in Central European modernism, psychoanalysis, and women’s writing. She defended her doctoral thesis in literary studies (2007) and obtained her habilitation in Humanities (2017) at the University of Warsaw, where she served as an assistant professor until 2020. In the 2019/2020 academic year, she was a Fulbright fellow at New York University. From 2021 to 2024, she worked as a research associate professor at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. Until June 2025 she was a senior research fellow at the French Institute for Advanced Studies in Lyon.
For many years, she has explored the cultural transfer of Freudian psychoanalysis to the Polish intelligentsia before World War II. Her book, Freud’s Emissaries, was published in Polish in 2016 and translated into English in 2023. She is working on a monograph on the eminent Polish-American psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, based on complete archival research in Europe and the United States.
»Beata ›Tola‹ Rank. Out from the Footnote«, in: Klara Naszkowska (ed.), Early Women Psychoanalysts. History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance, New York–London: Routledge 2024, pp. 57–76.
»Malinowski and the Disciples of Freud. Otto Rank, Ernest Jones and Wilhelm Reich«, in: Grażyna Kubica-Heller and Dariusz Brzeziński (eds.), Bronisław Malinowski and His Legacy in Contemporary Social Sciences and Humanities, New York–London: Routledge 2024, pp. 124–139.
Freud’s Emissaries. The Transfer of Psychoanalysis Through the Polish Intelligentsia to Europe 1900–1939, transl. T. Bhambry, , Genève–Lausanne: Sdvig Press 2023, vol. 1: 530 pp, vol. 2: 567 pp.
»Psychoanalysis and Literature in Poland«, in: Michał Mrugalski, Schamma Schahadat, Danuta Ulicka, Irina Wutsdorff (eds.), Central and Eastern European Literary Theory and the West, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter 2023, pp. 423–438.
»Freuds Gesandte. Der kulturelle Transfer der Psychoanalyse und ihre Wirkung auf die polnische Intelligenz bis 1939«, in: Pawel Dybel, Ludger M. Hermanns, Ewa Kobylinska-Dehe (eds.), Zwischen Hoffnung und Verzweiflung. Psychoanalyse in Polen im polnisch-deutsch-jüdischen Kulturkontext 1900–1939, Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag 2018, pp. 49–67.
The eminent Polish-American psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch was the longest-living disciple of Sigmund Freud and one of the most fascinating figures among the entire cohort of Central European Jewish refugees who significantly impacted the postwar American intellectual landscape.