38 Facts About Helene Deutsch

Helene Deutsch was a Polish-American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud.

Helene Deutsch was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Helene Deutsch was born in Przemysl, then in the Polish Partition of Austrian Galicia, to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach, on 9 October 1884.

Helene Deutsch was the youngest of four children, with sisters, Malvina, and Gizela and a brother, Emil.

Helene Deutsch went with him to an International Socialist Conference in 1910 and met the majority of key socialist figures, such as the charismatic women Angelica Balabanoff and Rosa Luxemburg.

Helene Deutsch became a pupil and then assistant to Freud, and became the first woman to concern herself with the psychoanalysis of women.

Helene Deutsch often reported that her father was her early source of inspiration.

Helene Deutsch's father, Wilhelm, was a prominent Jewish lawyer, 'a liberal and a specialist in international law' during a time when anti-Semitism was rampant.

Helene Deutsch was able to become Galicia's representative at the Federal Court in Vienna, and the first Jew in the region to represent clients in court.

Helene Deutsch idolized her father, and often shadowed him throughout his day with clients.

Helene Deutsch later attributed her father's resistance to his subservience to his wife and desire for peace at home.

Helene Deutsch considered her mother's interests to be social and materialistic.

Helene Deutsch claimed her mother was abusive; often beating, slapping, and verbally attacking her.

Helene Deutsch stated that her mother's abuse toward her was 'as an outlet for her own pent-up aggressions' because Helene Deutsch was not the boy her mother had wanted and expected.

Helene Deutsch often said that her childhood home was dominated by her mother's overwhelming concern for social propriety and status.

Helene Deutsch considered her mother 'uncultured, intellectually insecure, and a slave to bourgeois propriety'.

Helene Deutsch hated feeling dependent on her mother, and these feelings often led her to 'daydream that someone else was her real mother.

Helene 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.

Helene Deutsch wrote that Mrs Smith was the youngest child of a large family, where her mother's disappointment that she was not a boy was evident.

Helene Deutsch wrote that the friend's mother was the opposite of Mrs Smith's mother.

Helene Deutsch was filled with maternal warmth for both Mrs Smith and her own daughter.

The diagnosis, according to Helene Deutsch, was that Mrs Smith suffered from 'over-excitability of the uterus.

In 1916, Helene Deutsch sought admittance to Freud's infamous Wednesday night meetings of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

In 1919, under Freud's supervision, Deutsch began analyzing her first patient, Viktor Tausk, while at the same time Freud was analyzing Helene.

Helene Deutsch claimed that Freud tended to focus "too much on her identification with her father" and her affair with Lieberman.

In one analysis with Freud, Helene Deutsch dreamt that she had both female and male organs.

Helene Deutsch nevertheless was a brilliant clinician, who stood up to Freud and got away with it when she 'disagreed with him about her patients.

Helene Deutsch felt relaxed while working with Abraham and enjoyed his 'cool analytic style and his objective insight without any reeling experience of transference.

Helene Deutsch's continued relationship with Freud was friendly, yet at times strained.

Helene Deutsch argued that, in the phallic stage, the little girl's primary erogenous zone is the "masculine clitoris," which is inferior in entirety to the male penis.

That same year, Helene Deutsch created and became the first President of the Vienna Training Institute.

In 1935, Helene Deutsch emigrated with her family from Vienna to Boston, Massachusetts, where she continued to work as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1982.

Helene Deutsch was wary accordingly of any 'rigid adherence to the phantom of "Freudian Method", which, as I now realize, I must regard as an area of research ' and not as 'a complete, learnable entity which can be taught by thorough and regular drilling'.

Helene Deutsch was a very esteemed and beloved training analyst and supervisor, whose seminars, based on case studies, were known to often run into the early morning hours.

In 1963, Helene Deutsch retired as a training analyst in part due to her husband, Felix's, declining health and memory loss.

Helene Deutsch argued that these two events were due to fathers "taking a back-seat in childrearing".

Helene Deutsch was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.

On 29 March 1982, Helene Deutsch died at the age of 97.