Helene Deutsch
Helene Deutsch 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.Appignanesi/Forrester, p.308 Although Deutsch's father had a German education, Helene 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. During her youth, Helene became involved in the defence of socialist ideals with Herman Lieberman, a Polish politician. Their relations lasted for more than ten years. She 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.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. He 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. Similar to Freud, Wilhelm saw clients in a special room in his home, but he also had a formal office away from home. Helene idolized her father, and often shadowed him throughout his day with clients.Appignanesi/Forrester, p.309 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. This exclusion led her to psychoanalysis, which would become her lifelong career.Known in Przemyśl as the beautiful Rosenbach daughter, Helene was given the title of most 'brilliant enough to be a son.' It was in early childhood when Helene and her father began to experience tension in their relationship. Spurred by her thirst for education and her disdain for the life her mother planned for her, Helene turned to her father, only to find him unwilling to help her further her education past the age of fourteen. In her work, The Psychology of Women, Deutsch connects one aspect of feminine masochism with her attachment to her father and the possible consequences of such an identification. She writes that a father will sometimes break his relationship with his daughter when she approaches the age of sexual maturity. Deutsch later attributed her father's resistance to his subservience to his wife and desire for peace at home.
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 claimed her mother was abusive; often beating, slapping, and verbally attacking her. Helene stated that her mother's abuse toward her was 'as an outlet for her own pent-up aggressions' because Helene was not the boy her mother had wanted and expected. 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. Appignanesi/Forrester, p. 310Deutsch'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. In her later life, Helene saw this affair as the 'root cause of her tendency not only secretly to fantasize, but to relay these fantasies as truth.' As the only son in the family, Emil was supposed to be the heir apparent to the family. Instead, Emil proved to be a gambler, profiteer and poor student, and a disappointment to the family. Throughout her life, Deutsch tried to make up for her brother's shortcomings, but 'felt she never successfully made up for Emil's failure in her mother's eyes,' but did replace him as her father's favorite.
The "as-if" personality
'Her best known clinical concept was that of the "as if" personality, a notion that allowed her to spotlight the origin of women's particular ability to identify with others'. 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... 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'.Appignanesi/Forrester, p. 322
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, 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'. Indeed, it has been claimed of Deutsch that 'the ruling concerns of her life bear a striking resemblance to those of women who participated in the second great wave of feminism in the 1970s: early rebellion... struggle for independence and education... conflict between the demands of career and family, ambivalence over motherhood, split between sexual and maternal feminine identities'.Appignanesi/Forrester, p. 307 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'.