Les compartimos el prólogo original en inglés de la Dra. Klara Naszkowska para el libro “Las primeras psicoanalistas: una genealogía del psicoanálisis G-J” de Elena Bravo Ceniceros
Foreword: Not the Appendix, but the Beginning
To Las primeras psicoanalistas: Una genealogía del psicoanálisis, Vol. 2. Ed. E. Bravo Ceniceros. Ediciones Navarra, [2026].
This four-volume genealogy of the first women psychoanalysts is an act of recovery, but it is also an act of care. An act of ethical intervention into the politics of memory. To write about these women is not simply to add names to a history presumed complete. It is to pause before that history and ask how it came to be written. Who was granted authority to narrate the origins of psychoanalysis, whose work became theory, and whose life and thinking were reduced to scandal, anecdote, or silence.
The scale of this recovery is itself moving. Bringing together nearly 190 women who formally joined the psychoanalytic movement before or during 1939, this project makes visible the extraordinary breadth of women’s participation in the formation of psychoanalysis. These women were not marginal observers. They were clinicians, physicians, teachers, organizers, writers, translators, editors, institution-builders, social reformers, feminist activists, Marxists, Jewish intellectuals, refugees, mothers, and survivors. They worked in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Zurich, Geneva, Warsaw, Paris, London, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Oslo, New York, Boston, Detroit, and well beyond. They founded clinics and work groups, treated children and adults, developed new concepts, challenged sexual orthodoxies, addressed education and social justice, and carried psychoanalysis across borders under conditions of persecution, war, exile, and loss.
And yet, the stories most often told and taught about the beginnings of psychoanalysis still follow the same familiar arrangement: a small number of “great men,” their discoveries, their quarrels, their rivalries, their schools. Women usually appear, if they appear at all, as patients, muses, lovers, femme fatales, wives, unruly disciples, or eccentric exceptions. Their ideas were often misunderstood, borrowed without acknowledgment, displaced onto male colleagues, or absorbed into later canonical theories. Their lives were narrated through the men around them rather than through the work they themselves created. The history of psychoanalysis is not merely incomplete. It has been structured by forgetting.
Russell Jacoby’s notion of social amnesia names part of this process: it describes how societies repress their own pasts under the pressure of present structures of power. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s reminder that history is produced through power is equally essential. Silences enter history not only after events occur, but at every stage: in the making of sources, in the keeping or destruction of archives, in the writing of narratives, in the formation of canons, and in the transmission of professional memory. The women gathered in these volumes were vulnerable to all these silences. Their writings were scarce, lost, untranslated, or left unread. Their institutional labor often looked too “ordinary” to be visible. Their clinical innovations were renamed once others took them up. Their deaths—by murder, suicide, illness, exile, poverty, or exhaustion—too often became occasions for further erasure rather than remembrance.
For this reason, this volume asks us to read psychoanalytic history against its own habits of remembrance. It prompts us to ask not only who was forgotten, but how: through a sensational death, a love affair, a diagnostic label, a footnote, a derivative role, or a single concept detached from an entire life’s work. Inadequate remembering can be almost as damaging as oblivion. To remember Sabina Spielrein primarily as Jung’s patient or lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé as the muse of several famous men, Beata Rank as Otto Rank’s wife, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth as the woman murdered by her nephew, or Clara Happel as a “troublemaker” or “Nazi spy” is not to remember them well. It is to repeat, even if unintentionally, the power relations that first diminished them.
It matters, then, to understand the conditions under which these women entered the field in the first place. It was at a time when the profession was still unstable, experimental, and porous. This instability created opportunities. Compared with many medical and academic institutions, early psychoanalysis could appear open to women, especially to Jewish women who had fought for access to higher education in Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and other centers. Many of them were New Women: educated, multilingual, intellectually ambitious, politically alert, and unwilling to accept the narrow domestic destinies prescribed to them. Many came from acculturated Jewish middle- and upper-middle-class families that valued education as an inheritance no state could confiscate. Few others came from less privileged backgrounds and had to force their own way into professional life.
But openness had limits. Psychoanalytic societies, training institutes, publishing houses, and international organizations remained largely governed by men. As Nancy Chodorow has shown, women were unusually present in psychoanalysis yet underrepresented in the official leadership roles, publications, and directorial positions that later shaped the historical record. Their influence often circulated instead through teaching, training, supervision, and interpersonal networks. Psychoanalysis was, for much of its early life, an oral and face-to-face culture. In that culture, women could be central to transmission while leaving fewer durable traces. This contradiction matters deeply: psychoanalysis offered women a language for liberation while reproducing many of the exclusions it sought to interpret.
Margarethe Hilferding’s story makes this contradiction painfully clear. The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society began as a male circle, and women’s possible membership was debated, resisted, and treated as an exception. In 1910 Hilferding became the first woman admitted to it. A physician, socialist, feminist, and women’s rights activist, she brought into the room knowledge gained from years of work with working-class women in Vienna—as a gynecologist, women’s health counselor, and social physician. These women’s lives were shaped by poverty, repeated pregnancies, unwanted motherhood, lack of contraception, and unsafe abortion. When Hilferding presented “On the Basis of Mother Love” to the Vienna gathering she challenged the idealization of maternal instinct by arguing that motherly love was not simply innate, and that the mother-infant relationship contained sexual, ambivalent, and destructive dimensions. The all-male group largely missed the radical importance of what she was saying. Her ideas threatened patriarchal assumptions about sexuality, motherhood, childhood, aggression, the female body, and social inequality. As Rosemary Balsam has argued, these themes were not truly taken up by psychoanalysis for decades. The complexity of maternal feeling, the absence of automatic mother love, destructive impulses in motherhood, the erotic dimension of early care, and the psychic reciprocity between mother and child remained peripheral, disavowed, or only belatedly rediscovered.
Hilferding’s later marginalization, too, was not caused by a single event. She sided with Alfred Adler and left the Freudian group. She then devoted much of her life to social democratic medicine, birth control, abortion rights, women’s work, and the needs of the working class. She worked in Red Vienna’s municipal institutions, and she was Jewish in a Europe becoming increasingly antisemitic. After the Austrian authoritarian turn and then the Anschluss, she was stripped of security and work. She remained in Vienna, was deported to Theresienstadt, and then died in Treblinka in 1942. Her death in the Shoah was also a destruction of traces. Her life’s work is difficult to reconstruct because the world that had made it possible was itself attacked, dismantled, and murdered.
If Hilferding’s story shows how a radical idea could be spoken aloud and still not registered, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth’s shows how an entire field of practice could be founded and still not remembered. In the early 1910s, she was the first to practice and theorize child analysis and to pioneer the use of play in therapeutic work with children. She opened a field that would later become central to psychoanalysis, yet her name is still rarely taught as foundational. Anna Freud and Melanie Klein are often mistakenly presented as the founders of child analysis, while Hug-Hellmuth disappears behind them. Even today, many students do not learn about her. When she is remembered, it is often for the sensational circumstances of her murder by her nephew in 1924. Her death became the story that eclipsed her work. To recover Hug-Hellmuth is not to deny the tragedy, but to refuse to let tragedy become the only frame. The question is not merely what happened to her, but what she thought, what she made possible, and why psychoanalytic memory so often retained the scandal while losing the theory.
A third figure from this volume I want to hold in this frame of memory is Clara Happel. Her clinical, theoretical, organizational, and political contributions were obscured by the intertwined forces of misogyny, antisemitism, heterosexism, nationalism, professional rivalry, and exile. Happel helped shape psychoanalytic institutions in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg and wrote pioneering work on homosexuality. Her marginalization was not accidental. It tells us something about what psychoanalysis, as an institution, could not bear to remember.
That failure of institutional memory has a precise history. Happel’s conflict with psychoanalytic authority became acute in the 1930s. She opposed Nazi infiltration of the German Psychoanalytic Society and objected when higher-ranking Jewish members were replaced by Nazi sympathizers. Her resignation in 1934 was followed not by institutional solidarity, but by hostility from leading figures, including Ernest Jones, Anna Freud, and A. A. Brill, who characterized her as difficult and politically excessive. The language used against her—”troublemaker” with an “ultra-Jewish attitude”—is revealing. Her moral clarity and political resistance became a problem for leaders of the movement who, in the face of Hitler’s rise to power and the anti-Jewish transformation of professional institutions, prioritized the institutional survival of psychoanalysis over the people who had helped build it.
Her emigration to the United States did not bring rescue in any simple sense. Navigating the restrictive immigration regime shaped by the 1924 Immigration Act and the quota system, she arrived in New York with her children in 1936 and was detained at Ellis Island as a possible financial burden, a category readily imposed on single mothers. She eventually settled in Detroit, far from the established psychoanalytic centers of New York, Boston, and Chicago. There she tried to bring psychoanalysis to people who had little access to it, in keeping with one of psychoanalysis’s earliest social promises: treatment not only for the wealthy, but for those divided from care by class, race, migration, or poverty. She practiced, trained prospective analysts, helped found a regional association in 1940, and offered free youth counseling to people of color, refugees, and students. In an elitist and medicalized professional culture, such work could itself become suspect. Detroit, moreover, was marked by racism, antisemitism, nativism, and Ku Klux Klan activity. Happel was trying to practice psychoanalysis as a social and ethical commitment in a city organized against much of what she stood for.
That commitment made her a target rather than earning her protection. The FBI arrest and interrogation of Happel in 1943 damaged her professional standing. Her social and political activism, together with suspicion around her sexuality, made her vulnerable to surveillance. The categories through which she was diminished—immigrant, Jew, single mother, lesbian, financial burden, spy— were not incidental labels. They were instruments of social and professional exclusion. Happel’s life shows that psychoanalytic history cannot be separated from immigration law, state surveillance, antisemitism, heterosexism, and the politics of citizenship. She took her life in 1945, in response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after years of persecution, exile, disappointment, and exclusion. Her erasure from psychoanalytic history is not a minor omission. It is one of the symptoms this genealogy seeks to understand.
One of the great strengths of this four-volume project, visible already in these three lives, is that it refuses the logic of the exception. It does not ask us to rescue one or two “great women” and insert them into a masculine canon. It asks us to understand women’s presence as constitutive of psychoanalysis from the beginning. That shift changes the discipline’s origin story. Psychoanalysis emerges here as a transnational, multilingual, and politically exposed movement shaped by women who moved across borders in search of education, training, work, and survival. It developed not only in consulting rooms and theoretical papers, but also in orphanages, children’s clinics, schools, women’s health movements, municipal health systems, refugee networks, publishing houses, translation projects, and anti-fascist struggles.
This expanded history also belongs to Jewish and Holocaust studies. Many of the first women analysts were of Jewish origin, and their lives cannot be understood apart from the changing status of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the pressures and possibilities of acculturation and assimilation, the fight for women’s higher education, and the Nazi persecution and Shoah.
At the same time, I do not want to remember these women only as victims. That, too, would be a failure of memory. Their lives were marked by loss, but also by audacity, intellectual creativity, sexual independence, professional ambition, political conviction, humor, friendship, and stubbornness. Sabina Spielrein was not merely the woman between Freud and Jung; she was a medical scientist, theorist of the drives, child analyst, and researcher of language. Lou Andreas-Salomé was not merely a muse; she was a theorist of art, narcissism, creativity, and modernity. Beata Rank was not merely Otto Rank’s wife; she translated Freud into Polish, helped transfer psychoanalysis into Polish culture, and advanced a striking reworking of Freud’s myth of social origins.
The work of recovery is therefore double. First, we must reconstruct facts: names, dates, writings, institutions, migrations, analyses, publications, clinical work, translations, correspondences, archives, and descendants’ memories. But facts are not enough. We must also change the frames through which those facts are read. A biography is not recovered simply because an archival file has been opened. It is recovered when the person ceases to be treated as an accessory to someone else’s history. The question is not only whether women were present, but what their presence does to psychoanalysis as a discipline. Or, more sharply: where would psychoanalysis be today if their ideas and work had not been marginalized or erased? What happens if we begin from Hilferding’s concept of maternal love, from Hug-Hellmuth’s educational approach to child analysis, from Happel’s antifascist politics? The list could continue. It should continue.
These questions are not only historical. They speak urgently to the present. The forces that shaped these women’s lives have not disappeared: nationalism, antisemitism, racism, misogyny, antiimmigrant violence, reproductive control, queer marginalization, unequal access to mental health care, authoritarian politics, and the weaponization of history. The biographies gathered here are not antiquarian. They remind us that psychoanalysis has always been entangled with the social world it interprets. A discipline concerned with memory, repression, trauma, desire, and repetition cannot afford to ignore its own repressions and repetitions.
Consider, first, Hilferding. It is difficult not to hear the contemporary resonance of her intervention. Women are still judged by how they mother their babies. There are still powerful social expectations about what a “good” birth should look like, whether and how long a mother breastfeeds, how quickly she bonds, how much joy she is supposed to feel, and how completely she should give herself over to the baby. A new mother is still expected to love immediately and unconditionally, regardless of her state of mind, her bodily pain, her childbirth experience, her fear, her ambivalence, her exhaustion, or her rage. Hilferding’s refusal to sentimentalize maternity remains unsettling because the sentimentalization itself remains so alive.
Hug-Hellmuth’s insights carry a similar afterlife. She insisted that work with children required work with parents, an idea strikingly ahead of its time and not really continued by either Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Hug-Hellmuth understood that the child’s psychic life could not be separated from the family world in which it unfolded. At the same time, she criticized the common practice of parents analyzing their own children. A child, she argued, could not be expected to reveal the deepest wishes and conflicts to a parent, and the parent’s own narcissism, anxiety, and investment would make analytic neutrality impossible. This now seems almost obvious; yet Freud himself analyzed his daughter Anna.
Happel’s story resists the past tense just as insistently. Single mothers still have to prove themselves more intensely than others. Immigrants are still treated as burdens, risks, or intruders. Queer people, or those accused of queerness, still face suspicion and exclusion. To be a woman, an immigrant, a Jew, a single mother, without family support, raising children while struggling with money and professional recognition in the United States, remains a position of vulnerability. Happel’s life makes visible how these categories accumulate. They do not simply describe a person; they shape what forms of help are available, what kinds of suspicion attach to her, and how easily her work can be dismissed.
To remember these women adequately is not to idealize them. I do not want to make them saints, heroines without contradiction, or simple symbols of progress. I want to restore complexity and nuance. They disagreed with one another. Some internalized the gender assumptions of their time. Some were politically radical; others were silent and cautious. Some published extensively; others left almost no writing. Some were supported by families, husbands, lovers, colleagues, or institutions; others worked in isolation. Some succeeded professionally while remaining internally devastated. Some survived the Shoah; many did not. The point is not to produce a counter-canon of flawless foremothers. The point is to make psychoanalysis answerable to the full historical field from which it emerged.
This is why genealogy feels like the right word for this project. A genealogy does not offer a straight line of inheritance. It uncovers discontinuities, buried kinships, broken transmissions, missing branches, and suppressed origins. It allows us to see that psychoanalysis was made not only through official institutions but also through fragile networks of women teaching, translating, analyzing, corresponding, sheltering, mothering, leaving, returning, mourning, and beginning again. It also reminds us that the archive is never neutral. It is made of what power allowed to remain and what memory later made legible.
The task before us is not simply to admire these women from a distance. It is to let them change the questions we ask. If early psychoanalysis looks different when seen through women’s lives, then our theories of origin, authority, sexuality, childhood, migration, trauma, and memory must also change. The first women psychoanalysts do not belong in an appendix to psychoanalytic history. They belong at its center—not because they were women, but because they were psychoanalysts.