Women’s Voices in Psychoanalysis: Erased or Forgotten (article)

This article summarizes the principal contributions of three women analysts who worked between 1900 and 1939, and who remain largely unknown to the English-speaking psychoanalytic audience. The first two female analysts, Dr. Margarete Hilferding and Dr. Hermine Hug-Helmuth were members of Freud’s Wednesday Society (the precursor to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society). They are followed by a brief reference to Hungarian analyst Dr. Alice Balint, mainly in regard to the connecting points between her work and her two aforementioned predecessors.

Mutliple Marginality of the First Women Analysts

Psychoanalysis was born within the liberal Jewish community of Central Europe and was built by marginal people who thrived on “otherness.” In the early years of its development, the field struggled to be recognized as a legitimate area of inquiry, being at the margins between science and the humanities. Theoretically, in the early days of notable phallocentric bias, femininity was also marginalized. In addition, a position of a woman-professional psychoanalyst presented an additional dimension of marginality.

Throughout the evolution of psychoanalytic theory and

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practice, female analysts contributed to the reevaluation of phallocentric bias in psychoanalytic theory, advanced understanding of pre-oedipal development, initiated and advanced child analysis, and began the first analytic studies of pregnancy. It all started with these little known, mostly forgotten, first female analysts, in the first decades of the 20^th century.

Margarete Hilferding, M.D. (1871-1942)

Margarete Hilferding was the first female contributor’s voice that was heard during the formal presentation in the scientific meeting of the Vienna Wednesday Society on January 11, 1911. The topic of her presentation was Mother’s Love, about changes in maternal attitudes during pregnancy and after the delivery of the baby. Hilferding argued that love is born “by way of the physical involvement between mother and child” (Nunberg, H. and Federn, E., 1967/68, eds. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol. 2, 115), suggesting that the first intrauterine fetal movements awaken the mother’s sensual pleasure, and, after delivery, milk shooting into the breast gives the mother pleasurable sensations as well. Hilferding generalized that the origin of the Oedipus complex lays in the sensual connection with the mother. Maternal love, she concluded, could be acquired through the physical care of the first child, after which it would be bestowed on subsequent children by the ignition of these intimate memories.

At the time of her paper, Hilferding was 40 years old and the first woman to attain an M.D. from the University of Vienna. She had a three-year-old son and a six-year-old son, and was thus close to early mothering herself. Her emphasis on the sexual sensations of fetal movement, suckling, and touching shows her sensitivity to the interplay between the bodies of mother and infant.

Long before Winnicott, Bowlby, Loewald, Kernberg, and Laplanche paid close attention to how the relationship with a caretaker forms the crucible of an infant’s emotional life, Hilferding appreciated the reciprocity of the mother-infant bond and understood that love and hate/pleasure and displeasure were building blocks for the infant’s affective repertoire. She studied the mother’s mental representations of pregnancy and elucidated how the mother’s responses to sensations of fetal movement and milk shooting into the breast become powerful organizers of her mental life, and in turn helped to organize the infant’s representations of experience. Long before studies on postpartum depression, she articulated the sense of loss that some women feel in giving birth, manifest-

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ed in a diminution of pleasure and consequent rejection of the infant. In all these respects, she was far ahead of her time.

After having thanked her for her original contribution to the Wednesday Society discussion, Sigmund Freud cited her subsequently in his expanded edition of the Interpretation of Dreams (1911) when describing “dreams of punishment.” This class of dreams became important for later conceptualization of sado-masochism, the dual instinct theory, and superego’s functioning. Interestingly, besides Freud, who was appreciative but proverbially neutral, it was Alfred Adler, the theoretician of the “masculine protest,” who was most open and supportive of Hilferding’s ideas. Other male members of the Wednesday Society were critical of her. Hilferding further developed her ideas on motherhood in subsequent articles on maternity in the 1920’s.

To this day, the relative erasure of the pregnant body from psychoanalytic theory remains. When Rosemary Balsam undertook her psychoanalytic studies of this subject 80 years later, she remarked: “I have not found anyone except Hilferding who grants as much centrality to this experience of the functioning female body” (Balsam, “Women of the Wednesday Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein and Hug-Hellmuth,” American Imago, 60: 303-342, 2003, 312). Margarete Hilferding died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt on September 23, 1942.

 Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (1871-1924)

At the age of 42, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, PhD in physics and chemistry from Vienna University, first attended the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on October 8, 1913. Historians theorize that, as Hug-Hellmuth was acknowledged by Freud to be the world’s first practicing child psychoanalyst, there may have been a considerable rivalry felt by Anna Freud. It was seen as evidence of such a rivalry that Anna Freud refused to assist Hug-Hellmuth’s biographers George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen. When, in 1991, the biography, containing some of the previously untranslated publications, finally appeared, it became clear that Hug-Hellmuth’s contribution was sizable.

As the first practicing child analyst, she had made the first psychoanalytic child observation studies, independently confirming Freud’s theories of infantile sexuality. Even before her appearance at the Wednesday Group, Freud admired Hug-Hellmuth’s work, and their communications go back to 1900 or 1901. Among other

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matters, Freud commended the influence exerted by Hug-Hellmuth on his daughter Sophie’s rearing of his grandson Ernst. He wrote to Abraham on September 22, 1914: “My grandson is a charming little fellow…. A strict upbringing by an intelligent mother enlightened by Hug-Hellmuth has done him a great deal of good” (Freud, “Letter from Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham,” The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925, 278-279).

In her various German publications, Hug-Hellmuth had made a point which was picked up by many child analysts later on: it is possible to work psychoanalytically with children without directly interpreting the content of their metaphors in genetic terms, allowing them to explore their unconscious fantasies on their own terms. She pioneered the analytic play therapy with doll play while visiting child patients in their own nurseries and playrooms. When Freud wrote his study on Goethe in 1917, he credited Hug-Hellmuth’s case studies, highlighting sibling rivalry, pregnancy, and the overall importance of the early relationship with the mother.

In 1919, Hug-Hellmuth anonymously published A Young Girl’s Diary, which purported to record the life of an upper-middle-class girl named Rita from the age of 11 to 14. It turned out that the Diary may have contained autobiographical material. She first sent the journal to Freud in 1915, who urged her to publish it. In his letter to Hug-Hellmuth, Freud recognized the unique value that the diary contained in depicting little-attended pre-adolescent development. He wrote:

The diary is a little gem… it has never before been possible to obtain such a… view of the mental impulses that characterize the development of a girl… during the years before puberty…; we learn what form is first assumed by her relations with her parents and with her brothers and sisters and how they gradually gain in seriousness and inward feeling; how friendships are made and broken; how her affection feels its way towards her first objects; and, above all, how the secret of sexual life begins to dawn on her indistinctly and then takes complete possession of the child’s mind; how, in the consciousness of her secret knowledge, she at first suffers hurt, but little, overcomes it…. It is your duty, I think, to publish the diary… (Freud, 1915,

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“Letter to Dr. Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 341).

In 1920, Hug-Hellmuth wrote a seminal volume on Child Psychology and Education, which linked the knowledge of child development and child analysis and its relevance to child rearing and education. Building on her own work and Freud’s History of the Infantile Neurosis of 1918, she notes that the given schemata of instinctive knowledge operate in children as a preparation for understanding. Summarizing various authors’ contributions, Hug-Helmuth presents an analytic approach to child’s play and games, tracing the part played by infantile erotic impulses. Sadomasochistic desires, birth fantasies, and the desire for omnipotence are seen as realized in the game, as are the childish ideas of God and the emotional values which help to form the words of children.

Hug-Hellmuth was brutally murdered by her nephew Rolf in 1924. Like other analysts in those days who used their own families as raw material, Hug-Hellmuth had written articles about Rolf’s development. At the trial, where he received a sentence of 12 years, he accused her of making him a guinea pig of psychoanalysis.

Alice Balint-Székely-Kovács (1898-1939)

Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist Alice Balint started her studies in Budapest together with classmate Margaret Schönberger, later Margaret Mahler. From 1921 to 1924, she resided in Berlin with Michael Balint, her future husband. Both were first in analysis with Hanns Sachs and participated in the activities of the Psychoanalytic Association of Berlin and, upon their return to Budapest, they pursued training with Sándor Ferenczi.

An active member of the Psychoanalytic Association of Budapest, Balint maintained a private practice with both children and adults. She gave lectures for parents that later appeared in the pedagogy journal Gyermeknevelés (Child Education). In 1939 the Balints immigrated to Manchester, Great Britain. Alice Balint died there suddenly at the end of August 1939.

Her far-reaching work ranges from psychoanalytic anthropology to the psychoanalytic theory of development. Drawing on and extending the works of both Freud and Ferenczi, Balint arrives

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at her own categorization of love, archaic object relations, and the importance of archaic identificatory processes in the papers Love for the Mother and Mother-Love, and Identification, translated only posthumously in the 1940’s.

For Balint, in terms of ego and id, the archaic love without “reality sense” is the form of the love of the id which persists as such throughout life, while the social reality-based form of love represents the manner of loving of the ego. Within this thinking, following up, extending, and updating Hilferding’s and Hug-Hellmuth’s ideas, a very primitive object relation already exists before one can assume an ability to distinguish between ego and object, i.e. already in the id. The instinct to cling (later in 21^st century neuroscience recognized as an inborn attachment affect) plays a role in archaic object relation.

Children from the very first get to know the external world by means of identifications. Identifications enable the child to find substitutes for primitive sources of pleasure that have to be given up. Thus identificatory thinking is employed for the purpose of avoiding what is unpleasurable and obtaining what is pleasurable; it aims at transforming a strange and consequently frightening external world into one that is familiar and enjoyable. From this angle, loving is essentially the maintenance of affectionate feelings even at a time when direct gratification has ceased.

Conclusion

Early within the “one person” drive theory, the three incipient “two person” women analysts emerged, drawing attention to the crucial importance of the earliest multidimensional reciprocal relationship between the mother/caretaker and the baby, which stands as the nucleus of further development of the individual’s internal representational world and which proliferates all future endeavors and relations of the individual subject in the world.

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