ABSTRACT
Few countries have known as tragic a history as Poland’s. At the time of Helene Deutsch’s birth, on October 9, 1884, Poland was in one of its saddest centuries. Poland had long endured the shifting of its territorial lines, but the political devastation of the Partitions awakened a burning ideal of patriotic liberation. Poland retained its symbolic meaning for Helene: whenever in later life she had anxiety dreams they involved a particular policeman from her native town; as a youth she had marched in political protest and the local police would call her father to complain, but they never arrested her. The building in which the Rosenbachs had their apartment was, Helene Deutsch reported, “a microcosm of the Polish-Jewish society of Przemyšl at that time. The central problem of Helene Deutsch’s early life, as she later recalled it, focused around the character of her mother, whom she wholeheartedly despised.
