ABSTRACT
Diary-keeping is in itself hardly exceptional; many adolescents have found consolation in recording their most private thoughts, as they safely express secret wishes and feelings in the security of the written word. The diary which Hug-Hellmuth published purported to be given to her by an unidentified person. Helene Deutsch, however, said she considered Hug-Hellmuth too unimaginative to have recreated a childhood out of whole cloth, and relied on her material for illustrations when, later, she wrote The Psychology of Women. Helene Deutsch’s own diary seems to have been intended as a novel, the journal of a modern Catholic girl—“Madi Fournier.” The prose with which she begins the diary, although flat and relatively inexpressive, is hardly that of a twelve-year-old. Helene dated the first entry July 26, 1900, when she herself was approaching her own sixteenth birthday. From Helene’s point of view, however, Madi’s story was in itself a protection against reality.
