ABSTRACT
The new science of psychoanalysis and the predominantly Jewish middle-class “girls of tomorrow” saw a mutually open and fruitful interaction in the early 20th century. Sources show that, in the second half of the 1930s, it was Hungary where the proportion of women analysts was the highest, and this tendency increased until the post-war years, when the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society was dissolved. The first Hungarian women psychoanalysts contributed to the extension of the frameworks of femininity and psychoanalysis alike, both by presenting new role models and lifestyles, and by revising theoretical concepts and therapeutic methods. Women brought significant new perspectives to traditionally “feminine” fields – but ones essential to the Budapest School – such as the early mother–infant relationship, childrearing, and female sexuality, but also in completely different areas such as psychoanalytic technique and training, psychoanalytic ethnography, and the therapy of schizophrenia.
The status of being a Jew, a woman, and a psychoanalyst were fluctuating greatly in the 20th century. While at the turn of the century being a woman was a greater obstacle to a scholarly career, from the 1920s–1930s on it was Jewish origin that increasingly served as a basis for exclusion and from the 1950s psychoanalysis itself became repressed. Hence the careers and personal stories of women analysts are situated in, and can be interpreted at, the complex intersection of gender, racial, social and professional identities.
