ABSTRACT
The chapter overviews and interprets the socio-cultural and professional background of early Hungarian women analysts and the possible roots of the mutual openness of women and psychoanalysis. Although diverse, women’s careers partly reflect similar tendencies in so far as they often developed alongside identities of (Jewish) origin, gender and profession (which were sometimes also threatened in parallel) and are closely linked with the history of assimilation, emigration and cultural changes. As for their social background, they typically came from middle-class (mostly baptised) Jewish families and most of them studied in higher education (medicine or humanities). Their field of research/interest related to the mother-child relationship (and object relation in the broader sense), female sexuality, the questions of technique and training, psychoanalytic anthropology, and the study of schizophrenia. Their institutional positions were connected to therapy, training, or organising; although after the war, some of them found themselves in leading institutional positions. They had left-wing socio-political commitments, but only a minority was actively involved in social movements.
