ABSTRACT
Vilma Kovács (1879–1940) started her practice in the 1920s after being analysed by Sándor Ferenczi. Her main field of interest was the process of the analytic technique and training and she is still referred to most widely in this respect. Following Ferenczi, she organised and described the “Hungarian” training system whose specialty was that the first cases of the trainee were supervised by his/her own training analyst and discussed in an analytic situation. She became the manager of Ferenczi’s scientific legacy. She translated Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle into Hungarian, published a few studies, but mostly organised, trained, and analysed. She also served as an influential model for her younger female colleagues (and certainly for her daughter, Alice Bálint), creating a personal and professional network around her. As a female pioneer in her profession, she took part in the formation, dissemination, and struggles of psychoanalytic thought and institution itself. Her career represents the productive fusion of traditional and modern women’s roles. Her roles and activities as an institutional supporter, trainer, organiser, translator, networker, and “guardian” were at least as significant as her therapist work, strengthening the status of both psychoanalysis and that of the intellectual woman.
