User:Jameilla/sandbox/Ruth Jane Mack Brunswick

Background Ruth Jane Mack Brunswick- Ruth Jane Mack Brunswick, born on Feb. 17, 1897 in Chicago, Ill and died on Jan. 24, 1946 in New York, N.Y, was an American psychoanalyst, a student of Sigmund Freud whose work significantly explored and extended his theories.

Education- Ruth was educated irregularly but early became unusually well versed in literature, music, and the arts. Ruth Mack graduated from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1918 and having been refused admission to Harvard Medical School because of her sex, graduated from Tufts Medical School in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1922. She then traveled to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Freud. Joining the inner circle of students around Freud, Mack began practicing psychoanalysis herself in 1925. She was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and an instructor at the Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1932 she became an editor of the American journal Psychoanalytic Quarterly. One of her most notable early papers concerned her continuing treatment in 1926–27 of one of Freud’s most famous cases, the Wolf Man. She was widely respected as a brilliant, thorough, and effective clinician.

Marriage- n 1917 she married Dr. Herman Blumgart, who later pursued a successful career as a heart specialist. The marriage was already troubled; her husband saw Freud in an unsuccessful effort to salvage the marriage, but Freud evidently decided the relationships was hopeless. Mack was married (for the second time) in March 1928 to Mark Brunswick, an American composer.

Career- In 1938 the Brunswicks left Nazi-occupied Vienna and settled in New York City. There she joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society, taught courses in psychoanalytic technique and dream analysis, and kept up a private practice in spite of declining health. In 1944 she resumed her connection with the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, which she had dropped in 1938. Her professional publications, though few, were of classic quality and contributed greatly to the full development of Freudian theory—particularly with regard to questions of childhood trauma and parental attachment. Her most fascinating period as a psychologist took place in Vienna where she was psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. Later she became an intimate member of Freud's circle of psychoanalysts where she played an important role as a mediator between American analysts and Freud's circle. Dr. Ruth Brunswick had a place in Freud's life which few if any of his biographers have noted. She became her favorite collaborator, and both were inseparable. Anna Freud herself expressed her discontent (and jealousy) to Dr. Brunswick's privileges in Freud's researches. For years, rumors of their fierce rivalry flooded the psychoanalyst's circle. This rivalry was exacerbated when Freud gave his most important case study to Dr. Brunswick, the "wolf-man" which Anna was also expecting to have. []

Death- By 1933, she developed a total dependency on opiates. She died in New York on January 24, 1946, as a result of falling in the bathroom while intoxicated with opiates. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis only wrote that "She had a sudden tragic death".[]

Dr. Brunswick was charm, intelligent, feminine, and vivacious (James, et al., 1971). Her generosity drove her to help many of her friends to leave Austria once the Nazis invaded it. She also had to leave Vienna to save her own life. Dr. Brunswick pioneered the psychoanalytic treatment of psychoses, and the study of emotional development between young children and their mothers, and the importance of this relationship in creating mental illness. Dr. Brunswick was suffering from a gastrointestinal illness that led her to overuse painkillers and other drugs.