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Early Life and Family
She was born in Przemyśl, then Austrian Galicia, on 9 October 1884. She was born to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach. She was the youngest of four children, with an older sister, Malvina, aged eleven, another older sister, Gizela, aged seven and an older brother, Emil, aged ten. Her father had been educated in German, but Helene (Rosenbach) was sent to private Polish-language schools. Born into a progressive Austrian Poland, Przemyśl, Helene grew up to a Poland partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and the Austria-Hungarian Empire. She grew up in a time of Polish nationalism and artistic creativity. As a result, Helene identified intensely with the works of Frédéric Chopin, and Polish literature, insisting on her Polish national identity, out of allegiance to a country that she and her siblings saw as invaded.

Deutsch studied medicine and psychiatry in Vienna and Munich before she became a pupil of Freud. As his assistant she was the first woman to concern herself with the psychology of women. Following a youthful affair with the socialist leader Herman Lieberman, she married Dr Felix Deutsch in 1912, and after a number of miscarriages they eventually conceived a son, Martin. In 1935 she fled Germany, immigrating to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Her husband and son joined her a year later, and she worked there as a well-regarded psychoanalyst up until her death in Cambridge in 1982. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.

Father
As Helene often reported, her father was her early source of inspiration. Her father, Wilhelm, was a prominent Jewish lawyer, 'a liberal and a specialist in international law' during a time when Antisemitism was rampant. The fact that Wilhelm Deutsch was a Jew, however, did not prevent him from becoming Galicia's representative at the Federal Court in Vienna and the first Jew in the region to represent clients in court. Similar to Freud, Wilhelm saw clients in a special room in his home, but he also had a formal office away from his home life. Helene idolized her father, who would often let his daughter sit on a chair under his desk, while he conversed with clients. Being able to shadow her father through his daily life led Helene to at one-time contemplate being a lawyer, which was then crushed upon learning that women were excluded from learning the law. This led her down the path to psychology, which would be her career for the rest of her life.

In Przemyśl, Helene was known as the beautiful Rosenbach daughter and was given the title of most 'brilliant enough to be a son.' It was in early childhood when Helene and her father began to experience tension in their relationship. Spurred by her need and want to gain a proper education and be away from the life her mother laid out for her, Helene went to the man she thought would grant her her freedom, her father. Instead, she found resistance in the man she thought would be the one willing to help her further her education past the age of fourteen. In her work, The Psychology of Women, Deutsch connects one aspect of feminine masochism with her attachment to her father and the possible consequences of such an identification. In it, she remarks: the danger of such a relation to the father arises from the fact that sometimes he grants his daughter's request for an alliance and later abruptly breaks the bond. The father suddenly realizes, often under the prompting of the mother, that his daughter is approaching sexual maturity and should have more feminine interests; he refuses to have 'active' communion with her. Very often his own subsequent anxiety drives him to repudiate this relation. As a result of his relationship with his wife, Helene viewed her father, in this circumstance, as 'too obedient to his [wife]; he loved his wife, wanted peace at home and therefore remained firmly bound in his marriage.'

Mother
Where Helene Deutsch generally adored her father, she hated her mother, Regina. According to Helene, her mother, 'shared none of her husband's intellectual interests. Her own family was largely comprised of business people and her own aspirations were social and materialistic'. Helene often said that her mother 'was a mean woman' who would: beat her not to punish me, but as an outlet for her own pent-up aggressions. She let me feel the full force of the grudge she bore me for not being the boy she wanted and expected. According to Helene, her mother would beat, slap and verbally abuse her. In at least one instance, Helene recalled her mother using her as a 'human bell' in order to summon the servants to the table. Helene often said that her childhood home was strongly dominated by the overwhelming concern for social propriety and status. To Helene, her mother 'seemed uncultured, intellectually insecure, and above all a slave to bourgeois propriety'. Even above all of this, however, Helene at times yearned for the love of her mother. Helene, however, never really received any maternal love from her mother; that maternal presence came from her sister, Malvina, and a woman in the neighborhood affectionately called 'the Pale Countess.' During her childhood, Helene remembered being 'mothered by nine different nurses,' and hated feeling dependent on her [mother]. These feelings often led her to 'daydream that someone else was her real mother.'

Siblings
Helene Deutsch's saving grace was her sister, Malvina, from whom she felt the most motherly affection. When their mother decided to beat Helene, Malvina was the one to caution beatings away from the head. Malvina, although a gifted sculptor and painter, was to become a victim of the times in which she lived. Helene Deutsch and her sisters were expected to marry early in life and to marry socially appropriate men. Instead of marrying the man of her dreams, Malvina was forced to marry the man chosen by her parents as 'more appropriate.'

Her brother Emil, however, was not a suitable substitute for the affection she so craved. Around four years old, Emil sexually abused his sister and continued to torment her throughout her childhood. In her later life, Helene saw this affair as the root cause of her tendency not only secretly to fantasize, but to relay these fantasies as truth. She revived the pleasurable masochistic side of the childhood seduction by inventing make-believe secret love affairs, which gave her the reputation of being a fallen woman amongst her friends. [She made it a point to say that] this kind of childhood abuse plays no decisive role in various types of female masochism. As the only son in the family, Emil was supposed to be the heir apparent to the family. Instead, Emil, a gambler, profiteer and poor student, was a disappointment to the family. Throughout her life, Helene tried to make up for Emil's shortcomings in the eyes of her parents, but she 'felt she never successfully made up for Emil's failure in her mother's eyes,' but did replace him as her father's favorite.

Freud and Beyond
In 1916, Helene sought admission to Freud's infamous Wednesday night meetings of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. As a condition of her acceptance into the group, Helene had to comment on Lou Andreas-Salomé's paper, 'Vaginal and anal.' In 1919, under Freud's supervision, Helene began analyzing her first patient, Viktor Tausk. After three months, upon Freud's request, Helene terminated Tausk's sessions. At the same time, Freud was analyzing Helene. During her sessions with Freud, Helene reported 'falling in love with Freud.' She often felt herself to be Freud's daughter, claiming that Freud had inspired and released her talents. Helene claimed, however, that Freud tended to focus "too much on her identification with her father" and her affair with Lieberman. In one analysis with Freud, Helene dreamt that she had both female and male organs. Through analysis with Freud, she discovered that her personality was largely determined by her "childhood wish to be simultaneously [her] father's prettiest daughter and cleverest son." After one year, Freud terminated Helene's analytic sessions, to instead work with the Wolf Man. Whatever her misgivings with Freud, Helene was a brilliant clinician, who was 'able to stand up to Freud and get with it whenever she disagreed with him about her patients.'

Following Karl Abraham's presentation on femininity, penis envy and the feminine castration complex at the Hague Congress in 1920, Helene left analysis with Freud to work with Abraham. While at the Hague Congress, Helene presented her paper on The Psychology of Mistrust. In it, she claimed that lying was a defense against real events, as well as an act of creativity. In 1923, Helene moved to Berlin without her husband, Felix, or her son, Martin. Helene felt relaxed while working with Abraham and enjoyed his 'cool analytic style and his objective insight without any reeling experience of transference. She felt he was probing deeper than Freud.' While in session with Helene, Abraham showed her a letter from Freud addressed to him. In it, Freud argued that the topic of Helene's marriage with Felix should remain off the table during analysis. It was only later that Abraham confessed that he was unable to analyze her because he "had too much feeling for her." It is hypothesized that Freud, in abruptly terminating Helene's analysis and by sending the letter to Abraham, was trying to break Helene's compulsion to repeat.

In 1924, Helene returned to Austria from Berlin. She also returned back to Felix and Freud. Her continued relationship with Freud was friendly, yet at times strained. Following Freud's death, however, Helene often referred to herself as Freud's ghost. The following year, in 1925, Helene published The Psychoanalysis of Women's Sexual Functions. In it, she diverged from Freudian logic. She argued that, in the phallic stage, the little girl's primary erogenous zone is the "masculine clitoris," which is inferior in entirety to the male penis. It is this awareness of the inferiority of the clitoris, wrote Helene, that forces the little girl to grow passive, inward and turn away from her 'active sexuality'. That same year, Helene created and became the first President of the Vienna Training Institute. In 1935, Helene emigrated her family from Vienna to Boston, Massachusetts, where she continued to work as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1982.

On Pregnancy
In April 1912, Helene married Felix Deutsch. Following the outbreak of the Great War, Helene experienced the first, of soon to be many, miscarriages. In The Psychology of Women, Helene discusses the concept of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage as a result of psychological factors, with a critical factor involving the 'pregnant woman's unconscious rejection of an identification with her own mother.' Under the pseudonym of a patient named Mrs. Smith, Helene tells the story of a woman who has trouble of bringing a baby to full term; in it she writes:

The patient...was the youngest in a family with many other children, one boy and several girls. After this boy had disappointed the ambitious hopes of the parents, they wanted to have another son, but instead my patient was born. Her mother never concealed her disappointment over this fact, and her attitude toward the girl was unmistakeably: 'It would have been better if you had not been born.' The patient was saved from traumatic reactions to this attitude by two compensations- her father's deep and tender love for her, and the maternal affection of one of her sisters, twelve years older than herself. Her father's love aroused in her the wish to become a substitute for his son and she successfully turned her interests and ambitions toward this goal. She was saved from the dangers of the masculinity complex because her father's love for her emphasized and encouraged her femininity. The two tendencies frequently conflicted but did not lead to a neurotic result. Only after she had married and conceived an ardent desire for a baby did her childhood difficulty come to force. As a little girl she had reacted to her mother's rejection with conscious hatred and devaluation. The idea of identification with her aggressive mother had filled her with almost conscious horror. Up to her pregnancy she had been able to be feminine by disregarding her mother problem; but this method no longer worked when she herself was about to become a mother...Her tragic feeling that she would never achieve motherhood was intensified when she gave birth one month before term to a stillborn child.

The story of Mrs. Smith is strikingly similar to that of Helene's, as if she, herself, were speaking through Mrs. Smith. Through the story of Mrs. Smith, Helene argues that a successful pregnancy is possible when there is a loving relationship between mother and daughter, which 'smoothly socializes daughters into becoming mothers themselves.' Mirroring the life of Helene, Mrs. Smith's inability to bring a pregnancy full term is resolved. The problem is resolved during the next pregnancy when Mrs. Smith identified with a pregnant friend, but particularly with the friend's mother:

"The friend has a mother who was the opposite of her own. While her mother was tall, domineering, cold, and aggressive, her friend's mother was very small and full to the brim with maternal warmth. She spread her motherly wings both over her own loving daughter and Mrs. Smith, who was thus able to achieve motherhood by sharing in this benign mother-daughter harmony."

According to Helene, although a healthy relationship between mother and daughter was important for a healthy pregnancy, equally important was the ability to lean on a female friend who could act as a surrogate sister for the pregnant woman. This idea is furthered when Mrs. Smith and her friend become pregnant again around the same time. This time, there was no anxiety or fear surrounding pregnancy, but when Mrs. Smith's friend moved away, she miscarried. The diagnosis being that Mrs. Smith suffered from 'over-excitability of the uterus.' A successful pregnancy, therefore, could only be brought about by leaning on another woman.

1950 to Death
After 1950, Helene Deutsch began to say that she regretted being known primarily for her work with women’s psychology. At this time, Deutsch began to turn her attention back to men’s psychology and narcissism in both sexes Over time, she became increasingly devoted to the study of egoism and narcissism, thereby abandoning her lifelong study of feminism

In 1963, Deutsch retired as a training analyst in part due to her husband, Felix’s, declining health and memory loss. In 1963, Felix Deutsch died. Following his death, Helene Deutsch began to reminisce about her life with Felix and all that he had given her. Her relationship with Felix, up to that point, had always been a little bit strained. Through numerous affairs, like the one she had with Sándor Rado, Deutsch had always felt that Felix was more of the mother figure than she. According to Deutsch, ‘Felix seemed to have no trouble in ‘naturally’ displaying all the motherly ease. Even in situations in which a child usually calls for his mother, he [Martin] turned more often to Felix than to me.’

Following Felix’s death in 1963, Helene Deutsch turned her attention toward the sexual liberation of the 1960s and Beatlemania. She argued that these two events were due to fathers ‘taking a back-seat in childrearing. This absence of fathers then lead to loneliness in the children, who then sought solace with their peers.

On March 29th, 1982, Helene Deutsch died at the age of 97. In her last days of life, Helene Deutsch remembered the 'three men closest to her, combining Lieberman, Freud and her father into one man.' In her autobiography she wrote: I see three distinct upheavals in my life: liberation from the tyranny of my mother; the revelation of socialism; and my release from the chains of the unconscious...In each of these revolutions I was inspired and aided by a man - my father, Herman Lieberman, and lastly Freud.

Early Life and Family
Helene Deutsch was born in Przemyśl, then Austrian Galicia, to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach, on 9 October 1884. She was the youngest of four children, with an older sister, Malvina, aged eleven, another sister, Gizela, aged seven, and a brother, Emil, aged ten. Although Deutsch's father had a German education, Helene (Rosenbach) attended private Polish-language schools. Born into a progressive section of Austrian Poland (Przemyśl), Helene grew up to see Poland partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and the Austria-Hungarian Empire. She grew up in a time of Polish nationalism and artistic creativity. As a result, Helene empathized with the works of Frédéric Chopin, and Polish literature, insisting on her Polish national identity, out of allegiance to a country that she and her siblings viewed as invaded.

Deutsch studied medicine and psychiatry in Vienna and Munich. She became a pupil and then assistant to Freud, and became the first woman to concern herself with the psychology of women. Following a youthful affair with the socialist leader Herman Lieberman, Helene married Dr. Felix Deutsch in 1912, and after a number of miscarriages, gave birth to a son, Martin. In 1935, she fled Germany, immigrating to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Helene Deutsch's husband and son joined her a year later, and she worked there as a well-regarded psychoanalyst up until her death in Cambridge in 1982. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.

Father
Helene often reported that her father was her early source of inspiration. Her father, Wilhelm, was a prominent Jewish lawyer, 'a liberal and a specialist in international law' during a time when anti-Semitism was rampant. He was able to become Galicia's representative at the Federal Court in Vienna, and the first Jew in the region to represent clients in court. Similar to Freud, Wilhelm saw clients in a special room in his home, but he also had a formal office away from home. Helene idolized her father, and often shadowed him throughout his day with clients. Being able to shadow her father led Helene to at one-time contemplate becoming a lawyer, until she learned that women were excluded from practicing law. This exclusion led her to psychology, which would become her life-long career.

Known in Przemyśl as the beautiful Rosenbach daughter, Helene was given the title of most 'brilliant enough to be a son.' It was in early childhood when Helene and her father began to experience tension in their relationship. Spurred by her thirst for education and her disdain for the life her mother planned for her, Helene turned to her father, only to find him unwilling to help her further her education past the age of fourteen. In her work, The Psychology of Women, Deutsch connects one aspect of feminine masochism with her attachment to her father and the possible consequences of such an identification. She writes that a father will sometimes break his relationship with his daughter when she approachs the age of sexual maturity. Helene later attributed her father's resistance, to his subservience to his wife and desire for peace at home.

Mother
Helene Deutsch's relationship with her mother was distant and cold. Where she generally adored her father, Helene hated her mother, Regina. According to Helene, her mother, 'shared none of her husband's intellectual interests,' and Helene considered her mother's aspirations to be social and materialistic. Helene claimed her mother was abusive, often beating, slapping and verbally attacking her. Helene argued that her mother was abusive, not to punish her, but 'as an outlet for her own pent-up aggressions' because Helene was not the boy her mother had she wanted and expected. Helene often said that her childhood home was dominated by her mother's overwhelming concern for social propriety and status. Helene considered her mother 'uncultured, intellectually insecure, and a slave to bourgeois propriety'. Although Helene at times yearned for the love of her mother, she never really received any maternal love from her mother. Instead, any maternal presence came from her sister, Malvina, and a woman in the neighborhood affectionately called 'the Pale Countess.' During her childhood, Helene remembered being 'mothered by nine different nurses,' and hated feeling dependent on her [mother]. These feelings often led her to 'daydream that someone else was her real mother.'

Siblings
Helene Deutsch's sister, Malvina, was the person from whom she received maternal affection. When their mother decided to beat Helene, Malvina was the one to caution beatings away from the head. Malvina, however, was herself the subject of the limited view of a woman's role in society. Helene Deutsch and her sisters were expected to marry early in life and to marry socially appropriate men. Although a gifted sculptor and painter, Malvina was forced to marry the man chosen by her parents as 'more appropriate,' instead of the man of her dreams.

Helene's brother Emil, however, offered abuse rather than affection. Emil sexually abused Helene when she was around four years old, and continued to torment her throughout her childhood. In her later life, Helene saw this affair as the 'root cause of her tendency not only secretly to fantasize, but to relay these fantasies as truth.' As the only son in the family, Emil was supposed to be the heir apparent to the family. Instead, Emil proved to be a gambler, profiteer and poor student, and a disappointment to the family. Throughout her life, Helene tried to make up for her brother's shortcomings, but 'felt she never successfully made up for Emil's failure in her mother's eyes,' but did replace him as her father's favorite.

Freud and Beyond
In 1916, Helene sought admittance to Freud's infamous Wednesday night meetings of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. As a condition of her acceptance, Helene had to comment on Lou Andreas-Salomé's paper, 'Vaginal and anal.' In 1919, under Freud's supervision, Helene began analyzing her first patient, Viktor Tausk, while at the same time Freud was analyzing Helene. After three months, upon Freud's request, Helene terminated Tausk's sessions. During her sessions with Freud, Helene reported 'falling in love with Freud.' She often felt herself to be Freud's daughter, claiming that Freud had inspired and released her talents. Helene claimed, however, that Freud tended to focus "too much on her identification with her father" and her affair with Lieberman. In one analysis with Freud, Helene dreamt that she had both female and male organs. Through analysis with Freud, she discovered that her personality was largely determined by her "childhood wish to be simultaneously [her] father's prettiest daughter and cleverest son." After one year, Freud terminated Helene's analytic sessions, to instead work with the Wolf Man. Helene nevertheless was a brilliant clinician, who stood up to Freud and got away with it when she 'disagreed with him about her patients.'

Following Karl Abraham's presentation on femininity, penis envy and the feminine castration complex at the Hague Congress in 1920, Helene left analysis with Freud to work with Abraham. While at the Hague Congress, Helene presented her paper on The Psychology of Mistrust. In it, she claimed that lying was a defense against real events, as well as an act of creativity. In 1923, Helene moved to Berlin without her husband, Felix, or her son, Martin, to work with Abraham, whom she felt probed more deeply than Freud. Helene felt relaxed while working with Abraham and enjoyed his 'cool analytic style and his objective insight without any reeling experience of transference.' While in session with Helene, Abraham showed her a letter from Freud addressed to him. In it, Freud argued that the topic of Helene's marriage with Felix should remain off the table during analysis. It was only later that Abraham confessed that he was unable to analyze her because he "had too much feeling for her." It is hypothesized that Freud, in abruptly terminating Helene's analysis and by sending the letter to Abraham, was trying to break Helene's compulsion to repeat.

In 1924, Helene returned to Austria from Berlin. She also returned to Felix and Freud. Her continued relationship with Freud was friendly, yet at times strained. Following Freud's death, however, Helene often referred to herself as Freud's ghost. The following year, in 1925, Helene published The Psychoanalysis of Women's Sexual Functions. In it, she diverged from Freudian logic. She argued that, in the phallic stage, the little girl's primary erogenous zone is the "masculine clitoris," which is inferior in entirety to the male penis. It is this awareness of the inferiority of the clitoris, wrote Helene, that forces the little girl to grow passive, inward and turn away from her 'active sexuality'. That same year, Helene created and became the first President of the Vienna Training Institute. In 1935, Helene emigrated her family from Vienna to Boston, Massachusetts, where she continued to work as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1982.

On Pregnancy
In April 1912, Helene married Felix Deutsch. Following the outbreak of the Great War, Helene experienced the first of many miscarriages. In The Psychology of Women, Helene discussed the concept of spontaneous abortion and miscarriage as a result of psychological factors, with a critical factor involving the 'pregnant woman's unconscious rejection of an identification with her own mother.' Under the pseudonym of a patient named Mrs. Smith, Helene tells the story of a woman who has trouble bringing a baby to full term. Helene wrote that Mrs. Smith was the youngest child of a large family, where her mother's disappointment that she was not a boy was evident. Mrs. Smith, however, took solace in the deep love of her father and older sister. When she married and wanted to have a child, Mrs. Smith had difficulty reconciling her desire for a child with her mother's rejection of her. When she was about to become a mother herself, Mrs. Smith's fear about identifying with her mother intensified. This fear came to fruition when Mrs. Smith gave birth to a still born child one month before full term.

The story of Mrs. Smith is strikingly similar to that of Helene's, as if she, herself, were speaking through Mrs. Smith. Through the story of Mrs. Smith, Helene argues that a successful pregnancy is possible when there is a loving relationship between mother and daughter, which 'smoothly socializes daughters into becoming mothers themselves.' Mirroring the life of Helene, Mrs. Smith's problem is resolved during the next pregnancy when Mrs. Smith identifies with a pregnant friend, and particularly with the friend's mother. Helene wrote that the friend's mother was the opposite of Mrs. Smith's mother. She was filled with maternal warmth for both Mrs. Smith and her own daughter. This maternal love, shared with her friend, allowed Mrs. Smith to become a mother. According to Helene, although a healthy relationship between mother and daughter was important for a healthy pregnancy, equally important was the ability to lean on a female friend who could act as a surrogate sister for the pregnant woman. This idea is furthered when Mrs. Smith and her friend became pregnant again around the same time. This time, there was no anxiety or fear surrounding pregnancy, but when Mrs. Smith's friend moved away, she miscarried. The diagnosis, according to Helene, was that Mrs. Smith suffered from 'over-excitability of the uterus.' A successful pregnancy, therefore, could only be brought about by leaning on another woman.

1950 to Death
After 1950, Helene Deutsch began to say that she regretted being known primarily for her work with women’s psychology. At this time, Deutsch began to turn her attention back to men’s psychology and narcissism in both sexes Over time, she became increasingly devoted to the study of egoism and narcissism, thereby abandoning her lifelong study of feminism

In 1963, Deutsch retired as a training analyst in part due to her husband, Felix’s, declining health and memory loss. In 1963, Felix Deutsch died. Following his death, Helene Deutsch began to reminisce about her life with Felix and all that he had given her. Her relationship with Felix, up to that point, had always been a little bit strained. Through numerous affairs, like the one she had with Sándor Rado, Deutsch had always felt that Felix was more of the mother figure than she. According to Deutsch, ‘Felix seemed to have no trouble in ‘naturally’ displaying all the motherly ease. Even in situations in which a child usually calls for his mother, he [Martin] turned more often to Felix than to me.’

Following Felix’s death in 1963, Helene Deutsch turned her attention toward the sexual liberation of the 1960s and Beatlemania. She argued that these two events were due to fathers ‘taking a back-seat in childrearing. This absence of fathers then led to loneliness in children, who then sought solace with their peers.

On March 29th, 1982, Helene Deutsch died at the age of 97. In her last days of life, Helene Deutsch remembered the 'three men closest to her, combining Lieberman, Freud and her father into one man.' In her autobiography Helene Deutsch wrote that during the three main upheavals in her life: her freedom from her mother; 'the revelation of socialism'; and her time with psychoanalysis, she was inspired and aided by either her father, Lieberman or Freud.