About Helene Deutsch

Helene Deutsch (née Rosenbach; 9 October 1884 – 29 March 1982) was a Polish American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud. She founded the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1935, she immigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she maintained a practice. Deutsch was one of the first psychoanalysts to specialize in women. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Helene Deutsch was born in PrzemyÅ›l, then in the Polish Partition of Austrian Galicia, to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach, on 9 October 1884.[3] She was the youngest of four children, with sisters, Malvina, and Gizela and a brother, Emil.[4] Although Deutsch's father had a German education, Helene (Rosenbach) attended private Polish-language schools. In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Helene grew up in a time of resurgent Polish nationalism and artistic creativity, Mloda Polska. 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. During her youth, Helene became involved in the defence of socialist ideals with Herman Lieberman, a Polish politician. Their relations lasted for more than ten years. She went with him to an International Socialist Conference in 1910 and met the majority of key socialist figures, such as the charismatic women Angelica Balabanoff and Rosa Luxemburg.