Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 1 month.

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In this online event, we welcome Klara Naszkowska editor of Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance to discuss her book with academic Ana Tomcic who contributed to the publication. Join us for a discussion that will explore a range of female analysts that played a role in the early development of the field of psychoanalysis.

About the book:

Each life story is unique, yet each also entwines with other stories, sharing recurring themes linked to issues of gender, Jewishness, women's education, politics, and migration.

The book's first section discusses relatively known analysts such as Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Beata Rank, remembered largely as someone's wife, lover, or muse; and the second part sheds light on women such as Margarethe Hilferding, Tatiana Rosenthal, and Erzsébet Farkas, who took strong political stances. In the third section, the biographies of lesser-known analysts like Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska, Nic Waal, Barbara Low, and Vilma Kovács are discussed in the context of their importance for the early Freudian movement; and in the final section, the lives of Eugenia Sokolnicka, Sophie Morgenstern, Alberta Szalita, and Olga Wermer are examined in relation to migration and exile, trauma, loss, and memory.

With a clear focus upon the continued importance of these women for psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as discussion that engages with pertinent issues such as gendered discrimination, inhumane immigration laws, and antisemitism, this book is an important reading for students, scholars, and practitioners of psychoanalysis, as well as those involved in gender and women's studies, and Jewish and Holocaust studies.

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Speakers:

Ana Tomcic is a cultural historian and literary scholar. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis, twentieth-century literature, gender and sexuality, and the role of class in psychoanalytic contexts. Ana previously worked on ideas of progress in psychoanalysis and modernist literature and is currently writing a book entitled Rethinking Progress: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and Queer Development. She has also published on the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, as well as Melitta Schmideberg, Nelly Wolffheim and other women analysts, as well analysts who worked with underprivileged groups. She is a trainee at the Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis in Cornwall and works with the low-cost clinic there.

Klara Naszkowska is a cultural historian of women; research scholar, writer, and adjunct professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Montclair State University, NJ. As an educator she gives priority to the intersections of gender, sexuality, class and wealth, immigration status, age, and ability, advocating for ways to foster socioeconomic and political change. She's a 2025–26 Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholar sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, creating and disseminating pedagogical materials for use in colleges nationwide in support of a thriving American democracy.

Her own work critically investigates the lives of Jewish women pioneers of psychoanalysis who fled Nazi persecution in Europe for the US. She engages with archival materials and conducts oral history interviews to reconstruct their largely overlooked biographies. Her focus is on patterns of generational storytelling, memory, and postmemory. Her work has been recognized with the Fulbright Fellowship, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library Grant, and the Leo Baeck Institute’s Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship among others.

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Tickets:

Suggested donation £10-£15. Minimum donation £1.

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.