Emma Eckstein

Emma Eckstein (1865–1924) was an Austrian author. She was 'one of Sigmund Freud's most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself': she has indeed been described as 'the first woman analyst....Emma Eckstein became both colleague and patient' for Freud. As analyst, while 'working mainly in the area of sexual and social hygiene, she also explored how "daydreams, those 'parasitic plants', invaded the life of young girls"'.

Ernest Jones placed her with such figures as Lou Andreas-Salomé and Joan Riviere as a 'type of woman, of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast...[who] played a part in his life, accessory to his male friends though of a finer calibre'.

'Emma Eckstein was born in Vienna on 28 January 1865 to a well-known bourgeois family' with close connections to Freud: 'one of her brothers was Gustav Eckstein (1875–1916), a social democrat and associate of Karl Kautsky, the leader of the Socialist party; and a sister, Therese Schlesinger, a socialist, was one of the first women members of parliament'. Another brother, Friedrich, appears (anonymously) in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents as a 'friend of mine, whose insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most unusual experiments', including 'the practices of Yoga...He sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, for much of the wisdom of mysticism'.

Emma herself was active in the Viennese women's movement, 'collaborating with Dokumente der Frauen and Neues Frauenleben'.

After an operation in 1910, however, 'Emma took to her couch, and remained a partial invalid until she died on 30 July 1924 of a cerebral haemmorrhage'.

When she was 27, she went to Freud, seeking treatment for vague symptoms including stomach ailments and slight depression related to menstruation. Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess; masturbation in those days was considered dangerous to mental health. Her 'treatment lasted something in the region of three years – one of the most protracted and detailed of Freud's early cases'.

...
Wikipedia