Helene Deutsch

Helene Deutsch
Biography of Helene Deutsch
Born	9 October 1884 Przemyśl, Poland (Austrian Galicia)
Died	29 March 1982 (age 97) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Residence	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Citizenship	USA
Nationality	Poland
Fields	Psychoanalysis
Institutions	University of Vienna, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Psychoanalytic Society
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Known for	Psychology of women, Adolescent psychology
Influences	Sigmund Freud
Influenced	Stanley Cobb

Helene Deutsch (née Rosenbach; October 9, 1884 – March 29, 1982) was a Polish American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud. She was the first psychoanalyst to specialize in women.

Helene Deutsch was born in Przemyśl, then in the Polish Partition of Austrian Galicia, to Jewish parents, Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach, on 9 October 1884. She was the youngest of four children, with sisters, Malvina, and Gizela and a brother, Emil. 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 the Austria-Hungarian Empire; 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.

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.