Rendering Unconscious episode 288.
Rendering Unconscious welcomes Klara Naszkowska back to the podcast! She’s here to talk about her new book Early Women Psychoanalysts. History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance (Routledge, 2024).
In this episode, Klara discusses her new book, which grew out of a conference on Sabina Spielrein and other early female pioneers of psychoanalysis. 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. Klara emphasizes the importance of remembering these women, many of whom were Jewish and faced significant challenges. She also mentions ongoing research on Clara Happel and plans for future conferences and publications.
Klara Naszkowska, PhD (she/her) is a cultural historian of women, research scholar, writer, and professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University. Her work resurrects and critically examines the neglected history women pioneers of psychoanalysis, feminine sexuality, emigration, and memory. It 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. Klara serves as the Founding Director of the International Association for Spielrein Studies and the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholar sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
