17 - Women Emigré Psychologists and Psychoanalysts in the United States

Summary

One might expect precisely those women who had already taken up the systematic study of the conscious or unconscious mind to be especially sensitive to the gendered dimensions of their own experiences. Nancy Chodorow has argued, however, that this is not the case. In an essay entitled “Seventies Questions for Thirties Women,” she reports that in her interviews with émigré women psychoanalysts, her subjects repeatedly denied the significance of their gender for their professional work. Chodorow distances herself from this phenomenon by giving it an abstract sociological name - low gender salience. But she acknowledges that her interviewees forced her to see that ideas are rooted in varying social and cultural conditions and that “differences in women's interpretations of a situation may be understood not only in terms of structural categories like class or race, but also historically, culturally and generationally.”

Implicitly, at least, Chodorow's work also raises questions that are more specific to the lives of these particular women. The following remarks are intended as a preliminary exploration of these issues, focusing mainly on the careers and memoirs of selected émigré women psychologists and psychoanalysts. What did these women émigrés share? How did their multiple identities — as upper-middle-class educated professional women in the patriarchal culture of German-speaking Europe, as Central European Jews, and as members of emerging professions that have become central to twentieth-century culture and society — relate to one another?