EARLY WOMEN PSYCHOANALYSTS
Welcome to a website dedicated to the remarkable yet inadequately remembered, overlooked, and erased women pioneers of psychoanalysis born before World War I, most of them Jewish.
Despite their substantial contributions to psychoanalytic thought, theory, and clinical practice, their work has often been devalued, marginalized, or written out of the canon through intersecting gendered and racial forms of power, institutional practices, and historical narratives that defined whose narratives counted, and why – and whose did not.
This site highlights courses, publications, and events that honor and critically engage with their legacy. Join us in uncovering the stories of these women who shaped the field of psychoanalysis and continue to inspire future generations. Together, let’s restore their voices and contributions to the historical record and carry them forward for the future generations.
Early Women Psychoanalysts
14-week Saturday Course
with Dr. Klara Naszkowska & Dr. Ana Tomčić
Step into the largely untold history of extraordinary women who helped shape the foundations of psychoanalysis. Drawing on her anthology Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance (Routledge, 2024) – included free for participants – and her original research, Dr. Klara Naszkowska brings to life the biographies of pioneering women who worked across Europe before World War II. These figures' groundbreaking contributions were later marginalized or systematically erased from the historical record. Through richly textured biographical narratives, the course situates these women’s lives and work within the turbulent sociopolitical landscape of early 20th-century Europe. Themes include women’s expanding access to education, the rise of authoritarian regimes, forced migration, and the complex dynamics of Jewish identity in a rapidly changing world. Participants will explore how these trailblazers navigated the intersections of gender, religion, politics, and professional ambition during one of history's most transformative periods.
In the second half of each session, Dr. Ana Tomčić will facilitate an in-depth reading group dedicated to these women’s theoretical and clinical writings. Together, participants will engage directly with their published work in order to better understand what preoccupied these thinkers, what they valued, and how their ideas shaped – and continue to shape – the field of psychoanalysis.
While their contributions span many areas, particular attention will be given to child analysis, play therapy, linguistics, theories of femininity and female sexuality, motherhood and mother-infant relationships, Holocaust studies, psychoanalytic technique, and training.
The course will focus on the work of Sabina Spielrein, Margarethe Hilferding, Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Lou Andreas Salomé, Judith Kestenberg, Vilma Kovács, Clara Happel, Helene Deustch, Barbara Low, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Alberta Szalita, and other early women pioneers of psychoanalysis.
Student testimonials:
This course was immensely rich in content, in perspective, and in the care put in. The research Klara and Ana have done is genuinely inspiring, and their presence as lecturers, intellectuals, and listeners made the material and course so curious and alive. The course offered both substantial reading materials, thoughtful directions, and analytical skills. I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in psychoanalysis and especially to those who want to understand the women who quietly shaped the field and have been far too long overlooked and unacknowledged.
–––Artana, Berlin, May 2026
Meeting times
Fourteen Saturdays
September 2026 – June 2027 (every three weeks, dates to be announced soon)
12:00-2:00 PM (New York)
(9:00 AM San Francisco · 5:00 PM London · 6:00 PM Warsaw · 7:00 PM Beirut)
Each session includes a 10‑minute break
Location: Online via Zoom
Course fee
Licensed therapists: $1,000 · €850 · £735
Early-bird fee (available until August 1): $900 · €775 · £660
Students: $500 · €425 · £370
Early-bird fee (available until August 1): $450 · €385 · £335
We believe that financial need should not be a barrier to learning.
Please email klara.nasz@gmail.com to discuss reduced fees and scholarships.
Please also reach out if you are interested in attending a selected number of sessions.
Course materials
Primary text:
Naszkowska, K. (Ed.) (2024). Early Women Psychoanalysts. History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance, Routledge.
Participants receive a free PDF of the book and 20% off at checkout:
All additional materials will be provided.
Instructors
Klara Naszkowska, PhD (she/her) is an educator, research scholar, and writer whose work focuses on the intersections of Jewish women’s history, psychoanalysis, Nazi persecution, migration, and memory. She is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University (NJ). Her work resurrects the biographies of women who had made major contributions to the field of psychoanalysis in Europe and the U.S. and yet had been erased from historical narrative. Her research 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. She is 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. She is currently writing the biography of Clara Happel (forthcoming in Routledge, 2027).
Ana Tomčić, PhD is a cultural historian and psychoanalytic trainee at the Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis in Cornwall, UK. She is a postdoctoral researcher with the project Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices and Implications for our Times that investigates the history and contemporary practice of free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics in the UK, South America and Central Europe. In her work and research, Ana is especially interested in the roles of gender and class in psychoanalysis. She aims to offer low-cost analysis herself, while also looking at the ways in which psychoanalysis' gendered and classed perspectives have informed and misinformed psychoanalytic theories. She is currently finishing a book Rethinking Progress: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and Queer Development that looks at theories of individual and social development in the work of 20th-psychoanalysts, modernist queer writers and filmmakers.
Questions, suggestions, or concerns?
Please contact Klara at klara.nasz@gmail.com