An expert on ego psychology and the treatment of psychosis, he served as vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

[8] In Vienna and Berlin, Etta Federn studied literary history, German philology and Ancient Greek.

[2] In 1927, she published a biography of Walther Rathenau, the liberal Jewish Foreign Minister of Germany, who had been assassinated in 1922 by anti-Semitic right-wing terrorists.

Her biography was reviewed by Gabriele Reuter for the New York Times, which called Federn's account "amazingly lucid and precise" and said it "gives a beautifully clear idea of [Rathenau's] life.

who wrote that the "simple, objectively written little book is to be recommended particularly to foreigners and young people," demystifying Faust by viewing it as Goethe's "spiritual and intellectual autobiography.

She learned Spanish and became director of four progressive schools in the city of Blanes, educating both teachers and children in secular values and antimilitarism.

[10] In 1934, she was interviewed in the magazine La Mirador about a controversy concerning her palm reading, an art she had practiced for many years, and whether it contributed to the suicide of a young man in Barcelona.

She wrote: "Educated mothers relate their own experiences and sufferings to their children; they intuitively understand their feelings and expressions.

"[19] In 1938, toward the end of the Spanish Civil War, as Francisco Franco's fascists bombed Barcelona and defeated the Republicans, she fled to France.

[23][20] She spent her final years in Paris, supported in part by her relatives in the USA and doing palm readings based on her psychological insights.

The story of Etta Federn and her unequal love for her two sons inspired Stig Dagerman's 1948 play Skuggan av Mart (Marty's Shadow).