Helene Deutsch (née Rosenbach; 9 October 1884 – 29 March 1982) was a Polish-American psychoanalyst and colleague of Sigmund Freud.

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.

In the late eighteenth century, Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Helene grew up in a time of resurgent Polish nationalism and artistic creativity, Mloda Polska.

[7] 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.

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.

[8] Her father, Wilhelm, was a prominent Jewish lawyer, 'a liberal and a specialist in international law' during a time when anti-Semitism was rampant.

[9] Being able to shadow her father led Deutsch to contemplate at one time becoming a lawyer, until she learned that women were excluded from practicing law.

[9] In her work, The Psychology of Women, Deutsch connects one aspect of feminine masochism with her attachment to her father and the possible consequences of such an identification.

[15] Throughout her life, Deutsch tried to make up for her brother's shortcomings, but 'felt she never successfully made up for Emil's failure in her mother's eyes,' but did replace him as her father's favorite.

[19] More broadly, she considered that 'the "generally frigid" person who more or less avoids emotions altogether ... may learn to hide their insufficiencies and to behave "as if" they had real feelings and contact with people'.

[25] In his 1931 article on "Female Sexuality", Freud wrote approvingly of 'Helene Deutsch's latest paper, on feminine masochism and its relation to frigidity (1930), in which she also recognises the girl's phallic activity and the intensity of her attachment to her mother'.

[26] In 1944–5, Deutsch published her two-volume work, The Psychology of Women, on the 'psychological development of the female ... Volume 1 deals with girlhood, puberty, and adolescence.

[29] As time permits a more nuanced, post-feminist view of Freud, feminism and Deutsch, so too one can appreciate that her central book 'is replete with sensitive insight into the problems women confront at all stages of their lives'.

[30] Indeed, it has been claimed of Deutsch that 'the ruling concerns of her life bear a striking resemblance to those of women who participated in the second great wave of feminism in the 1970s: early rebellion ... struggle for independence and education ... conflict between the demands of career and family, ambivalence over motherhood, split between sexual and maternal feminine identities'.

[31] In the same way, one may see that 'to cap the parallel, Deutsch's psychoanalytic preoccupations were with the key moments of female sexuality: menstruation, defloration, intercourse, pregnancy, infertility, childbirth, lactation, the mother-child relation, menopause ... the underlying agenda of any contemporary women's magazine – an agenda which her writings helped in some measure to create'.

'[33] Under the pseudonym of a patient named Mrs. Smith, Helene tells the story of a woman who has trouble bringing a baby to full term.

In 1916, Deutsch sought admittance to Freud's infamous Wednesday night meetings of Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Through analysis with Freud, she discovered that her personality was largely determined by her "childhood wish to be simultaneously [her] father's prettiest daughter and cleverest son.

[39] In 1923, she moved to Berlin without her husband, Felix, or her son, Martin, to work with Abraham, who she felt probed more deeply than Freud.

[40] Helene felt relaxed while working with Abraham and enjoyed his 'cool analytic style and his objective insight without any reeling experience of transference.

She argued that, in the phallic stage, the little girl's primary erogenous zone is the "masculine clitoris," which is inferior in entirety to the male penis.

[42] It is this awareness of the inferiority of the clitoris, wrote Helene, that forces the little girl to grow passive, inward and turn away from her 'active sexuality'.

[43] Deutsch was wary accordingly of any 'rigid adherence to the phantom of "Freudian Method", which, as I now realize, I must regard as an area of research ' and not as 'a complete, learnable entity which can be taught by thorough and regular drilling'.

[44] She herself however was 'one of the most successful teachers in the history of psychoanalysis ... her seminars were remarkable experiences for students, and her classes were remembered as spectacles'.

[25] Deutsch was a very esteemed and beloved training analyst and supervisor, whose seminars, based on case studies, were known to often run into the early morning hours.

[46] In 1963, Deutsch retired as a training analyst in part due to her husband, Felix's, declining health and memory loss.

[32] In her last days of life, she remembered the "three men closest to her, combining Lieberman, Freud and her father into one man".

[51] In her autobiography Deutsch wrote that during the three main upheavals in her life, her freedom from her mother; "the revelation of socialism"; and her time with psychoanalysis, she was inspired and aided by either her father, Lieberman or Freud.