Hermine Hug-Hellmuth
[1] Her book, A Young Girl's Diary (1921), published in New York by Thomas Seltzer, was prefaced with an endorsement from Sigmund Freud dated 27 April 1915.
[7] Her work influenced such notable psychoanalysts as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Jean Berges and Gabriel Balbo.
Hug-Hellmuth was born into a Catholic family, the second daughter of Hugo Hug Von Hugenstein, a military officer in the Austrian war ministry.
[8] Hug-Hellmuth became a teacher and taught in private and public school for several years before she returned to her studies and enrolled in University of Vienna in 1897.
[8] Her name was not recorded much in official documents and was instead mentioned in English schools that were designed to "cure the children" through games.
When it was published by Sándor Ferenczi, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Stefan Zweig it received great success and was praised by Sigmund Freud as “little jewel”.
In response to the accusations, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth republished it under Burt’s name and claimed that it is indeed written by a female teenager aged 11 to 14.
[10] He became an important research subject for Hug-Hellmuth, emerging as the major personality in her first book, Aus Dem Seelenleben des Kindes (On the Spiritual and Mental Life of the Child), published in 1913.
[7] In a will written a few days before her death, Hug-Hellmuth requested that no accounting of her life or work be published, even in academic publications on the psychoanalytic field.
[11] The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was initially named the Wednesday Evening Psychological Meetings before being re-branded in 1906, was started by Sigmund Freud in 1902 as a small informal gathering of minds in his practices’ waiting room.
Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was first recorded attending the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on October 8, 1913 and remained an attendee until her death in 1924.
Introducing two essays by Stanley Hall and His School, one on “rage” and the second on “dolls”, Hug-Hellmuth gives commentary on the papers from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis.
Never, I believe, has anything been written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, belong- ing to our social and cultural stratum, during the years of puber- tal development.
All students of my own writings will be grateful to you [p. 261].”[12] Written from a Freudian theoretical perspective, the book supposedly contained the nature of the viewpoint of an adolescent girl whom Hug-Hellmuth at the time was treating.
[13] Although the book caused a scandal as many people thought to be its contents as fabricated, A Young Girl’s Diary was generally acknowledged as an interesting prospect of developing sexuality within a youthful adolescent.
[12] Freud defended Hug-Hellmuth’s work as legitimate which however was ultimately withdrawn in the German circulation due to its fraudulent speculations.
[6][16] Essentially, it can be seen in Melanie Klein’s work regarding her contributions to child’s transference and play technique that there is a depiction of impactful evidence by Hug-Hellmuth’s significance in the psychoanalytical stream.
French Analysts Jean Bergès and Gabriel Balbo have highlighted her works regarding the participation of parents and transference in their book Psychoanalysis and the Child.
[6] A Young Girl’s Diary was initially praised for its insight since it was uncommon for a book to provide detailed descriptions of an adolescent's life development through maturity.
A persistent doubter of Hellmuth’s work was Charlotte Buhler, a Professor of Child Psychology in Vienna who also found interest in children’s diaries.
She strongly opposed psychoanalysis and criticized the book for its clear psychoanalytic perspective that propagated Freud’s ideas on sexuality in infants.
Charlotte’s students persisted even after Hug-Hellmuth’s death in trying to prove that A Young Girl’s Diary was written by an adult.
