Women of the Wednesday Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein, and Hug-Hellmuth

Posing My Interest

In Midsummer 1962, the Basic Book Service announced as its Alternate Selection the newly translated Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Volume 1, 1906-1908, edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn. It was the first of what turned out to be four volumes: the others were published in 1967, 1974, and 1975. The notes begin in 1906, when Otto Rank became paid secretary of the Society. In 1913, they grow thin, and—apart from one meeting in 1918 just after the War and a moving brief account (long after Rank's break with Freud) of the people present and the agreements made in 1938 when the group was dissolved by the Nazis—they cease altogether in 1915 due to Rank's departure for military service in World War I. In eloquent detail, these volumes show psychoanalytic thinking in statu nascendi. The topics covered range from clinical cases through biology, psychiatry, sociology, and criminology to the lives of painters, musicians, writers, as well as reviews of books and scientific articles. Nunberg suggests that the "discussions . . . disclose, perhaps more clearly than his books and essays, how Freud's mind worked" (1962, xxix); and the minds of his colleagues are similarly revealed.

These minutes are not a sterile, bare-bones text, such as is produced by present-day analytic societies. In the very earliest days, from 1902 until 1906, there were no minutes at all of the "Wednesday Evening Psychological Meetings" that took place in Freud's waiting room amid billowing cigar smoke. As the group became more formalized in 1906, "little Rank," as Freud called him "affectionately, betraying just a touch of condescension" (Gay 1988, 176), began his labors in pen and ink. Two years later, the group recast itself as the "Vienna Psychoanalytic Society." The notes seem relatively open. ¹ As everyone was aware of Freud's ambitions, the speeches are infused by a sense of taking part in the unfolding of a great historical drama.

The notes, of course, reflect the perspective of Rank, who was in a phase of mutual admiration with Freud, although sycophancy does not appear to have contaminated his evenhandedness. He recorded contentious opinions, even when Freud's contribution does not seem particularly perspicacious. Nunberg's foreword to Volume 3 is much more worshipful than any of the members themselves: "One can only admire the patience with which Freud tried to show them their errors and wrestled with them for their recognition of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, which formed the foundation for their own work" (1974, xi). Freud usually spoke at or near the end of a meeting, incisively highlighting what he saw as the central points. When he chose, he palliated the discussion, but he could also add non sequiturs and contradict other members, especially Adler. Rank, however, frequently gives the main speaker the last word—perhaps including a note that he had answered all the preceding arguments. Contrary to Nunberg's orthodox repudiation of "errors," some of the ideas that were devalued at the time can now be seen to have foreshadowed the most promising directions in recent analytic thinking. I will present evidence that, as speakers to the Viennese group, Margarete Hilferding and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth both fell into that category. Sabina Spielrein, though ultimately less impressive in my view, was later acknowledged by Freud to have anticipated aspects of his own theoretical development.

Freud was famously nasty, at least to outsiders, about his Viennese colleagues. For example, in March 1911, after he had handed over the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association to Jung, he wrote privately to the latter: "You have been very kind to the Viennese in your handling of the Congress question. Unfortunately they are a lot of rabble and I shall feel neither horror nor regret if the whole show here collapses one of these days" (McGuire 1974...