Düsseldorf—Berlin—Ankara—Washington

Abstract

Edith Weigert (-Vowinckel)¹ became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) in 1929, fled from the National-Socialists in 1935 to Turkey, and then emigrated three years later to the United States, where she played an especially important role as lecturer, teaching and supervising analyst. She published numerous scientific essays.² She took on uncommon positions in more ways than one: as a female student of medicine, as an analyst in a hospital setting, as a non-Jewish emigrant, a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Turkey, and last but not least, as an autonomous individual in the conflict between classical-orthodox and liberal-eclectic schools of thought in the United States. She witnessed meaningful developments in the history of psychoanalysis during her stay at the Berlin Institute and in Washington, where she encountered representatives of different theoretical movements. As a classical Freudian psychoanalyst in Berlin and trained psychiatrist at the Charité, she was receptive to new and interdisciplinary influences during the entire course of her life: these include Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's psychotherapy, and the philosophy of European existentialism. All of these elements make her historical and biographical account an exciting and worthwhile project. In the following pages, a portrait emerges of a person who strived to emphasize commonality rather than difference within her own professional community as well as on a theoretical level of psychoanalytic practice during a time in history marked by conflict and division. A special portrait developed during the course of my research, one that reveals an image that is inconsistent, but in a very customary way.^3,4