Maudsley Lecture | Women in the shadows of psychoanalysis: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sabina Spielrein, and Joan Riviere

It has been said that psychoanalysis was from its very inception a “woman’s profession.” Yet this is far from the whole picture. In fin de siècle Vienna, in the founding decade of the movement, psychoanalysis was indubitably a man’s world. This lecture is about the first women to break into this man’s club, the first to sit in a room made up entirely of male analysts and challenge their ideas about female sexuality.

The lecture traces the lives and works of three of the first female psychoanalysts – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sabina Spielrein and Joan Riviere – women whose contributions have, in different ways, been hidden, and who were each targets of misogynistic treatment. In considering how the fabric of their lives as women was vital to their psychoanalytic insights, the lecture also looks at the intersections between biography and psychoanalysis.

Dr Catherine Humble works at the Institute of Psychoanalysis as Executive Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She holds the posts of Honorary Research Associate at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, where she teaches psychoanalysis and literature, and she has worked as a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, Kingston University and the University of West London. She has published several academic papers on psychoanalysis, literature and film, and has co-edited a book, Experiencing the Body: A Psychoanalytic Dialogue on Psychosomatics. Her writing has appeared in the Independent, Prospect and the Observer, and she has worked as a longstanding book reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and the Telegraph.