Research On Heleni Doyi 's Psychoanalytic Thought

Helene Deutsch (1884-1982) was a famous Polish-born American psychoanalyst and educator, the pioneer of the female psychoanalysis, one of Freud’s followers. Her books named The Psychology of Women are the first that systematically described women’s psychological development, and also the most important contribution that she did to psychoanalysis. Deutsch detailed the psychological development of women and its characteristics for five stages, which are prepuberty, early puberty, puberty, motherhood and climacterium. She emphasized the important role of identification in women’s psychological development. She thought that the three essential traits of femininity are narcissism, passivity and masochism. All of these are rooted in the early genital trauma. She devoted all her life to explore the psychoanalytic skills and the clinical practices and its applications. She developed her own views on psychopathology, stressed on the actual conflicts in the formation of neuroses and the psychical genesis of homosexual women. Deutsch’s greatest clinical contribution is her delineation of the "as if" personality, which in her view is the result of the lose of object cathexis. She attached great importance to the analyst’s controlling, and emphasized the collaboration between analyst and patients, and then presented a new skill called "The Therapeutic Alliance". She still elaborated the transference, acting out and the resistance, and discussed three typical forms of defense, that is the "intellectual" or "intellectualizing" defenses, defenses expressed by "turning to reality" and defenses manifested by "turning inward" to "internal reality". Moreover, she applied psychoanalysis to literature, and analyzed two related mythological figures Dionysus and Apollo.Deutsch’s contributions to psychoanalysis primarily cover putting forward the systematic theory of the psychological development of women, developing the psychoanalytic treatment techniques and promoting the psychoanalytic applications. The main limitations of her theory lie in the following aspects, having not got rid of Freud’s theory of biological view, having not formed her own theoretical system, and her interpretation of the female development is questionable. In addition, Deutsch changed Freud’s view on female psychology to some extent, and had an important influence on school of object relations and ego psychology.