Lena Magnone
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis; Feminism; & Migration
Helene Deutsch and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis
This project aims to offer the French public a scientific monograph – based on the results of complete archival research from both sides of the Atlantic and informed by up-to-date methods of biographical materialism, cultural transfer, and migration and trauma studies – on an eminent Polish-American psychoanalyst. Born in 1884 in Przemyśl (a town today situated on the Polish-Ukrainian border that, at that time, was part of Austria-Hungary), Helene Deutsch died in 1982 in Cambridge, MA. She was the longest-living disciple of Sigmund Freud in the United States and one of the Central European Jewish refugees who most significantly impacted the postwar American intellectual landscape. Her century-spanning life, as well as her innovative writing at the intersection of clinical, autobiographical, and literary genres, allow for the presentation of the transnational social and cultural history of psychoanalysis from a unique feminist perspective.
Lena Magnone is a literary scholar with a particular interest in Central European modernism, psychoanalysis, and women’s writing. She defended her doctoral thesis (2007) and obtained her habilitation (2017) at the University of Warsaw in Poland, where she worked as an assistant professor until 2020. After a Fulbright fellowship at the New York University, she settled in Germany, first as a Humboldt fellow and later as a research associate professor at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Oldenburg. Most recently, she published a two-volume monograph Freud’s Emissaries. The Transfer of Psychoanalysis Through the Polish Intelligentsia to Europe 1900-1939.