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January 23, 202524 min readMargarethe Hilferding, Sigmund Freud and the Conspiracy of SilenceMargarethe Hilferding was the first woman admitted to Sigmund Freuds Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but her radical work on maternal instinct was dismissed and ignored Lily Whear (composite); Karl Hilferding (CC BY-SA 3.0) (image)In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day next week, Lost Women of Science is telling the story of Margarethe Hilferding, a pioneering psychoanalyst and physician from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. She was the first woman to earn a medical degree at the University of Vienna and the first woman to join Sigmund Freuds Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In her paper On the Basis of Mother Love,LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.TRANSCRIPTMarcy Thompson: The year was 1945. World War II had just ended in Europe, and a soldier named Peter Milford headed back to his home in Vienna.Eveline List: He fought in the army to free Austria.Marcy Thompson: He came back to find out what remained of his beloved city and the mother he had left behind.Eveline List: Everything had been destroyed. In the rubble, he was looking for the surviving friends.Marcy Thompson: When he left Vienna before the war, his name wasn't Peter Milford. It was Peter Hilferding. He'd changed his name in New Zealand, where he'd escaped as a refugee.Eveline List: an hour to an hour walk to a house that was the publishing center of the Social Democratic Publishers.Marcy Thompson: Before the war, in this very building, Peter's mother published articles about hunger, housing, and the rights of the working class on behalf of the Social Democratic Party.A trained physician, the first woman to graduate from the University of Vienna Medical School, she worked tirelessly on behalf of women's health and reproductive rights. She was the first woman to be accepted into Sigmund Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic SocietyEveline List: at the door, late at night and told who he was, and they took him in and gave him a bed for a night.Marcy Thompson: His mother's name was Margarethe Hilferding or Margaret in the English pronunciation, and her contribution to the field of psychoanalysis was so prescient, so forward thinking, that it remains radical to this day. She would challenge the deeply ingrained notion that a mother's love for her child is innate.Eveline List: Then he walked to the outskirts of Vienna to the place of his aunt. And his cousin, her father, gave him a suitcase that Margarethe Hilferding had left for him.Marcy Thompson: What Peter had left Vienna to escape was the same crushing reality that his mother could not. The Hilferdings were Jewish, which in wartime Vienna was a death sentence.Eveline List: could have in the awful place where she had been gathered with other Jews, and some old clothes and that was all. And they gave him her letter of goodbye.Marcy Thompson: I'm Marcy Thompson. Today on Lost Women of Science, we examine the fragments of the remarkable life of Margaret Hilferding. As is so often the case with brilliant women, her story might have gone unnoticed. At best, a footnote on the pages of someone else's story. At worst, another tragic victim of the Holocaust.But as we'll see, Hilferding left behind much more than that. Starting with that suitcase and what was uncovered by the indomitable curiosity of a few women, a handful of historians and psychoanalysts who examined the origins of Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking work, and discovered to their surprise the female medical doctor who was there at the beginning.Eveline List: My name is Eveline List. I studied first history and psychology. And after my doctorate, I decided to start psychoanalytic training to understand something about people. I wanted to understand how, how things and people were connected.Marcy Thompson: It sounds a little bit like Hilferding herself went in to study the same thing.Eveline List: I mean, yeah.Marcy Thompson: What drew you to her? Where did you discover her?Eveline List: Well, I spoke to a friend who was the head of the documentary archives of the resistance movements in Vienna. And then he said, well, uh, aren't you interested in some materials? And I said, well, yeah, what you got? And so he suggested Margarethe Hilferding.I have always been very much into the history of psychoanalysis. So I knew she had been the first one. Of course, I was very interested. They had very little about her. But what, what he gave me was the starting point.Marcy Thompson: Eveline List would soon connect with Hilferding's son, Peter Milford, the same person who had returned to Vienna so many years earlier.Turns out they lived fairly close to each other. When Eveline met Peter, he was well into his 90s.Eveline List: He was intellectually very bright and open, and he also had a very dry humor, but at the same time he was very humble.Marcy Thompson: Peter Milford provided Eveline with a first hand account of his mother's astonishing accomplishments.He traced her story back before the turn of the 20th century, when enormous cultural change was taking place.In the late 19th century, Margarethe Hilferding was part of an unusual historical phenomenon. She was among a growing group of highly educated, liberal Jewish women who studied medicine in Europe. A subset of these women were drawn to the nascent field of psychoanalysis. Outside of academia, these women are unknown. And even within academia, these pioneers have received little attention.Klara Naszkowska: We of course know that that's the tendency to cut out from official history, to cut out the minorities, and that includes women.Marcy Thompson: That's Klara Naszkowska. Cultural historian, professor of women's studies at Montclair State University, and editor of the book, Early Women Psychoanalysts.Naszkowska's research focuses on a somewhat better known Russian physician, who was also a pioneer in the field, Sabina Spielrein.Klara Naszkowska: As I was researching Spielrein, I was discovering more and more names. I mean, I wasn't definitely the first one to discover this, but I discovered for myself that there were so many of those women.Almost all of those women were also Jewish, which was also another factor, ah leading to their disappearance from history. And that while each of them had an individual story, there were so many also common threads in those stories when it comes to gender, Jewishness, anti-SemitismMarcy Thompson: By the late 1800s, a cultural shift was taking place among progressive Jewish families in Europe and Russia, especially those who subscribed to Marxist ideologies. They began educating their daughters.Klara Naszkowska: We have a very typical family there. And that's a Jewish family where parents are either observant or maybe observe some of the holidays. Those parents typically, especially fathers, support their daughters in pursuing university level education, in becoming doctors, in becoming psychoanalysts, and, generally speaking, financially independent professionals, and not marrying.Marcy Thompson: While this describes the characteristics of Margarethe Hilferding's family to a T, it doesn't necessarily explain why Hilferding herself would eventually be drawn to this new field, or what made her into the formidable figure she would become. For that, we need to understand the depth and breadth of her intellect and her overriding desire to work on behalf of women.Candice Dumas: She contributed so significantly to several fields, the field of medicine, the field of psychoanalysis, she really advocated for rights to contraception and abortion. This is the early 1900s.Marcy Thompson: Candice Dumas is a clinical psychologist with a practice in Cape Town, South Africa. She was also interested in tracing the first generation of women in psychoanalysis.But while Dumas was aware of pioneers like Sabina Spielrein, she knew nothing of Margarethe Hilferding, even though she was part of the headwaters of psychoanalysis itself.Candice Dumas: And I think she paved the way for other women to join the fold and be accepted as well at the end of the day.Marcy Thompson: As is the case with so many lost women scientists, Hilferding was undeniably brilliant, excelling well beyond what was expected of her or even her male contemporaries at the time.Candice Dumas: She knew from the very beginning she wanted to study medicine, and she was willing to jump through all the right hoops to get there.Marcy Thompson: To put these hoops in perspective, in 1897, Margarethe was one of three female students who were enrolled to study for an academic degree at the university. That's out of 15 million women who lived in Austria, Hungary at the time.She enrolled to study physics and math, but could only do so if professors allowed women in their classes. Here's Eveline List.Eveline List: They were made fun of and professors were, some of the professors were really neglecting simply that they existed or, you know, didn't let them to their lectures. The argument of the majority who was against that women studying were so far-fetched and ridiculous.You know, like, there are so many bald men and that's a sign of how their brain is functioning. And when women, uh, would start studying, they'd lose their hair and their fertility.Marcy Thompson: Despite these ridiculous attitudes, Margarethe continued to pursue her goal. Heres Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She started taking medical courses on the side as kind of an underground student, until finally that women were allowed to study, officially study medicine.Eveline List: And actually the opening of the medical university happened not because they suddenly got all so enlightened, but that they desperately needed female doctors because in Bosnia, which Austria had occupied, the women refused to go to male doctors. And so they needed female doctors.Marcy Thompson: And in 1903, at age 32, Margarethe Hilferding became the first Austrian woman to receive her medical degree from the University of Vienna after completing her entire formal education there.Things were beginning to change, and although anti-Semitism and misogyny were still alive and well in Austria, the era of progressive Viennese modernism was underway.It was a time of radical social change.Eveline List: There were several emancipatory movements at that time.Marcy Thompson: Austria had been ruled for centuries by the conservative Habsburg dynasty and was solidly Catholic, but more progressive thinking was taking hold.Eveline List: The largest, of course, was the labor movement. There was the women's movement. There were all kinds of health movements.Marcy Thompson: And in the coffeehouse culture that the era is famous for, Margarethe found her way to a group of radical intellectuals who reflected her own desire for progress, the Socialist Students League.Eveline List: They met in one cafe regularly, starting to read the Neue Zeit, which was the social democratic periodical from Germany. They were reading Karl Marx and discussed among each other.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was the group's first female member, and it was there that she met her husband, Rudolf Hilferding, who was seven years her junior. He was also a medical doctor, and, like Margarethe, he was interested in a multitude of subjects. Candice Dumas explains the union.Candice Dumas: It was really an intellectual marriage and a marriage of equals. They were both raised Jewish. And they decided on a civil marriage instead of a religious ceremony.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe worked at the Vienna General Hospital, fighting to be called Frau Doktor, not simply Fraulein. And Rudolf's interest expanded into the field of economics and the need for political reform.Both of them felt frustrated that their medical training didn't prepare them to understand the psychic and social conditions that impacted their patients' lives.Candice Dumas: Rudolf moved away from medicine and veered fully into politics.Marcy Thompson: The couple moved to Berlin, where Rudolf was invited to lecture for the German Social Democratic Party.They had two children, Karl and Peter, and Rudolf threw himself into writing what would become a groundbreaking and career making Marxist treatise called Finance Capital. His career seemed boundless, but Margarethe found herself alone, raising two children and unable to practice as a doctor in Germany.Without a degree from a state controlled university, it was impossible for her to put her vast education and drive to work. So much for all that Marxist talk of emancipation. Here's Eveline List.Eveline List: Here they were talking about all those enlightened ideas, a revolutionary perspective, and then he actually expected her to do all the work by herself, but he followed his interest. All that she had worked for was suddenly impossible.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was faced with a choice.Candice Dumas: He wanted to stay and she needed to go back to where she was free. She packed up two very young children and moved back and looked after them on her own. She loved raising her children, but she also loved her work.Marcy Thompson: Rudolph stayed in Germany. He eventually became the Minister of Finance for two Social Democratic led governments. But their marriage was over. Margarethe returned to Vienna with her children, and set up a medical practice treating women in a working class district.Margarethe's patients had most likely never been to a female doctor. As their physician, she functioned as a gynecologist, but also as a counselor. She saw the impact of their social conditions. She witnessed their suffering. She listened. Here's Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She went into the depths of their psyches and could explore with them. She saw how overburdened women were and how it impacted them economically. It impacted them physically.Marcy Thompson: Her medical training, however, wouldn't have included any way of understanding how these factors contributed to her patient's health. And she wouldn't have had an empirical approach to alleviating their mental suffering.Universities were still years away from offering any kind of psychological training. It just didn't exist. But the new field of psychoanalysis, which had started in Vienna a few years before and was just taking root, offered both a framework for understanding internal psychological struggle, and also a way of placing patients in a broader social context.Both were part of Margarethe's personal mission. Klara Naszkowska explains that psychoanalysis would have offered Margarethe some insight, especially in light of the political turmoil of the time.Klara Naszkowska: In Europe, it was a very broad cultural project. It was a socio-political project. It was a way of looking at people, so included a lot of different factors and therapy was one of them.Marcy Thompson: The pioneering work of Sigmund Freud framed this internal unrest in a new way. Here's Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: Freud was, was looking for connections as what, what's going on underneath, what is driving people's behaviors and emotions and, um, difficulties that they get stuck with.So this is also the realm is that it's not only about getting patients to talk and focusing on what is spoken, but in looking at what is underneath that and what is potentially unspoken.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe would certainly have been familiar with Freud's lectures in Vienna, as well as his written work. His theories were a topic of discussion, especially among the followers of progressive movements.Eveline List believes there was a clear reason that Margarethe was drawn to Freud.Eveline List: There was the idea of being able to understand her patients better.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe Hilferding and Sigmund Freud had many acquaintances in common, and soon enough she made her way to Freud himself.Candice Dumas: It's almost as though it was, it was meant to be that they were going to cross paths.Marcy Thompson: The all male Vienna Psychoanalytic Society originally met at Freud's apartment on Wednesday evenings. But in that cozy enclave where the subconscious lives of men and women would be plumbed, there was some doubt that a woman doctor would have anything of value to contribute. Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: So we know there was a huge debate about whether women actually have that cognitive capacity to become doctors and psychoanalysts, and it's not pretty, let's say.Rosemary Balsam: There were really outrageous things that were said.Marcy Thompson: That's Rosemary Balsam.Rosemary Balsam: Particularly by one of my nemesis, Fritz Wittels, and he said that, well, as medical students, they're harmless, women, because any normal kind of essentially red blooded man in medical school would treat them as prostitutes. But once they graduate, they're a real threat. Nobody should give power to a woman because they'll abuse their power.Marcy Thompson: Rosemary Balsam is a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists of London and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale Medical School.Rosemary Balsam: So this was kind of, you know, an attitude that was shared by a lot of them. Freud himself sort of viewed Vittles as, you know, boys will be boys, and so on.Marcy Thompson: Even though Freud had stated that, quote, women cannot measure up to men in their capacity of sublimation of sexuality, unquote, he was well aware of the progressive thinking in the cultural circles surrounding the group, and he called for the intellectual openness to accept women as members.In 1910, 38 year old Margarethe, a physician with the highest education it was possible for anyone to achieve, a deep political commitment, and mother to two young boys, was taken into consideration as the group's first female member.Klara Naszkowska: They vote, and the vote is in favor of accepting her. But this is kind of like the beginning.Marcy Thompson: It was a historical moment. Although there had been one example of a woman attending a meeting, it was an altogether different accomplishment to be accepted as a member. Margarethe had taken down that barrier as another first. Eveline List.Eveline List: I think she impressed them enormously.Marcy Thompson: Within a year, she presented her own research. It was a paper called On the Basis of Mother Love. It was a thesis that grew directly out of Margarethe's practice as a physician. It would determine her relationship to the field of psychoanalysis, and it would cause some very big waves among Freud and his esteemed male colleagues. More after the break.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe had been a member of Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for less than a year when she presented her revolutionary paper to the group. It was called On the Basis of Mother Love. It should be noted that the actual paper no longer exists. The minutes of the meeting, which were recorded by Otto Rank, on January 11th, 1911, are essentially a summary of Hilferding's presentation.But Rosemary Balsam believes Otto Rank most likely represented the paper accurately.Rosemary Balsam: One of the things that I had appreciated very much about Rank's minutes, it's more open than any kind of notes I'm sure we would write these daysmuch more open and much more descriptiveand so it really does convey her thinking.Marcy Thompson: And Hilferding's thinking proved to be extraordinary. Clara Nashkowska explains.Klara Naszkowska: So this paper and this presentation she gave, Motherly Love, was incredibly ahead of her time in just a mind blowing way.Marcy Thompson: The central thesis of Margarethe's paper was hard for the men in the room to comprehend.Rosemary Balsam: She said there is no maternal instinct.Marcy Thompson: No maternal instinct. Even today, that is a bold assertion. Margarethe put forth the idea that there is no innate maternal love, as she called it.Klara Naszkowska: I mean, it's still, still incredibly progressive. Because she talked about things that we're still dealing with, such as this idea of maternal instinct. This idea that if you don't have it, then you're a bad parent, you're a bad mother.Marcy Thompson: The research that Margarethe conducted for this paper was rooted in the lives of real women. It came directly from her experiences as a physician and as a mother herself. As an extremely rare example of a female physician who treated women, she had unparalleled insight into her patients' lives.Candice Dumas.Candice Dumas: She could explore with her patients, I think, in a way that male doctors at the time couldn't, whether these women actually wanted to be mothers or not. And that was radical thinking for both women and men at that time.Marcy Thompson: This idea went against the grain of how women had been perceived historically, culturally, and biologically. It goes against that same grain today. We are meant to think of ourselves as natural caretakers who immediately bond with our children as a matter of species survival. That's how we are taught that women are wired. And that was precisely the thinking of the men in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.Rosemary Balsam: And I think that it was the kind of Darwinian biological kind of sense that derived from what they all knew from animal life and they were all very taken with how, uh, female animals would protect their young and so on.And it was felt that that was really part of instinctual life and that it applied to us.Marcy Thompson: But Hilferding rejected that idea. She said that while maternal affection isn't automatically instinctual, it could be brought about by physical contact between the mother and baby. Taking Freud's drive theory into consideration, which is based on the idea that organisms have instinctual needs that power certain behaviors, Hilferding put forward a new idea about instinct.Eveline List explains.Eveline List: If it's not sort of something inborn, then obviously it needs a relationship. And it's the relationship to whom? And of course, it's the mother. So the life saving and drive inducing comes from the relationship between mother and child. And then of course, that capacity of the woman is nothing innate either.It has to develop. And so the whole drive dynamics is something psychosocial alongside of course a biological basis because I mean psychoanalysis is not some esoteric belief, but but of course without the body there's nothing.Rosemary Balsam: Hilferding brought the body right into the room and talked about birthing.Marcy Thompson: Let's pause for a second and remind ourselves of the year. It was 1911. In front of a group of well educated but relatively unenlightened men, men who knew little about internal female struggles, there was Margarethe Hilferding talking about the sometimes brutal, physical, and emotional aspects of motherhood.And she was putting it in psychoanalytic terms.Rosemary Balsam: So she tied, which I have long felt, but that that the quality of the birth experience probably influences the relationship to that child. So Hilferding was quite observant about that and talked about the psychological surround of the mother, but also the physicality of, um, the act of birthing.Marcy Thompson: It was shocking to her audience. Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: And when she gave that presentation at that time this all male group did not like it. They did not like it. And we still do it, but they definitely did it. We still idealize this motherly love, as she, as she called it. And they, they were not having it. They completely rejected her presentation.Marcy Thompson: Motherly love to this group would seem to have a particular definition, one that was inborn and could not be challenged, even using a psychoanalytic framework as Margarethe did. Eveline List, again.Eveline List: Psychoanalysis is interested in the body as something that has meaning. It's just the symbolized body that really counts in psychoanalysis.Rosemary Balsam: So the interaction between the mother and child is central in Hilferding, and she said, this is, I find, uh, absolutely brilliant. She said, if we assume an Oedipal complex in the child, it finds its origin in sexual excitation by way of the mother, the prerequisite for which is an equally erotic feeling on the mother's part.It follows then that at certain times the child does represent for the mother a natural sex object, and so on.Marcy Thompson: This notion would have been startling to the men in attendance because it pushed Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex in a new direction. A direction that involved the mother and child relationship as primary.Rosemary Balsam: Another thing that she said was that there exists between a mother and child certain sexual relationships which must be capable of further development.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was not only charting new territory, she was laying down the path for further exploration. She brought long overlooked desires and fears of motherhood into the conversation.According to Klara Naszkowska.Klara Naszkowska: She talked about how the relationship between a mother and her fetus or baby or child is complicated, complex, nuanced, and ambivalent.Marcy Thompson: Ultimately, she took on a subject that is still taboo, the existence of women as sexual beings before, during, and after motherhood. Candice Dumas points out why that was problematic.Candice Dumas: That was radical thinking for both women and men at that time. The different reactions women have to motherhood, which back then was also not spoken about. Today, it's still difficult to speak about. I see patients in my practice that if they are not in love with their babies from day one, they feel immense guilt that they are doing something wrong as a woman and as a mother.Klara Naszkowska: I teach my students about this and I ask them about maternal instinct and a lot of them think, no, no, no, that's a natural thing. They don't see it as a social construct, which it actually is.Marcy Thompson: As hard as it is for us to grapple with these conflicting feelings today, it was practically crippling for the esteemed members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who had a very particular idea of who and what women should be, even in this extremely progressive bubble.They were living in a country where the cult of the Virgin Mary had been the norm for centuries. Women's maternal love was not only ingrained, it was a cultural necessity.Candice Dumas: I think personally they experienced this as a threat.Marcy Thompson: They held tight to the idea that maternal love was inborn, and anything suggesting otherwise was due to the fact that a mother was, in the words of one member, degenerate. To this, all Margarethe said was, It just won't do.Rosemary Balsam: I think that she definitely was disappointed. However, Hilferding was pretty tough minded.Marcy Thompson: But her presentation was essentially rejected. Even worse, it was erased. Possibly by Freud himself. Which wouldn't have been unusual.Rosemary Balsam: People who broke from Freud, almost every one of them had more to say about females than Freud. And that seemed to be a kind of unconscious threat. And when she said this won't do, I think that, uh, that's, that would be the beginning of a lot of discord.Marcy Thompson: Within months, the group experienced some seismic shifts, ultimately resulting in a splinter group who followed Alfred Adler. As for Freud, his true feelings about Margarethe may have been expressed in the letter he wrote to Carl Jung.When she left the group, along with others, Freud was not unhappy to be losing their only female member. He referred to her as their only doktor weib, which, according to Eveline List, he meant derogatorily. She goes so far as to say that he was calling Margarethe a bitch of a doctor. Never one to depend on a man for approval, Margarethe moved on.But On the Basis of Mother Love would be Margarethe's only contribution to the field. Its impact, if it had one, was brief.Candice Dumas: This paper essentially disappeared. For a hundred years, nobody read any of of her work.Klara Naszkowska: And these themes basically disappear from psychoanalysis.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe Hilding did not need the validation of a group or dependence on its leader to do what she believed in most: caring for her patients, and fighting to uphold the values of social democratic politics. For her, there was still plenty of work to do.Klara Naszkowska: She is a counselor because part of her service, mostly for the working class, for the poor, is counseling on sexuality and birth control and sexual relationships and so on.Marcy Thompson: And so, that is what she returned to, serving her patients, fighting for their rights, to birth control, to abortion, to a living wage. In just a few years, the First World War began. Margarethe continued to raise her two sons. And when the war was over, the Social Democratic Party saw some success on behalf of working people.Eveline List: She was a regular activist in the party and gave speeches in many fields. And she was organizing the Social Democratic Doctors and she founded that society. And she was, of course, a women's rights activist.Marcy Thompson: This period of time was known as Red Vienna. It lasted through the mid 1930s, and saw the rise of socialist organizing and workers power.Eveline List: She was very involved in political life, one could say.Marcy Thompson: But as she went up against the Catholic Church to fight for these rights, Margarethe experienced considerable heartbreak when her son Karl converted to Catholicism at age 19.Candice Dumas: His baptism and confirmation coincided with a presentation she gave where she was criticizing the role of the Catholic Church in relation to abortion laws. It was a big disappointment for her.Marcy Thompson: Despite this, Margarethe believed deeply that education itself was a source of political power as it had been for her.Candice Dumas: She really honestly believed that with enough education that thatanti-Semitism could be eradicated, that people could enlighten themselves beyond that, that wouldn't become as important anymore.Marcy Thompson: The gains of Red Vienna were short lived. In 1934, the Austro-fascists banned the Social Democratic Party, and practically overnight, the entire country was ruled under the ultra conservative, anti-Semitic Austro-fascists. Margarethe was temporarily imprisoned, and lost her public positions, her home, her practice, her source of income, and her rights.But, as the years wore on, and conditions for Jews continued to decline, she remained dedicated to helping people whose situation was worse than hers.Eveline List: Hilferding, she loved being a doctor, doing the work of a doctor and the Rothschild, you say, we say Rothschild, was the only Jewish hospital that still existed. And she was allowed to walk there. She was not allowed to use public transport. She was also not allowed to sit on a public bench. She worked there a few hours every day and then walked back.Marcy Thompson: In 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany. Nazis entered Vienna, the streets lined with people waving flags. Hitler rode through the city standing in an open car, appearing to be adored by all. Everything that Margarethe and the Social Democratic Party worked for was over. Margarethe, who was 66 at the time, was forced to live in a Jewish old person's home in Vienna.This is what it was called, but it was actually a filthy, overcrowded prison for older Jews who had been forcibly moved from their homes, and whose rights were taken away. Here's Candice Dumas again.Candice Dumas: It seems as though in these old age ghettos, she was really able to, without a lot of resources, she was still able to try and provide care, medical and psychological care, to, to the other people imprisoned there as well.Marcy Thompson: Her son, Peter, managed to escape to New Zealand. And even though Margaret had a narrow window of opportunity to leave for France, she didnt take advantage of it.Candice Dumas: She was dedicated to her work. She would leave when she was ready. And unfortunately, when she was ready, it was too late.Marcy Thompson: In 1941, systemic mass deportations of Jews began. In the end, Hilferding was a woman who lived according to her ideas and convictions. But her foray into psychoanalysis, as brilliant as it was, was cut short. In total, the notes on her one psychoanalytic paper take up just 14 pages of the four volumes of the Minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society.But that doesn't mean we can't learn from that paper now.Rosemary Balsam: She really was a pioneer here and she really had prescient ideas.Marcy Thompson: So the question is, how is it that a paper written more than a hundred years ago is still ahead of its time? The forces working against Margarethe Hilferding were the same forces that have been working against women throughout time, and that work against us today.In Rosemary Balsam's words, it's due to a conspiracy of silence.Rosemary Balsam: I mean, the silence has been there, uh, for centuries upon centuries upon centuries, and I think that it's very much to the advantage of male power that people are in a conspiracy of silence.Marcy Thompson: The silencing that Margarethe Hilferding experienced came long before the Holocaust. But eventually, that would silence her, too. Which brings us back to the suitcase, and the letter that was found inside it when her son Peter returned after the war.Margarethe letter (German): Meine lieben buben, lieber Karl und lieber Peter.Margarethe letter (English): My dear boys, dear Karl, dear Peter.Marcy Thompson: She wrote this letter in June 1942. It was her 71st birthday. The next day, she would be transported to Theresienstadt, which served as a temporary holding place for Jews being moved to camps farther east.Margarethe letter (English): Now, it seems that my departure is getting serious after all, but not closer to you and not under favorable conditions.Marcy Thompson: She put this letter in that suitcase, which she managed to get to her sister's house on the outskirts of Vienna.Margarethe letter (English): I expected that we would probably never see each other again, that we would never hear from each other again, that we wouldn't even know where we are. I had to expect that, but it was still a long way off.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe was taken from Vienna to Theresienstadt by train. There, Margarethe might have seen her brother, Otto Honigsberg, who died in Theresienstadt shortly after.Margarethe letter (English): It is now over a year since I received a Red Cross reply to my letter from Peter, and two months since I've heard from Karl.Marcy Thompson: Margarethe did not know that her son Karl had been murdered in Auschwitz, or that her ex-husband Rudolf had been tortured to death in Paris by the Gestapo.Margarethe letter (English): I have not been so bad on the whole, and have always kept my head up until now. Will that be possible any longer? I certainly intend to, but it will be very difficult.Marcy Thompson: Not long after being transported to Theresienstadt, Margarethe was sent to Treblinka, a concentration camp.Margarethe letter (English): And now it's my 71st birthday. I don't want to be sentimental, but it's actually a sad day for me.Marcy Thompson: Upon arriving in Treblinka, Margarethe was murdered almost immediately.Margarethe letter (English): One shouldn't complain if one has to leave life soon. It's about time.Marcy Thompson: Although she would disappear, her work was not for nothing. Eventually her son Peter would read this letter and understand the depth of his mother's love and her remarkable story. A story where she was not lost, after all.Margarethe letter (English): The only happiness is that you are on the outside.Mother.Marcy Thompson: On January 27th, we observe Holocaust Memorial Day. And this year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - Birkenau. We dedicate this episode of Lost Women of Science to all those, like Margarethe Hilferding, who did not survive.I'm Marcy Thompson, and I produced this episode. Deborah Unger was Senior Managing Producer.Echo Finch designed and engineered our sound. Our music was composed by Lizzie Younan. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiyah. Lily Whear created the art. Thank you to our co-executive producers, Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, and to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager. Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American.Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ann Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. For a transcript of this episode and for more information about Margarethe Hilferding, please visit our website, lostwomenofscience.org, and sign up so you'll never miss an episode.Further ReadingEarly Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance. Edited by Klara Naszkowska. Routledge, 2024Scientific Meeting on January 11, 1911, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: Volume III: 1910-1911. Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn. International Universities Press, 1962Women of the Wednesday Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein, and Hug-Hellmuth, by Rosemary Marshall Balsam, in American Imago, Vol. 60, No. 3; Fall 2003Lisa Appignanesi on Women & Freud, an extract from Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Lisa Appignanesi. Freud Museum London, October 2024
