Beatrice Moses Hinkle was an American feminist, psychoanalyst and writer. She was a co-founder of the first psychotherapeutic clinic in the United States.
Background
Beatrice Moses Hinkle was born on October 10, 1874 in San Francisco, California, United States. She was the only child of B. Frederick Moses, a physician, and Elizabeth Benchley Van Geisen Moses. Her father was killed in an accident in a carriage which he and his pregnant wife were riding; Hinkle used to relate the event to illustrate her will to live even before her birth.
Education
She was educated privately in San Francisco. When her husband discouraged her desire to become a lawyer, she entered the hitherto all-male Cooper Medical School (now the medical department of Stanford University); she graduated in 1899.
Career
In 1899 Hinkle was appointed San Francisco city physician and became the first woman in the country to serve as a public health doctor. She commenced her duties during a four-year epidemic of bubonic plague. Working with its victims, Hinkle was struck by their varied reactions to the same infection and was thus led to the practice of suggestion, an early form of psychotherapy.
In 1905 she moved with her children to New York, where she was professionally associated with Charles R. Dana. In 1908 she and Dana established the first psychotherapeutic clinic in the United States, at the Cornell medical college. In 1909 the journal Psychotherapy published her article "Methods of Psychotherapy, " which discussed yoga, hypnotism, and psychoanalysis. Hinkle had read Sigmund Freud's seminal Studien Uber Hysterie and was impelled in the same year to go abroad to study the new method being practiced by Freud and his disciples, including Carl Gustav Jung. There was as yet no split within the psychoanalytic ranks, and Hinkle's analysis was conducted along Freudian lines. From her first conversation with Jung, however, she realized that she had found the approach to the human psyche she had sought, later outlined in Jung's controversial Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912). Hinkle's English translation of this work, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), clearly aligned her with Jung. Around 1915 Hinkle returned to New York, where she lived and practiced until her death. About this same time she ended her brief marriage to a man named Percy Eastwick, thought to have been a banking executive.
By 1916 she was associated with the neurological departments of Cornell medical school and the New York Post-Graduate Medical School. Although Hinkle basically shared Jung's views, she was eclectic. In April 1922 she published in Psychoanalytic Review "A Study of Psychological Types, " which, while acknowledging the influence of Jung's earlier work on types (for example, extrovert and introvert), emphasized significantly different factors.
In 1923 Hinkle published her major work, The Recreating of the Individual, which incorporated her essay on types. In it she discussed the whole field of psychoanalysis and her experience with it, but the chapters on women and artists made a particularly original contribution.
In 1929 Hinkle published her translation of Dirk Coster's type-conscious work, The Living and the Lifeless. Publication, however, was not Hinkle's characteristic mode of expression. In fact, she wrote her major book only during a rare period of lowered spirits following the death of a close friend and colleague, Constance E. Long.
Hinkle, although supporting solidarity among women, saw any real change in women's actual stature as the result only of the individual development of repressed faculties of independent thinking and acting. In "Chaos of Modern Marriage, " she stated, "There is no sex antagonism between persons who have freed themselves from infantile desires and are emotionally mature. " Hinkle believed that artists, among whom she numbered many of her own patients, were capable of directing the same creativity toward the solution of their life problems as to the problems of art, citing Goethe as an exemplar. Her views could be subsumed, in fact, under one supreme value suggested in the title of her 1923 work, in whose introduction she quoted Bergson's statement on "the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from outside but causes to spring from within. "
Personality
A small woman, warm and intuitive, with great personal magnetism, Hinkle was described by Jung in a letter to Freud as "an American charmer. " Her appearance was complemented by her powerful mind, deep human wisdom, and indomitable purpose.
A private person, Hinkle often said that she had learned the important truths of life not out of books but from experience. Her foremost interests were the lives and problems of her patients, for whom her dedication taxed even her robust health. Yet her self-development included travel, particularly visits to the Orient; friendships as unusual as that with Tobagola, an African primitive whom she assisted in America; and reading widely in fields other than her own. There were few household arts she did not deliberately master in her pursuit of wholeness.
Connections
In 1892 Hinkle married Walter Scott Hinkle, the city assistant district attorney. In 1899 her husband died, and Hinkle was left with two children to support.