Ruth Mack Brunswick was an American psychoanalyst. She is remembered for her participation in the development of Freudian theory in the 1920s and 1930s, and as close confidant and collaborator with Sigmund Freud.
Background
Ruth Mack Brunswick was born on February 17, 1897 in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Julian William Mack, lawyer and spokesman for liberal Jewry, and Jessie (Fox) Mack, both of German-Jewish descent.
Her father was elected to the recently established Cook County juvenile court when his daughter was entering grade school, and he soon became identified nationally with Reform Judaism and public-minded activism. The circumstances of Ruth Mack's early years prepared her for the cosmopolitan surroundings in which she would spend her life.
Education
In 1914 Brunswick entered Radcliffe College, where she studied philosophy and psychology. Following graduation from Radcliffe in 1918, she entered Tufts Medical School, completing the program with honors four years later.
Although not an outstanding student, her interest in psychiatry led her to work with Elmer Ernest Southard at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital while yet an undergraduate. She sang in the choral society and was elected May Queen; along with two classmates, Estelle Frankfurter and Elizabeth Brandeis, she helped found Radcliffe's chapter of Menorah and served as its president.
When, in 1923, Blumgart received a Mosely traveling fellowship for further medical study in London, Brunswick went to Vienna to pursue her interest in psychoanalysis.
Brunswick was an intimate associate of Freud's family, as well as a devoted and talented student whose gifts as a sensitive analyst and contributor to psychoanalytic theory were quickly recognized.
Career
During the next thirteen years her energies were first focused on her own instruction in psychoanalytic methods and then on the guidance of other students who had come to Vienna to study under Freud. She was a teacher at the Psychoanalytic Institute. Meanwhile, she maintained ties across the Atlantic, becoming an editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly when it was established in the United States in 1932.
Freud selected her to continue treatment of one of his best-known patients, the Wolf-man, whose initial treatment he described in History of an Infantile Neurosis.
Brunswick saw this patient from October 1926 through February 1927, and her vivid narrative of the analysis and treatment she undertook is a brilliant model of a didactic case history. Published originally in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1928), it is a classic exposition of the task of the mature and affective analyst and remains the work for which she is best known. Immersed in her work, closely tied to Freud yet still with many friends and colleagues in the resident American colony, Brunswick enjoyed a considerable professional reputation.
Vienna during the 1920's was a magnet for American intellectuals and artists who enjoyed the congenial and stimulating milieu of a European urban culture in which "advanced" ideas were accepted and assimilated.
The happy and productive years that followed ended abruptly in 1938, when the Nazis entered Vienna. The Brunswicks, faced with the necessity of relocating their home and work, chose to settle permanently in New York City, where Brunswick continued to practice psychoanalysis as a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. These were years also spent giving aid and encouragement to European refugees from Nazism. The move to New York was attended by other problems; poor health diminished her energies and curtailed her active professional role.
Her name is not listed as an editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly from 1938 to 1944, when she resumed that position on the masthead of the journal. Her divorce from Mark Brunswick in 1945 seemed to be accompanied by renewed vitality, and her colleagues at the Psychoanalytic Institute anticipated her increased contribution to their work. This expectation heightened the shock of her sudden death shortly after apparent recovery from pneumonia. Her body was cremated, and in accordance with her wishes, no memorial service was held at the time.
Both of her articles "The Analysis of a Case of Paranoia" and "The Preoedipal Phase of the Libido Development" also indicate the critical importance of Freud's collaboration in Brunswick's work. Brunswick's contribution to psychoanalysis, however, extended beyond these writings.
(1929. 8°. 54 S., 1 Bl., (= Sonderdruck aus der "Internati...)
Views
Her special concern was the treatment of the severely ill, those whose symptoms others had seen as intractable to psychoanalytic techniques. Much of her work focused on the elaboration of unresolved childhood trauma in adult life, a subject of major concern in the development of psychoanalytic theory.
Her close association with Freud from the outset of her career identified Brunswick as an unusually gifted and perceptive analytic practitioner.
Membership
Ruth Brunswick was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Personality
Ruth Brunswick was a slight, vivacious, and much admired young woman, active in college affairs and responsive to opportunities for intellectual and social leadership.
Connections
In the summer of her junior year she married Herrman L. Blumgart, a student at Harvard Medical School.
She was fortunate in being able to commence her training as Freud's analysand, and when her marriage ended in divorce in 1924, she stayed on in Vienna.
Among her American associates were two cousins of her former husband: David Brunswick, a student of psychoanalysis, and his brother Mark, a composer-musician whom Ruth married in 1928. The couple returned briefly to the United States in 1929 spending the year in New York City, where their daughter, Mathilda Juliana, was born; they reestablished residence in Vienna in 1930.