Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Gerda Barag (1909-1981)

Gerda Dina Barag, born in Berlin as the daughter of a physician, was active in the Zionist movement from a young age. She studied medicine in Berlin, where she met her husband, the Russian-born physician Gershon Barag (1902–1957). He had lived in Palestine since childhood, had studied medicine in Germany, and was undergoing training analysis in Berlin with Jenö Harnik. After Hitler's rise to power, Gerda Barag interrupted her studies and followed her husband to Zurich, Switzerland, where she worked at the psychiatric clinic in Münsingen. She later returned to Germany to complete her medical studies in Berlin, earning her doctorate in 1935.
At the end of 1935, the Barags emigrated via Switzerland and London to Palestine, settling in Tel Aviv. Gerda Barag specialized in psychiatry and underwent training analysis with Mosche Wulff from 1935 to 1938. In 1946, like her husband before her, she became a full member of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society. In 1948 the Society was renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel), to which Gerda Barag served as treasurer for twenty years. She taught at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute and the School of Psychiatry at Tel Aviv University. Her daughter became a psychiatrist like her parents, while her son, Dan, became a professor of archaeology.
Gerda Barag's 1956 article on late reactions among liberated concentration camp prisoners was of particular significance. She was the first to treat Shoah survivors as a distinct group and attributed the patients' consciousness disorders to their traumatic experiences in the KZ. This marked a turning point in psychiatric research on that topic in Israel, as no causal connection between mental illness and Shoah trauma had been recognized until then.
Gerda Barag contracted pancreatic cancer at the end of her life and passed away at the age of 72 from a heart attack. (Top of the article)

Vicky Bental née Newman (1906-1992)

Vicky Bental was born in Cologne as Victoria Newman, the daughter of Rudolph Newman and Else née Oppenheimer, and grew up in Berlin. She studied medicine at various universities, including Vienna, where she contracted tuberculosis and had to interrupt her studies. In 1933, she returned to Berlin and continued her clinical training at the Charité. During this time, she joined Zionist groups and met her future husband, bank employee Artur Blumenthal, later known as Asher Bental (1900–1976), whom she married in 1934. The couple had three children.
In 1935, she was barred from specialist medical training due to her Jewish heritage. A year later, the Blumenthals emigrated to Palestine, eventually settling in Haifa in 1938. Vicky Bental underwent training analysis with Berta Grünspan and began practicing as a psychoanalyst in 1949. The following year, she obtained her medical license, and in 1963, she was officially recognized as a specialist in psychiatry.
When the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society was renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel, HHBI) in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, Vicky Bental was among its first members. In 1953, she represented the HHBI at the IPA Congress in London, and from 1970 to 1975, she served as its president. She conducted introductory courses in psychoanalysis for educators in Haifa and from local kibbutzim, taught psychology at the Oranim Teachers College, and, from the 1960s onward, worked as a consultant for Youth Aliyah (Aliyat Hano’ar).
Vicky Bental passed away at the age of 85 in Haifa due to complications from a stroke. (Top of the article)

Margarete Miriam Brandt (1892-1977)

Margarete Miriam Brandt was born in Bronischewitz, Posen, as the eldest of three children of estate owner Isaak Brandt and his wife, Amalie Joachim. In 1911, she completed her Abitur at the Auguste-Viktoria-Schule zu Charlottenburg in Berlin, and then attended the Land- und Hauswirtschafts-Frauenschule Arvedshof in Saxony. She went on to study medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, where she earned her doctorate in 1918. The following year, she opened a general medical practice in Berlin. From 1926 to 1933, she also served as a municipal school doctor in Berlin-Lichtenberg. In 1927, she joined the Verein sozialistischer Ärzte. Around the same time, she began training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, with Franz Alexander as her training analyst and Max Eitingon as supervising analyst.
After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Margarete Brandt emigrated to Palestine, following Max Eitingon. A year later, she became Eitingon’s first assistant at the Palestine Psychoanalytic Institute in Jerusalem, where she worked as a psychoanalyst until her retirement in 1964. In 1935, she became an associate member of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society and was granted full membership in 1939. After 1948, the Society was renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel). She worked closely with the school welfare system in Jerusalem, providing care for children with behavioral difficulties. Following Eitingon’s death in 1943, she took over the leadership of the Psychoanalytic Institute, which was subsequently renamed the Max Eitingon Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Miriam Margarete Brandt remained unmarried and lived with her sister, Elfriede Brandt, in their home in Jerusalem, which also housed the Psychoanalytic Institute. (Top of the article)

Yolanda Gampel

Yolanda Mejerovich Gampel was born in Buenos Aires. She studied psychology in Buenos Aires and became acquainted with the Argentine psychoanalytic school before moving to Israel in 1963. Since a doctorate was required for training at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel HHBI)—she earned her PhD in 1973 under Didier Anzieu at the University of Paris-Nanterre with a dissertation on body image.
She then returned to Israel, completed her psychoanalytic training, and became a training analyst and supervisor at HHBI. From 1989 to 1991, she served as president of HHBI, and from 2001 to 2005, she was vice president of the European Psychoanalytical Federation. From 2007 to 2011, she was a board member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Until her retirement, she taught psychology and psychotherapy at the Sackler Medical School and the School of Psychological Science at Tel Aviv University. Additionally, she was a visiting professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre (1985–1987) and the University of Lyon 2 (2000–2001). In 2001, she received the Hayman Prize, awarded by the IPA, for her publications on traumatised children and adults, and in 2005, she was honored with the Sigourney Award for significant contributions to the field of psychoanalysis.
Yolanda Gampel's work focuses on the effects of sociopolitical violence on children and adolescents. She became particularly well known for her studies on the understanding of trauma and its transgenerational transmission. Her starting point was her psychoanalytic work with Holocaust survivors and their children, as well as investigations into the ability to cope with traumatic situations. In this context, Yolanda Gampel introduced the term "radioactive identification": The experience of traumatic violence has "contaminated" the psyche and body of survivors and spreads its diffuse harmful effects like "radioactive fallout." Hidden in images, nightmares, and symptoms, the trauma remains virulent and can be passed on to subsequent generations through unconscious "radioactive identification."
Since the First Intifada (1987–1993), Yolanda Gampel has been working on an Israeli-Palestinian mental health project, training professionals in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Tel Aviv and Gaza. (Top of the article)

Naomi Glickson-Weiss (1911-1979)

Naomi Gluecksohn (Glueckson, Glücksohn, Glikson, Glickson) was born in Odessa as the eldest daughter of Moses Gluecksohn (Moshe Glikson) and Malka (Masha) née Leipuner. Her father was a journalist and a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Odessa. In 1919, her family immigrated to Palestine, where her father served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Haaretz from 1923 to 1938.
From 1931 to 1933, Naomi Glücksohn studied psychology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. After returning to Palestine, she was among the first candidates at the training institute of the Chewrah Psychoanalytith b'Erez Israel in Jerusalem, which opened in 1934. By then married to Abraham Weiss, she became an associate member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) in 1958, a full member in 1967, and later a training analyst. From 1975 to 1977, she served as chair of the training committee at the Max Eitingon Institute of Psychoanalysis in Jerusalem. She made significant contributions to the development of child analysis in Israel. (Top of the article)

Lea Goldberg (1921-2011)

Lea Goldberg Israeler was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, as the daughter of the Polish-Jewish entrepreneur Wolf Goldberg and his wife Hermine, née Israeler. Her younger sister, Raquel Berman, also became a psychoanalyst. Lea Goldberg attended high school in Vilnius, Lithuania, until her family embarked on a perilous escape following the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Their journey took them through Lithuania, the Soviet Union, Korea, and Japan before finally reaching Mexico.
From 1944 to 1947, Lea Goldberg studied at the Academia de San Carlos, an art school in Mexico City. After marrying a Polish psychiatrist, she moved to Argentina. Between 1951 and 1958, she studied medicine in Buenos Aires, earned her doctorate, and completed psychoanalytic training at the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA). In 1957, she was a member of the APA committee that organised the 5th Symposium on Child Psychoanalysis. A year later, she emigrated to Israel, where she worked as an analyst for four years.
From 1962, she spent several years in Mexico again and became a member of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Mexicana. She later moved to the United States, practicing as a psychoanalyst in Washington, D.C., from 1970 to 1985. During this time, she worked at the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric clinic in Rockville, where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had established a therapeutic community with family-like structures in the 1930s and 1940s.br> In 1985, she returned to Israel, where she became a member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) and taught and worked as a practicing psychoanalyst until 2006. In 1989, she participated as a moderator and group leader at the first East European Seminar of the EPF, which took place in Hungary.
In 2006, she returned to her family in Mexico, where she passed away at the age of 89. (Top of the article)

Berta Grünspan (1890-1975)

Berta (Betty Beile) Grünspan was born as the second of six children of the Jewish merchant Hermann Grünspan in Niedzybrodrie, Galicia, where she attended the German-language school. At the age of fourteen, she had to contribute to the family’s livelihood by tutoring neighbourhood children. At seventeen, she moved to Vienna to train as a nurse. Subsequently she worked as a surgical nurse at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna. During World War I, she cared for wounded soldiers on the Serbian front and decided to become a doctor. She completed her secondary education and studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1917 to 1924. Afterward, she worked as a general practitioner at the Lainzer Versorgungsheim der Stadt Wien.
Berta Grünspan's interest and involvement in the socialist movement, Zionism, and women's emancipation brought her into contact with the Vienna analysts and psychoanalytic theories in the 1920s. She underwent analysis with Willi Hoffer and, from 1933, control analyses with Hermann Nunberg, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Grete Bibring. In 1937, she became an associate member of the Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung and also worked at the Psychoanalytic Clinic. Among her analysands at the time was the psychoanalyst Frederick Wyatt.
After losing her position at the Versorgungsheim in 1933, Berta Grünspan worked in a Jewish private hospital. In 1938, when the Nazis invaded Vienna, she emigrated to Palestine. She settled in Haifa and opened a psychoanalytic practice in 1941. As a member and training analyst of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b'Erez-Israel), renamed Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel, HHBI) in 1948, she played a key role in the development of psychoanalysis in Palestine. Together with Karl Friedjung and Ilja Schalit, she formed the influential Haifa Group within the HHBI.
In 1955, Berta Grünspan moved to the kibbutz of Yfat, where she lived and worked as a doctor and analyst until her death. Even in her eighties, she continued to hold consultations in the psychiatric department of the nearby hospital in Afula. She passed away from cancer at the age of 85. (Top of the article)

Ruth Jaffe (1907-1996)

Ruth Jaffe was born in Berlin as an only child to a German-Jewish family. Her father, Alfons Jaffe, was an industrialist, her mother, Alice, née Holländer, was a gymnastics teacher. From 1927 to 1933, Ruth Jaffe studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna, completing her state examination at the Berlin University in 1933. Following Hitler’s rise to power she had to abandon her specialist training at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 and was qualified as a doctor in 1943 in Zurich on the subject of the prognosis of children with brain tumors. That same year, she emigrated to Palestine.
After two years of voluntary work at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, she was unable to find a position as a physician. From 1936 to 1937, she retrained as a social worker at Siddy Wronsky's "School for Social Service." Thereafter she directed the department of welfare of the Vaad Leumi (National Council of Jews in Palestine) in Rishon LeZion from 1938 to 1943 before training as a psychiatrist. From 1943 to 1949, she worked at the Geha Mental Health Center, where she became its medical director in 1951. In 1953, she was appointed medical director of the Shalvata Mental Health Hospital in Magdiel, Hod HaSharon, a position she held until her retirement in 1973.
With Heinrich Winnik she was among the first psychoanalysts in Israel who directed mental health hospitals. Her training analyst was Moshe Wulff, who was a co-founder of the psychoanalytic society in Russia and later in Palestine. In 1950, Ruth Jaffe became an associate member, and in 1954, a full member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel). Since 1960 she was a training analyst at the Israel Institute of Psychoanalysis. Beginning in 1968, she taught psychiatry in the medical school of Tel Aviv University. One of her main interests was the research of survival strategies by Holocaust survivors. (Top of the article)

Fanja Lowtzky née Schwartzmann (1873-1965)

Fanja (Fanny) Lowtzky was born in Kyiv as one of seven children of a prosperous Russian-Jewish textile entrepreneur by the name of Isaak Schwarzmann. One of her brothers was the religion philosopher Lev Shestov (Leo Schwarzmann). In 1898, she started philosophy studies in Bern and graduated in 1910 with a doctorate thesis on Heinrich Rickert. Since 1898 she was married to the Russian composer Hermann Lowtzky (1871–1957). In 1914 the couple moved to Geneva, where they lived until 1923. Whether she underwent an initial analysis with Sabina Spielrein in Geneva is unconfirmed.
In 1923, Fanja Lowtzky went to Berlin, where she entered into training analysis with Max Eitingon, who was also of Russian origin. From 1928 to 1935, she was a full member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft. In 1935, her book on Søren Kierkegaard was published in which she described how close Kierkegaard came to discovering his Oedipus conflict, which he sought to resolve using philosophical and religious concepts.
Following Hitler’s gain of power Fanja Lowtzky emigrated to Paris with her husband in 1933, where she became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. One of her analysands during this time was the French writer Raymond Queneau. In 1939, Fanja Lowtzky and her husband emigrated to Palestine. In 1941, she became a full member and, in 1944, a training analyst of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b’Erez-Israel CPEI) founded by Max Eitingon, Moshe Wulff, Anna Smeliansky, and others in 1933.
In 1940 she initiated a seminar for teachers, youth counselors and kindergarten teachers in the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute. This two-year course on psychoanalytic remedial education, inspired by August Aichhorn’s work with neglected children, provided a major contribution to the influence of psychoanalytic thinking in the Israeli educational system. With the encouragement of Hadassah Medical Organisation, the seminar led to the initiation of the Palestine Association for Mental Hygiene and the Journal Higiena Ruhanith [Journal for spiritual Hygiene] in 1942.
Within the CPEI - renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel HHBI) in 1948 - Lowtzky’s educational approach as a non-medical "lay analyst" met with resistance. She was criticised for deviating too far from classical psychoanalytic methods and for diluting Aichhorn’s approach by granting too much freedom. In 1952, the HHBI decided to close her educational seminar. Fanny Lowtzky continued working as a training analyst within the Israel society for another four years before moving to Zurich in 1956, where she passed away at the age of 91. (Top of the article)

Hilde Marberg geb. Nussbaum (1911-1989)

The child psychiatrist Hilde Marberg was born as Mathilde Nussbaum in Freiburg, the daughter of Max Nussbaum and Fanny Maier. She grew up in a prominent Jewish family in Hanau, where her father was a lawyer and notary. She began studying medicine but had to break her studies in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power. In 1934, she and her family emigrated via Basel to Palestine. Mathilde Nussbaum returned to Switzerland to complete her studies and internship and graduated at the University of Basel in 1936.
She then returned to Palestine and served as a physician in the Zionist paramilitary organisation “Hagana” during the Arab Revolt. She supported herself by working as a laboratory assistant. In 1939, she married the physician and bacteriologist Kurt Marberg (1910–1964). They had a daughter and a son.
The Marberg couple initially lived in Haifa before settling in Givatayim in the Tel Aviv area, where Hilde Marberg worked as a child psychiatrist, e. g. at Hadassah Hospital and Tel Hashomer Hospital. Subsequently she became chief psychiatrist for children at the mental health clinic in Ramat Chen, headed by Franz Brüll, a position she held until her retirement in 1972. She was an associate member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) where she gave a lecture on a case of conversion hysteria in 1952. Additionally, she taught child psychiatry at the school of medicine and department of psychology at Tel Aviv University.
Hilde M. Marberg died of cancer at the age of 78.. (Top of the article)

Noemi Mibashan de Goldenberg (1923-2013)

Noemi Mibashan’s parents were originally from Romania and had emigrated to Palestine several years before Noemi's birth. Her father, Abraham Mibashan, taught Hebrew and was an active Zionist. Her mother, Rosa Shoshana Rosenblat, had studied art in Vienna. In the 1920s, the family returned to Romania and later emigrated to Argentina, where Noemi Mibashan attended an English school in Buenos Aires and worked as a translator. In the 1940s, she translated, among others, works by Alfred Döblin and Lion Feuchtwanger into Spanish, as well as Franziska Baumgarten's book Das Heldentum der Akademikerinnen im Kriege [El heroísmo de las universitarias durante la guerra (1952)].
She married Isaac Goldenberg (1914–2006), an Argentine lawyer and later president of the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas. They had two daughters, Ana Lia (*1948) and Rut. Noemi Mibashan de Goldenberg studied medicine in Buenos Aires and underwent psychoanalytic training with Marie Langer, co-founder of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina. Later she did further analysis with Willy Baranger. She became associated with the Kleinian Argentine school and worked as a psychoanalyst in Argentina until 1972. That year she emigrated to Israel with her two daughters, settling in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv.
Noemi Mibashan was a training analyst and supervisor at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) and taught psychotherapy at Tel Aviv University. She worked as a psychoanalyst at the mental health clinic in Ramat Chen until her retirement, succeeding the clinic’s founder, Franz Brüll, as its director.
In her later years, Noemi Mibashan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and passed away at the age of 90 in Ein-Hod. (Top of the article)

Rena Moses-Hrushovski (1930-2007)

Rena (Renate) Moses-Hrushovski was born in Germany as the daughter of a dermatologist. Following the November Pogroms, her family emigrated to Palestine in 1939. She was first married to Benjamin Hrushovski, later Harshav (1928–2015), a literary scholar, poet, and translator who was originally from Vilnius and had immigrated to Israel in 1948. Their son Ehud Hrushovski was born in 1959. In the early 1980s, she married the Berlin-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Rafael Moses (1924–2001), who had emigrated to Palestine in 1937. He was previously married to Agi Bene-Moses, who passed away in 1979.
Rena studied psychology and special education under Carl Frankenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then taught courses in counseling and group dynamics at the university’s Division for Teacher-Counselors. In the early 1960s, she began working with disturbed children at a Child Guidance Clinic led by the psychoanalyst Eli Ilan. Her first case in 1963, a severely disturbed seven-year-old girl, treated by her until the age of fifteen, formed the basis of her doctoral thesis (1973) and served to illustrate her concept in her book Deployment (1994).
Rena Hrushovski received her psychoanalytic training at the Max Eitingon Institute of Psychoanalysis in Jerusalem in the 1960s. Her training analyst was Erich Gumbel, a German émigré. She became a member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) and a training analyst at the Eitingon Institute. In 1984, she co-founded the Israel Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes (IASGOP). Between 1979 and 1986, she participated in the Arab-Israeli Dialogues, a project led by psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and others, which explored large-group identities in international conflicts and their resolution through psychoanalytic insights.
One of her main subjects was a particular kind of narcissistic character disorder, which Moses-Hrushovski termed “deployment.” This concept refers to a rigid self-programming into a system of attitudes, positions, roles, and behavior aimed at protecting one’s self-esteem and dignity. It serves to ward off unbearable tensions arising from feelings of envy, shame, guilt, and humiliation. (Top of the article)

Margarete Obernik-Reiner (1893-1948)

Margarete (Grete, Margalit) Obernik was born in Brno, the youngest daughter of Adolf Obernik and Augusta Roubiček. She spent her youth in Prague and, as a young woman, was actively engaged in the Zionist movement. Before moving to Vienna, she was a member, and from 1914 a board member of the Zionist Club of Jewish Women and Girls in Prague.
Grete Obernik worked as an educator in Vienna and was a proponent of Siegfried Bernfeld’s psychoanalytically oriented reform pedagogy. She frequented the circle around Jerubbaal, a journal of the Viennese Jewish youth movement edited by Bernfeld in 1918/19. She taught child psychology at the Hebrew Pedagogium for teachers and educators in Vienna, founded by Bernfeld in 1918. Additionally, she directed the kindergarten at the Kinderheim Baumgarten, which provided housing and education for Jewish orphans, established by Bernfeld in 1919.
In 1920, Grete Obernik emigrated to Palestine, where she worked as a kindergarten teacher and educational counselor in Haifa and Jerusalem. She was a member of the first psychoanalytic group in Palestine, founded in 1920 by David Eder and Dorian Feigenbaum. Yet the group dissolved after a few years. During this time, she wrote her Brief aus Palästina, discussing the position of women in Palestine. In 1923, she married Markus Reiner (1886–1976), a scientist and civil engineer from Czernowitz who had immigrated to Palestine in 1922. The couple had two children, Efraim (b. 1924) and Hannah (b. 1926).
From 1925 onward, Grete Reiner returned to Vienna for several stays to attend the psychoanalytic training for educators at the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV) and to undergo analysis with Anna Freud. In 1932/33, she was last in Vienna working as a staff member of the child guidance service, set up for the WPV by August Aichhorn. At its official opening in May 1933, Grete Reiner-Obernik presented a case study from her practice discussing a 16-year-old male sex worker (Erste Beobachtungsergebnisse eines Falles aus der Erziehungsberatung).
Back in Palestine, she became active in the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b’Erez Israel CPEI) from 1934 but was only admitted as an associate member in 1937. She settled in Tel Aviv and gave lectures on collective education and sexual problems. As a non-medical “lay analyst”, she faced limited acceptance within the CPEI, yet - like Fanny Lowtzky - she played a significant role in promoting the social work and educational applications of psychoanalysis in Palestine.
In 1936, Grete Reiner began to show signs of mental illness, which ultimately led to her taking her own life at the age of 55. (Top of the article)

Natalya Peled (1909-1979)

Natalya (Natalia) Peled (Nathalia Pollack before 1948) was born in Russia. Like her husband, Dov Pollack (1909–?), she studied psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she earned a PhD. Both did their psychoanalytic training in Paris. Natalya's training analyst was René Spitz, and Dov's was Marie Bonaparte.*
Nathalia and Dov Pollack came to Palestine in 1936 and settled in Tel Aviv. In 1937 their daughter Noa was born. Upon the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, they Hebraized their surname to Peled. They both became members of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b'Erez Israel CPEI), renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) in 1948.
Natalya Peled was among the first to do psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic work with children in Israel. For many years, she worked as a training analyst and supervisor at the Eder Institute of the CPEI, founded in Tel Aviv in 1937 by David Idelsohn, Martin Pappenheim, and Moshe Wulff. She worked with the children of the Kibutz movement, in later years she worked mainly with adults. Natalya Peled taught and supervised young analysts in the Psychoanalytic Institute until she died all of a sudden at the age of 70. (Top of the article)

• * According to Guido Liebermann; according to the Israel Psychoanalytic Society: vice versa

Lizzi Rosenberger geb. Junker (1905-1989)

Alice "Lizzi" Rosenberger (also Rosenberg) was born in 1905 in Zagreb, Croatia. She was married to the lawyer Joel Rosenberger (1903–1999), an active Zionist and editor of the Zionist magazine Židov in Zagreb. They had two children: Uri and Timna. Lizzi Rosenberger earned a PhD and initially qualified in Alfred Adler's individual psychology. From 1938 to 1941, she underwent training analysis with Stjepan Betlheim, who had founded the first Psychoanalytic Society of Yugoslavia in 1937. At the same time, she co-ran a private children's home based on progressive education in Zagreb, along with Annemarie Wolff-Richter, a special educator and Betlheim analysand. In the face of the fascist threat, she left Yugoslavia in 1941.
Lizzi and Joel Rosenberger came to Palestine in 1941 and settled in Tel Aviv. Lizzi Rosenberger underwent further analysis with Mosche Wulff and became a member and training analyst of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b'Erez Israel), renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel) in 1948. At the end of World War II, she traveled to London to attend Anna Freud's child-analysis training courses.
Lizzi Rosenberger is regarded as one of the leading child psychoanalysts in Israel. She specialised in the treatment of severely disturbed and neglected children and led the child department of a mental health clinic in Tel Aviv. She was active in the kibbutz movement and lectured kibbutz education at Tel Aviv University. In addition she was a leading figure in the socialist-Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair.
Lizzi Rosenberger worked with Mosche Wulff at the Shalvatah Psychiatric Hospital in Hod haSharon. In 1964, they published a widely discussed study on the psychoanalytic treatment of childhood schizophrenia. The study described the case histories of two schizophrenic girls, aged four and a half and six, one of whom lived in a kibbutz. (Top of the article)

Anna Smeliansky (1879-1961)

Anna (Chana) Smeliansky, whose life was shadowed by hereditary retinal atrophy, came from Telepino, a hamlet near Kiev (then part of Russia) The daughter of Jewish tenant farmers, she acquired her school education on her own and passed the final exam as a governess in Odessa. In view of the conditions in Russia for women, she went to Switzerland to study medicine in Bern (1900-1903) and Zurich (1903-1907). In 1907, she graduated under William Silberschmidt at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Zurich .
Like her older brother, the writer Moshe Smilansky, Anna Smeliansky became passionate about the ideals of Socialism and Zionism. In 1912, she left Europe for Palestine and worked as a doctor in Jerusalem. A year later the glaring light of the Mediterranean landscape forced her back to Europe to live in Berlin. From 1921 to 1933 she was a member of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung and the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG) When Karl Abraham and Max Eitingon opened the Berlin Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in 1920, Anna Smeliansky and Ernst Simmel were Eitingon’s first assistants. She rejected a marriage proposal from Max Eitingon, with whom she had been friends since her student days.
After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, "Aryanization" also took place in the DPG. Just before the Jewish members of the DPG had to declare their "voluntary" resignation, Anna Smeliansky emigrated once more to Palestine. At the end of 1933, she co-founded the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society (Chewrah Psychoanalytith b'Erez-Israel) in Tel Aviv, along with the psychoanalysts Max Eitingon, Mosche Wulff, Ilja Schalit, and Walter Kluge, who had also emigrated from Berlin. After the founding of the state in 1948, the society was renamed the Israel Psychoanalytic Society (Hahevra Hapsychoanalitit Be-Israel HHBI). In 1934, the Psychoanalytic Institute in Jerusalem was opened, and since 1939, Anna Smeliansky had been a member of its training committee. Despite being nearly blind, she continued working as a psychoanalyst in private practice until shortly before her death and regularly attended the meetings of the HHBI. (Top of the article)

Ruth Stein geb. Steinberger (1947-2010)

Ruth Steinberger was born in Linz, Austria, as the daughter of the talmudic scholar Oscar (Asher) Steinberger. After surviving Auschwitz, her father emigrated to Israel with his second family in 1951. At the age of 19, Ruth Steinberger married Dov Stein, a mathematician and computer engineer, with whom she had three children.
Ruth Stein studied French literature and psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and obtained an MA in clinical psychology in the early 1970s. Following her first analysis, with Erich Gumbel, she divorced in 1980. She pursued doctoral studies under Joseph Sandler, the first professor at the Freud Chair of the Hebrew University, graduating in 1989 with a PhD thesis on Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect. She had further analysis with Rena Hrushovski-Moses and completed her psychoanalytic training in 1992. Since 1997, she had been a training analyst at the Institute of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society.
In 2001, Ruth Stein married Gavriel (Ben-Ephraim) Reisner (*1946), a lecturer in English literature. They moved to New York, where she became an associate professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and practiced psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She was a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), and she gave lectures at international conferences. She was also a member of the US editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and served as associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
Ruth Stein combined French thought, such as the work of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche, with Anglo-American object relations theory and neo-Freudianism. In her final years, she focused particularly on relational psychoanalysis, which is based on Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory. In her numerous publications, Ruth Stein addressed topics such as affect, sexuality, perversion, guilt, and fundamentalism. Her paper The otherness of sexuality: Excess was awarded the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Prize in 2008. In this study, she rehabilitated the idea of excess, which, according to her, is an essential part of the sexual experience and distinguishes it from everyday experience.
On the day of the award ceremony, Ruth Stein suffered a stroke which lead to her death two days later. (Top of the article)