Emma Eckstein

Who was Emma Eckstein?

Emma Eckstein was 'one of Sigmund Freud's most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself': she has indeed been described as 'the first woman analyst....Emma Eckstein became both colleague and patient' for Freud. As analyst, while 'working mainly in the area of sexual and social hygiene, she also explored how "daydreams, those 'parasitic plants', invaded the life of young girls"'.

Ernest Jones placed her with such figures as Lou Andreas-Salomé and Joan Riviere as a 'type of woman, of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast...[who] played a part in his life, accessory to his male friends though of a finer calibre'.