Source: fembio.org/frauen-biographie/helene-deutsch.shtml
Helene Deutsch, an emigré psychoanalyst known for her theories of feminine
psychology
Source: Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst's Life (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Press, 1985).
Helene Deutsch in 1967
When a woman’s longing to be a mother is not gratified by children of her own,
and when she seeks a substitute by the most natural method, namely, adoption,
the question arises as to why she has no children of her own. In the course of
our discussion we have met various types of women who long for children but are
unable to gratify this longing directly, owing to unresolved psychic conflicts.
We have seen the midwife who out of fear of the biological functions was obliged
to content herself with presiding over the delivery of other women’s children,
and Unamuno’s Aunt Tula, who despised sexuality to such an extent that she could
gratify her ardent motherliness only by exploiting the sexual service of other
women. We have seen the androgynous woman who withdraws from female reproductive
tasks and yet wants to create and shape a human being after her own image, and
the woman whose eroticism has remained fixed in homosexuality and whose yearning
for a child derives from the profound source of her own mother relationship.
Many such women renounce men, but gratify the wish for a child by adoption. . .
.