Women in Psychology, Beatrice Hinkle Signed Letter on Her Professional Workload, 1933

Dr. Beatrice Hinkle

Manuscript & Autographs

Hinkle, Beatrice M., typed letter signed, 1933, documents the professional life of the physician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and first American translator of a major work by Carl Jung. By the date of this letter, Hinkle had spent more than two decades practicing psychotherapy and developing approaches that departed from Freudian psychoanalysis, while her writings addressed women, marriage, sexuality, education, and individual psychological development. Writing from New York on April 7, 1933, she describes the demands of her work directly, explaining that she has been “so rushed that not a moment has been free.”

Hinkle, Beatrice M. April 7, 1933. Typed letter signed on Hinkle’s Gramercy Park letterhead. New York, New York. The letter’s reference to an overwhelming workload provides personal evidence of Hinkle’s continuing professional activity during the 1930s. Hinkle had entered psychiatric work decades earlier: in 1908, she joined neurologist Charles L. Dana at Cornell Medical College in establishing one of the earliest psychotherapy clinics in the United States. After studying psychoanalysis in Europe, she became an early American advocate of Jung’s analytical psychology and translated his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido into English as Psychology of the Unconscious in 1916.

Hinkle’s career joined the early institutional development of American psychotherapy with contemporary feminist intellectual circles. A member of the feminist Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village, she brought Jung into contact with members of New York’s avant-garde and developed psychological ideas that challenged aspects of Freud’s theories concerning women. The letter dates from the mature phase of a career that extended from Progressive Era medical reform through the establishment of analytical psychology in the United States. Condition not stated in the supplied description. The brief statement that she was “so rushed that not a moment has been free” supplies an unusually direct record of the working life of an early American woman physician and psychoanalyst.

Item #15132

Price: $350.00