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Evaluations of Helene Deutsch's work on female psychology almost invariably focus on her idealization of motherhood and on her attribution of narcissism, passivity, and masochism to the "feminine" woman. The author suggests that identification plays a more important role in Deutsch's portrayal of feminine development than has hitherto been acknowledged. Deutsch treats identification as a reparative process that enables women to overcome major traumata by allowing them to re-experience the initial bliss of the mother-child relationship. The biographical origins of Deutsch's theory of feminine development are explored, and an assessment offered of how her reliance on personal experience both enhanced and inhibited its explanatory power.

The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and the American psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre were both deeply absorbed by the vicissitudes of the infant's and young child's psychic development. Their clinical observations and theoretical ideas display striking convergences and reciprocal influences. Winnicott was deeply influenced by Greenacre's account of maturational processes, an important stimulus to his thinking that originated outside of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Greenacre's writings on early ego development and creativity were influenced by Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena. The fact that these relationships have remained unexplored until now indicates the need for less insular accounts of the development of psychoanalytic thought on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Part I reviews the role of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration of the American Psychoanalytic Association, chaired by Lawrence Kubie and Bettina Warburg, members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, in facilitating the immigration to the United States of scores of European analysts and candidates between 1938 and 1943. The challenges facing the committee are outlined in reports written by Kubie and Warburg. In particular, the intractable problem of how to integrate European lay analysts into the American Psychoanalytic Association was an ever present problem. Part II describes the impact emigré analysts had on the intellectual life of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and considers how the psychoanalytic work of the emigrés was influenced by their move to America. The reminiscences of two emigré analysts, Peter Neubauer and Kurt R. Eissler, on their experience of coming to the United States close the paper.