Raissa Epstein

Introduction

Raissa Epstein, born Raissa Timofeyevna Epstein in Moscow on 9 November 1872 and dead in New York City on 21 April 1962, was a Russian-born feminist, socialist and welfare organiser who married Alfred Adler in 1897. She was not a psychoanalyst and not a philosopher, and the books sometimes attributed to her do not exist. Her place in the history of psychology is different and harder to measure: she was the person through whom the feminist and socialist politics of turn-of-the-century Vienna entered the household in which individual psychology was built.

Adler's own writings stress social interest, equality between the sexes, and the claim that a person can only be understood inside a social field. Historians of the field have argued that these emphases did not appear in a vacuum. Hendrika Vande Kemp's summary is the one most often quoted: Raissa Epstein Adler, a radical socialist, influenced her husband's views on women and served as a feminist model for her daughters and son.

An earlier version of this entry described her as a psychoanalyst-philosopher who wrote The Unconscious and Human Existence and Psychoanalysis and the Search for Meaning, and who helped found existential psychoanalysis. None of that is supported. No such books are recorded in any national library catalogue, and she left no theoretical writing under her own name. What survives instead is a documented life of political organising, exile and institutional stewardship, and a persistent argument among historians about how much of Adler's social thought should be credited to her.

Early Life and Education

Raissa Epstein was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Moscow. Because women were not admitted to Russian universities in the nineteenth century, she was taught by private tutors rather than enrolling anywhere. In 1895 she went to Zurich, one of the few European cities where women could matriculate, and studied biology at the university for three semesters.

At the end of 1896 she moved to Vienna and joined the women's movement there. Vienna in these years was the capital of a reforming, largely Social Democratic municipality, and its intellectual circles were crowded with Russian émigrés. Through the émigré Aline Furtmüller she became friends with Leon Trotsky, then living in Vienna, and worked alongside him in 1929.

She met Alfred Adler while he was a young physician in the city, and married him in Smolensk in 1897. Four children followed: Valentina in 1898, Alexandra in 1901, Kurt in 1905 and Cornelia in 1909. Alexandra trained in medicine and became a psychiatrist who worked on the neuropsychology of brain injury; Kurt Alfred Adler, who lived from 1905 to 1997, became an Adlerian analyst in New York. The name is a standing trap for biographers, since several unrelated men called Kurt Adler were active in the same decades.

Academic and Professional Career

Raissa Adler had no academic post. Her working life was political and organisational, and it ran in parallel with her husband's career rather than through it.

In Vienna she worked on women's questions in the orbit of Julius Tandler, the city councillor for health whose programme of municipal clinics, sex counselling and mother-and-child welfare made Red Vienna famous. Together with Tandler and Margarete Hilferding, herself a physician and an Adlerian, she helped found the Austrian branch of Workers International Relief, sat on the committee of Red Aid, and joined the Communist Party of Austria. In 1922 she was on the preparatory committee of a Viennese Clarté group, the pacifist international founded by Henri Barbusse in 1919.

By the early 1930s she was on the board of the Association for Individual Psychology, the professional body her husband had built. After the Austrian Civil War of February 1934 she was arrested and held for two days because of her political activity. That arrest is usually given as the reason Alfred Adler brought her out of Vienna personally; the couple emigrated to the United States in 1935.

In New York she continued the same pattern of committee work inside the movement her husband had founded. After the Second World War she chaired the executive committee of the Individual Psychology Association in New York, and in 1954 she was elected honorary president of its board of directors. She died in New York in 1962.

Major Contributions to Psychology

A channel for socialist and feminist ideas into individual psychology

Adler's break with Freud is usually told as a theoretical dispute about the driving force of mental life. Adler replaced libido with a striving for superiority and compensation, and then, decisively, with Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social interest, the sense of belonging to a human community that he treated as the measure of mental health. He was also unusually explicit among his contemporaries in supporting women's education, co-education and entry into the professions, and in treating the cultural devaluation of women as a psychological problem rather than a natural fact.

What is contested is the source. Adler's biographers place him in a milieu where these arguments were live: Phyllis Bottome, his authorised biographer, and later historians both describe a household in which politics were argued by a wife who was better educated in socialist thought than he was. Vande Kemp's formulation, that Raissa influenced his views on women and modelled feminism for their children, is the standard cautious version of the claim. The stronger version, that individual psychology's social interest is partly her intellectual property, is argued but not documented.

A feminist practice inside the Adler household

The evidence that survives is behavioural rather than theoretical. The Adler children were raised as atheists in a city where religion mapped onto political identity; both daughters pursued professional careers at a time when that was unusual; Alexandra became a physician. Where Adler's published writing on women remains ambivalent, mixing a real argument for equality with the vocabulary of the masculine protest, the household he lived in appears to have been run on more consistently egalitarian lines. Historians differ over how much weight this should carry.

Institutional continuity for individual psychology in exile

After Alfred Adler died in Aberdeen in 1937, the movement he founded risked dispersing between Europe and the United States. Raissa Adler's committee work in New York, culminating in the chairmanship of the association's executive committee and the honorary presidency in 1954, was part of the apparatus that kept an organised Adlerian presence alive in North America through the 1940s and 1950s. It is unglamorous institutional labour, and it is the part of her contribution least dependent on inference.

A test case for how psychology writes its own history

Raissa Epstein is a useful example of a general problem. She appears in the record largely as a wife, in a marriage about which the surviving testimony is affectionate but thin, and the interpretation of her influence therefore slides easily into speculation. The fact that she is now credited with shaping one of the major schools of psychotherapy, on the basis of almost no writing of her own, tells us as much about how the field distributes credit as it does about her.

Major Publications

She published no books and no theoretical papers. The titles formerly listed on this page were invented. What exists is a small body of biographical and archival scholarship, almost all of it in German:

Karl Fallend, Raissa Adler, in Brigitta Keintzel and Ilse Korotin (eds.), Wissenschafterinnen in und aus Österreich (Böhlau, Vienna, 2002), pp. 12-13 — the standard short biography, written for a reference work on Austrian women scientists and available online.
biografiA: Lexikon österreichischer Frauen, vol. 1, pp. 41-42 — the Austrian biographical dictionary entry, and the source for the variant birth data that conflicts with the encyclopaedias.
Austrian Biographical Encyclopedia (ÖBL), entry Adler, Raissa Timofejewna (1872-1962) — the national biography, which fixes her dates.
Frauen in Bewegung 1848-1938, Austrian National Library database, record 2106 — a photographic and documentary record of her activity in the women's movement.
Library of Congress Name Authority File, record n98058520 (Adler, Raissa Epstein; variant Epstein, Raissa Timofeivna) — the authority record created when the Adler papers were catalogued, and the reason her name is indexed in both forms.

Impact and Legacy

Raissa Epstein's legacy is now institutional rather than theoretical. Her name appears in the reference works on Austrian women's history, in the biographical apparatus around Alfred Adler, and in the renewed scholarly interest in Red Vienna as an environment that produced psychological and educational reform together. Arguments about the social determinants of mental health, which Adlerian and community psychology both claim as ancestors, trace part of their lineage to the municipal and political world she worked in.

The criticism of her legacy runs in three directions. The first is evidential. Almost everything said about her influence on Adler's theory rests on the fact of the marriage plus a handful of second-hand remarks; there is no correspondence, diary or manuscript in which her own account of individual psychology survives. A claim this consequential rests on unusually thin documentation, and historians who repeat it are often repeating Bottome and Vande Kemp rather than returning to archives.

The second is the risk of the great-man frame. Writing about her as the woman behind the theory can reproduce exactly the pattern it seems to correct: she becomes significant because of her proximity to a man, and her own political work, the welfare organising, the relief committees, the arrest in 1934, is treated as background colour rather than as the substance of a life.

The third concerns Adler himself. Whatever the direction of influence in the marriage, his published position on women is more equivocal than the feminist reading allows. He argued for equality and against the neuroticising of women's ambitions, but he did so within a vocabulary of masculine protest that later feminist critics read as androcentric. Crediting Raissa with the progressive half and explaining away the rest is a way of avoiding that difficulty rather than resolving it.

Learn More

Alfred Adler — her husband, and the founder of the individual psychology whose social direction she is credited with shaping.
Kurt Adler — the entry on a different man of the same name, and a note on how the Adler family names have been confused.
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.