Ruth Jane Mack Brunswick

Ruth Jane Mack Brunswick (born Feb. 17, 1897, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Jan. 24, 1946, New York, N.Y.) was an American psychoanalyst, a student of Sigmund Freud whose work significantly explored and extended his theories.

Ruth Mack graduated from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1918 and, having been refused admission to Harvard Medical School because of her sex, graduated from Tufts Medical School in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1922. She then traveled to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Freud. Joining the inner circle of students around Freud, Mack began practicing psychoanalysis herself in 1925. She was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and an instructor at the Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1932 she became an editor of the American journal Psychoanalytic Quarterly. One of her most notable early papers concerned her continuing treatment in 1926–27 of one of Freud’s most famous cases, the Wolf Man. She was widely respected as a brilliant, thorough, and effective clinician.

Mack was married (for the second time) in March 1928 to Mark Brunswick, an American composer. In 1938 the Brunswicks left Nazi-occupied Vienna and settled in New York City. There she joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society, taught courses in psychoanalytic technique and dream analysis, and kept up a private practice in spite of declining health. In 1944 she resumed her connection with the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, which she had dropped in 1938. Her professional publications, though few, were of classic quality and contributed greatly to the full development of Freudian theory—particularly with regard to questions of childhood trauma and parental attachment.