Beatrice Moses Hinkle (1874–1953)

Beatrice Moses Hinkle was born in San Francisco, California, to B. Frederick Moses, a physician, and his wife Elizabeth Benchley Van Geisen. She was privately educated. In 1892, she married Walter Scott Hinkle, a lawyer and assistant district attorney with whom she had two children. She enrolled at Cooper Medical College, now part of Stanford University. She graduated in 1899, just after her husband died. In 1905, she was appointed San Francisco's city physician, making her the first female doctor in the country to hold a leading public health position. During her tenure, she became interested in mental health treatment. In 1908, she moved to New York City and with Dr. Charles R. Dana, co-founded the USA's first psychotherapy clinic at Cornell University Medical School. She decided to learn more by studying with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. However, Freud's lack of recognition of the independent female psyche led her to break with him and study with Carl Jung in Zurich. She returned to New York in 1915 and introduced Jung's writings to the English-speaking world through her translations. In 1916, she translated Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, to which she contributed some of her own ideas about psychoanalysis. She joined the faculties of Cornell Medical College and the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and became one of the most famous female psychoanalysts in the USA. She also was a member of the Heterodoxy Club, a feminist network based in Greenwich Village. She began contributing her own writing to periodicals such as Harper's Magazine, focusing on women's rights, women's suffrage, and other feminist issues. Her book, The Re-Creating of the Individual: A Study of Psychological Types and Their Relation to Psychoanalysis, was published in 1923. She ran a private sanatorium in Washington, Connecticut, for a number of years. An autobiographical essay of hers was published in These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (2003).