ESTHER MENAKER (1907-2003).
Born in Bern, Switzerland, Esther came to the United States at three. She majored in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her M.S.W. in the School of Social Work where Jessie Taft, Rank’s friend and translator, was teaching. She and William Menaker married in 1930; he was a dentist turned psychologist. They went to Vienna for psychoanalytic training where Esther was analyzed by Anna Freud and William by Helene Deutsch. Both obtained doctorates in psychology at the University of Vienna.
After settling in New York City in 1934, Esther and William played major roles in nonmedical psychoanalytic education, as Adjunct Professors in NYU’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program. They helped found the Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and Esther was an early member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. The Menakers, had two sons, Michael and Thomas.
A prolific writer, Esther developed her theory of masochism as an adaptive process of the ego. A student of ethology, Esther coauthored Ego in Evolution (1965) with William, who died in 1972. Papers on masochism, creativity and ego identification as transmitter of social evolution appeared in Masochism and the Emergent Ego (1979).
Other books: Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy (1982), and Separation, Will,and Creativity (1996). She has also embraced self psychological theory. Much of their experience in Vienna is recounted in Appointment in Vienna, 1989 (reprinted as Misplaced Loyalties, 1995). Inspired by Kohut, Esther’s recent work Freedom to Inquire (1996) emphasizes the empathic stance and the importance of the selfobject.