Career

Professional Career

1975–1978: Research Officer at the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research, Minoritenplatz, Vienna, under Minister Dr Hertha Firnberg, with a focus on higher education documentation.

1975–1976: Lecturer at the Federal College of Education, Ettenreichgasse, Vienna.

1975: Teacher at the academic secondary school of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Augartenpalais.

1975–1977: Lecturer and organiser at the Institute for International Cooperation in Vienna; seminar leader, exhibition organiser, and lecturer in the field of political education for the Austrian Trade Union Federation and the Vienna Chamber of Labour.

1975–1977: Volunteer with the Auschwitz Committee, serving as a driver and accompanying groups on visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

1978–1979: Austrian Lecturer at the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, Lisbon.

1979–1980: Research residency in preparation for habilitation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

1980–1982: Austrian Lecturer at the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, Lisbon.

1983–2004: Lecturer at the Department of German Studies, University of Innsbruck, specialising in feminism and psychoanalysis in literary studies.

1984–1989: Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame’s Innsbruck programme.

1989: Lecture and research residency at the University of Louisiana, New Orleans.

1993–2000: Psycho-oncology therapist and team supervisor at the District Hospital in Hall in Tirol.

1995–2000: Lecturer at the School of Nursing in Hall in Tirol, within the specialist training programme for psychiatric nurses. Focus: burnout prevention.

1999–2008: Contract Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Education in Brixen-Bressanone.

2012–2015: Volunteer librarian at the synagogue of the Jewish Community for Tyrol and Vorarlberg.

2015–present: Volunteer organiser and lecturer at the Jüdisches Lehrhaus Innsbruck.

1988–present: Psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Innsbruck, Hall in Tirol, and at Lake Achensee.

Psychoanalyst and supervisor: Edmund Frühmann (Vienna–Salzburg)

Teacher and mentor: Paul Parin (Zurich)

Buddhist teachers: Tarab Tulku and Lene Handberg (Copenhagen); Gonsar Rinpoche and Geshe Tsültrim (Vevey–Feldkirch)

Academic Research

Major research projects funded by the Austrian Ministry of Science, the Federal Chancellery, and the Austrian National Bank examined popular women’s literature from the eighteenth century onwards; the representation and role of women and girls in Austrian school readers; women’s reading habits since the founding of the Austrian Republic; public health policy in “Red Vienna”; Social Democratic weekly publications concerning women between 1918 and 1934; and the representation in the print media of the Second Austrian Republic of the demand for university graduates.

Numerous publications and lectures in the fields of women’s studies and gender studies, including co-editorship of the first Austrian collected volume on the history of women’s literature from the Middle Ages onwards.

Research on the application of psychological and psycho-oncological approaches in general hospitals, as well as studies on gambling addiction, sexual masochism, burnout, and exhaustion. Further work includes several unpublished case studies from psychoanalytic practice.

Academic presentations at conferences in Munich, Florence, Shanghai, Moscow, Chennai, and Helsinki.

Since retiring from academia, I have continued to participate regularly in international congresses and conferences, presenting contributions of my own.

Personal Life

Long-term partnership and marriage to the Portuguese philosopher, poet, and Wittgenstein translator M. S. Lourenço (1936–2009).

Their daughter, Leonora Lourenço, was a medical student (1981–2001).

Comment

Many people—quite often, in fact, those whose outlook on life is particularly nationalist or xenophobic—have biographies similar to my own, shaped by culturally mixed and frequently unwelcome origins.

For some, however, the idea of never truly belonging anywhere is unbearable. Under the collective pressure to conform, they adopt the beliefs of the majority culture, constructing the sense of “we” they long for by restrictively excluding “the others” and, in a sense, persecuting in those others the parts of their own personality that they have rejected and split off.

The capacity to tolerate continuing ambivalence—or, in psychoanalytic terms, to hold the third object within one’s experience—is a cultural and psychological achievement that has nothing to do with formal education or intelligence. It is solely a question of psychological maturity or, put more simply, of integrity and an educated heart.

In Tyrol, a region at the heart of Europe through which people from widely differing places of origin have travelled on both sides of the main Alpine ridge since the end of the Ice Age, before a small proportion eventually settled there permanently, particularly strong pressures towards conformity have prevailed since the Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the period of the great migrations, and the centuries leading to the end of the Middle Ages, it was not until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the idea began to take hold that people of different sexes and ethnic origins should be accepted in their diversity—and indeed that different languages, religions, and ways of life might be regarded as an enrichment of society rather than as a threat to a patriarchally defined tribal identity.

Yet the Josephinian Enlightenment, which brought long-awaited freedoms to Jews and Protestants throughout the Habsburg Monarchy, did not penetrate every part of our country—despite, or perhaps partly because of, the flourishing of tourism from the nineteenth century onwards. Paying foreign visitors had to be presented with an untouched, pious and cheerful fairy-tale world, filled with a love of nature, delight in song, and fear of God. This idealised image existed alongside persistent violence within families, the brutal exploitation of maids and farmhands, and habitual sexual misconduct by property-owning patriarchs towards women and children.

Self-reflection—let alone an acknowledgement of responsibility for the many anti-scientific, fascist, and antisemitic wrongs of the past—is difficult to market to tourists. This is compounded by the limited interest of many foreign visitors, who often arrive on holiday with their own idealised notions of wholesome rural life. Such aspects of the past consequently fall victim to denial, concealment, and collective forgetting.

When I decided to move to Lake Achensee in 2012, to live and work here, I was well aware of the discrepancy between the magnificent natural surroundings and the friendliness of its inhabitants on the one hand, and the often considerably darker aspects of rural life on the other. After all, many of my father’s Tyrolean relatives had once fled brutality, ignorance, and alcoholism, travelling as far as New York and San Francisco.

Nevertheless, living here has also enabled me to connect with important events in the history of psychoanalysis dating back to the summer of 1900. Sigmund Freud, who had published his epoch-making work on the interpretation of dreams in Vienna in 1899, met his Berlin colleague Wilhelm Fliess on several occasions at different locations around Lake Achensee, where the two discussed—and argued about—the psychological bisexuality of human beings.

One hundred years later, in the summer of 2000, an international congress on the history of psychoanalysis was held in Pertisau in commemoration of these questions, known within psychoanalysis as the “Achensee Question”. At its heart lies the question of the psychological as well as biological dimensions of human androgyny.

It remains a deeply restorative experience for me to look out from my terrace across the lake, to feel a sense of intellectual connection with the revered old master, and, in my own modest way, to contribute to the continuing development of reason, joy in life, and self-reflection—the qualities so characteristic of psychoanalysis—in my work with patients and clients.

Early Childhood

My path to psychoanalysis began in early childhood, avant la lettre. Born less than three years after the end of the war, I experienced, like so many of my generation, within my family of origin a complex web of anger, pain, fear, a thirst for adventure, vitality, and sensual pleasure. What left me profoundly confused was the silence and the lies of many people I loved: psychological phenomena that a child may be unable to comprehend cognitively, yet can intuitively perceive as being surrounded by taboos—questions that must not be asked and truths that must not be known.

The desire to decipher these prohibitions on knowing, and to make them intellectually and emotionally accessible to myself, became the origin of my interest in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

I was born into a family that had been compelled to constitute itself as such only because of my existence—an existence unwanted by virtually everyone involved. My mother was engaged to a Jewish American officer when she became pregnant by a fellow student in Innsbruck. She refused an abortion that had already been arranged and, to the horror of her brothers, married my future father.

I spent the first six formative years of my life amid the bomb-damaged landscape of a small Tyrolean town. In and around the house of my widowed Italian-Marrano grandmother on Bahnhofstraße in Wörgl, I encountered people from the most disparate backgrounds: Communists who had escaped execution almost at the last moment; Social Democrats liberated from Dachau concentration camp; Nazi perpetrators who had been imprisoned for several months in Kufstein Fortress in 1945; former Nazi fellow travellers who referred to Hitler as “Adolf the First”; people liberated from the Wörgl camp for so-called “Mischlinge ersten Grades” (“first-degree mixed-race persons” under the Nazi racial laws); desperate disabled war veterans bending down to pick up cigarette butts; representatives of the French occupying forces in their striking uniforms; desperately poor East Prussian refugee families living in the barracks of the former Nazi camp; and attractive young women in home-sewn suits searching for a suitable husband.

Wörgl’s Jewish residents had been robbed, driven into exile, or murdered—among them my mother’s best friend. Now deprivation and hardship affected almost everyone, and somehow all these people had to endure one another.

We kept chickens and rabbits in our courtyard. The tenants in our building, some of whom had been billeted there during the war, were crowded into the smallest possible spaces. There was also a shoemaker’s workshop in the house, whose fragrant scraps of leather became my favourite toys. At home there was Italian opera and literature; outside our windows, behind lowered blinds, there was the spirited sound of brass-band music.

Italian was a kind of secret language between my grandmother and me. As a descendant of Trentino irredentists, she hated the tedeschi—the Germans—with all the passion expected of a member of the Calvi family, and she had rejoiced wholeheartedly at Germany’s defeat.

At the time of my birth, her mother Irina had arrived triumphantly from the province of Brescia. Three generations of Italian ladies—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother—picked their elegant way through the bombed-out ruins in high heels, with me, the fourth generation, in a pram.

As my early childhood progressed, I became part of a group of farmers’ and railway workers’ children who were allowed to roam freely through the town, fields, and woods. Our favourite playgrounds were Wörgl railway station and the sawmill belonging to relatives by marriage.

My one-eyed father took my mother and me on motorcycle excursions to Bavaria and across the Brenner Pass: all three of us perched on an unsteady motorbike, without helmets, protective clothing, or goggles. I was hidden beneath my mother’s voluminous coat, my legs tucked up, while contraband was concealed against her body.

There was no television, no telephone, scarcely any radio, no car, no running water in the flat, no washing machine, and no heating. Books and records were prohibitively expensive; newspapers were read at the school where my father worked. The neighbouring farmers’ wives distilled schnapps to keep their husbands quiet, while the black market dominated everyday shopping.

Of the eight rooms in our flat, only four were actually used: the kitchen, where everyone washed themselves in a single basin and gathered for meals; my parents’ bedroom; my room; and a room shared by my grandmother and uncle. The remaining rooms existed for appearances and remained unused. Most of the time, every room was bitterly cold.

Portraits of Hitler had already been removed from Tyrolean walls in the spring of 1945, shortly before the arrival of the American liberation forces. In our home, however, since we belonged to no religious denomination, the pale rectangle left behind was not transformed once again into the traditional Herrgottswinkel—the devotional corner found in many Catholic homes. Instead, it disappeared beneath imposing family photographs intended to evoke the illusion of an intact pre-war world.

Only later did I discover that several members of my mother’s family were absent from these portraits: three great-aunts and a great-uncle whose very existence had been erased and whose names were no longer spoken.

Decades later, I began to develop my own understanding of a fractured family, one that had fallen partly silent about the history of its own origins—a family for whom neither education nor prosperity had brought greater insight into how it had become what it was.

And after distancing myself from my family of origin for many years, my psychoanalytic training and my experience of life gradually brought with them a growing compassion for my family, as well as a desire for reconciliation.

These two qualities together—knowledge and non-judgemental empathy—are also indispensable foundations of the work I practise with people today.