Tatiana Rosenthal was born in
St Petersburg in 1885. A supporter of the
Russian Revolution of 1905, she then went to Switzerland, where she studied medicine at the
University of Zurich. After gaining her medical diploma, she went to Vienna, where she was a member of
Sigmund Freud's Wednesday Group in Vienna, the forerunner of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In 1911 she published a paper on the Danish writer
Karen Michaelis, 'The dangerous age of Karen Michaelis in light of psychoanalysis', which pioneered the use of
psychoanalysis in
literary criticism. At the beginning of
World War I, Rosenthal returned to
St. Petersburg, where she worked as a neurologist at
Vladimir Bekhterev’s Brain Institute. Bekhterev, though not himself converted to psychoanalysis, appointed Rosenthal as the head of the outpatient clinic, and allowed her to treat neurotic patients there with psychoanalysis. In that way, she became the founder of
psychoanalysis in St Petersburg. Interested in the psychology of art, Rosenthal published a 1920 paper which tried to explain
Dostoevsky’s creative writing by his personal suffering. While in St Petersburg, she had a child. In 1921 she committed suicide. ==Works==