Benedek initially decided to pursue a career in
child psychology and study the effects of maternal separation on infant emotions. She completed the requirements for a residency in pediatrics in 1918 and began working as an assistant physician at the St. Elizabeth University pediatric clinic in
Bratislava. She left this position in 1919 and married shortly afterward. Having taken courses from Hungarian psychoanalyst
Sándor Ferenczi, an associate of
Sigmund Freud, during her university days, she decided to switch her career track to
psychoanalysis. She underwent a five-month
training analysis with Ferenczi before leaving Budapest. In 1920 she and her new husband relocated to Germany to escape the political upheaval in Hungary. In 1920 she became an assistant physician at the Neurological-Psychiatric Clinic of the
University of Leipzig and in 1921 opened the city's first private psychoanalytic practice, becoming a
training analyst. From 1933 to 1935 she was a training and
supervisory analyst at the
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Although as a Jew she was a target of the
Nazi Party in Germany in the mid-1930s, Benedek did not feel the need to emigrate, since she considered herself a Hungarian rather than a Jew. Nevertheless, in 1936 her husband convinced her to leave Germany and accept the offer of
Franz Alexander to work as a training analyst for the
Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. She was a faculty and staff member, engaging in teaching, supervising, and research at the institute, for the next 34 years. She acquired her U.S. medical license in 1937 and her U.S. citizenship in 1943. Her husband joined the faculty of
Northwestern University School of Medicine. ==Research==