Tensions and Flows: The Life and Work of Judith Silberpfennig Kestenberg

Abstract

This study is a historical and theoretical analysis of the work of Judith S. Kestenberg (1910–99), which focuses in particular on her developmental movement studies. As a Polish-Jewish émigré arriving in New York Psychoanalytic circles at the outbreak of the Second World War, her story is one of a female inside/outsider. Kestenberg was a nonconformist, innovative and eclectic thinker, who gravitated towards the unknown and unspoken; her work focused on the depth psychology of bodily movement and the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust. These two seemingly dissimilar subjects were selectively received by psychoanalysis at the time. Lacking a comprehensive study of Kestenberg's oeuvre as a whole, this article sets out to accomplish an integration of the two. It identifies various reciprocities between her personal and professional history and traces epistemological continuities throughout her professional career. It also explores her personal experience of displacement, belonging and community, as they become visible from her biography. Examining her professional career, issues of transdisciplinarity and changes in theorizing and methodology in post-war American psychoanalysis also come into view.