Ruth Selke Eissler

Ruth Eissler died in New York on October 7, 1989, survived by her husband.

Ruth Eissler's other writings included poetry, several short stories and a novel (that was never published). In celebration of her seventieth birthday, a collection of her German-language poetry was finally published In 1976 by Abaris Books in New York.

From 1950 to 1985, she was one of four editors of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, founded in 1945 by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris, and published annually.

In 1948, Ruth and her husband moved to New York City, where she became a member and educator of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Eissler later became secretary and then vice-president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

In Vienna, she met the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Kurt Robert Eissler (1908–1999), co-founder of the Sigmund Freud Archives, and they married in 1936. After Austria was annexed to Germany by Hitler on March 12, 1938 (an event known as the Anschluss) the couple moved to the United States arriving in Chicago, where she joined the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society while working as a child psychiatrist at the Michael Reese Hospital. During the Second World War, Ruth Eissler was a consulting physician in a program for young delinquent women in Chicago and in 1949 published a paper about her work.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 in Germany, she went into self-exile in Vienna and worked at the psychiatric hospital in Rosenhügel. She specifically trained in psychoanalysis and was admitted as a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1937.

Ruth Selke obtained her abitur in 1925 and then graduated from medical school at the University of Freiburg, Germany in 1930. She completed her residency in Heidelberg and after receiving her Doctor of Medicine degree at the University of Heidelberg (1932) and practiced in the Psychiatric Department of the Buerger Hospital in Stuttgart. Her dissertation was titled, Medical Histories of Six Cases: The Contribution of Social Hygiene to the Question of Alcoholism and Tuberculosis.

Ruth Selke Eissler, (born in Odesa, Ukraine on February 21, 1906, and died in New York on October 7, 1989) was a Jewish–American physician and psychoanalyst. She is sometimes known as Ruth Eissler-Selke.

Ruth was born in Odesa (now Ukraine). Her father Ludwig Selke ran a bank and then worked as a grain export trader. Her mother, Jenny Lewin, was born on May 17, 1877, in Warsaw. In addition to Ruth, the couple had four other children: Eugen, Rudya, Eva and Angela. The family moved several times in her youth to Hamburg and Danzig.