Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is doctor, psychologist, sex researcher and writer Charlotte Wolfe

Charlotte Wolff was born on September 30, 1897 in the small West Prussian town of Riesenburg. Her father was a Jewish merchant. Wolff attended exclusive undergraduate schools before earning a scholarship to study philosophy and medicine at the University of Freiburg in 1918. She completed her medical doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1928, and completing her residency in Berlin's Rudolf Virchow Hospital (now Charite) she became deputy director of the clinic for family planning and pregnancy prevention. at the hospital.

Wolff was openly attracted to other women and frequently choose to wear men's clothing, explaining that they were much more practical and comfortable for her to practice medicine. Berlin at the time (1920s and early 1930's) was a center of gay and lesbian culture, and many nightclubs, salons, and cafes allowed German gays and lesbians to be out publicly and socialize. While Wolff didn't hide her relationships with women, she wasn't in the social scene and seldom went to lesbian nightclubs. Rather she was devoted to her work, helping poor women gain access to family planning.

In January 1933 Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany and soon afterward, Wolff was arrested for espionage and for wearing men's clothes. She was released when a prison guard, the husband of one of her patients, spoke up for her, but she received continued harassment from Gestapo. She also had to resign her directorship of the family planning clinic because she was Jewish. Recognizing that as a Jew, a strong woman, and a lesbian, her future in Germany was bleak, she fled to Paris. That was in May 1933.

Unable to practice medicine in France, Wolff fell back on one of her more unique medical specialties, chirology, the study of the hand. She developed her own theories of physical and psychological diagnosis using observation of the features of the hand.
In Paris she met writers Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley. Their work inspired her to study scientifically the methods of hand interpretation and gestures.

In 1936, Wolff fled Paris for London, at the instance of Huxley and his wife Maria.
As she had in Paris, Wolff earned her living by reading hands in London. She read the hands and collected palm prints of such celebrities as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Duchamp, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and her friends the Huxleys.

Huxley had introduced her to the Surrealist clique in Paris and later in London, he introduced her to the London literary set and promised he would write the preface for her first book. He had written to his publishers on behalf of her and suggested the idea of a book of handprints of well-known people with short interpretations of their hands. 'Studies in Handreading' was then published in 1936.

The book itself gives only a brief explanation of chirological methodology and is more noteworthy for the collection of famous handprints that it contains, including the prints of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Ravel, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and Aldous Huxley himself. She presented the prints of a comparative study of the hands of 'materialists' and 'spiritualists', to demonstrate how different orientations in life produce radically different chirological features.

Up to this point, her work was much more psychoanalytical than psychological. She had been undergoing Jungian analysis in Germany and Paris, though later became more impressed by the writings of Freud and the neo-Freudians, and her first book shows rather more psychoanalytical and palmistic influences than her later works. Her more serious research into the psychological significance of the hand began in Paris through the permission and influence of the eminent French psychiatrist Professor Henri Wallon, who enabled her to research in the hospitals and clinics of Paris allowing her to study mental deficiencies and illness and endocrinological imbalance as manifested in the hand.

(Something of note: Jake's grandmother Dr. Ruth Achs did studies of the palm of babies "born to mothers who had German measles early in their pregnancy during the epidemic that swept the U.S. in 1964-65" to look for clues in the palm that could linked to developmental abnormalities. Check out Time Magazine January 28, 1966.)

From the mid 1930s to the 1950s, she published several books on the study of the hand, including The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis. In 1941, in recognition of her work in chirology, she was made an honorary member of the British Psychological Association.

After moving to London, Huxley introduced Wolff to his brother Julian Huxley, the then secretary of the Royal Zoological Society, and he gave her permission to take the handprints of the apes at London Zoo for her comparative studies of the hands of apes and humans. She also got to know Dr William Stephenson of University College London and he was able to provide her with research facilities and access to mental colonies and hospitals for her to continue her researches into mental illness and the hand.

To earn a living, she was worked as a handreader, but grew tired of this and considered it secondary to her main aim of presenting psychological chirology on ascientific basis, than a social amusement of intellectual circles. Her investigations into the abnormal psychology of the hand was founded on the basic axiom of psychologyas a science that it is the study of the abnormal that provides the best evidence for the nature of the normal.

Wolff received her British citizenship in 1947. She often described herself as a "international Jewish woman with a British passport". It was after receiving citizenship Wolff gained her licensed to practice medicine in England.

Wolff worked for twenty years in the field of chirology, in which she had learned from Julius Spier. She and Spier wrote four books on the subject together

Her analysis of hands had awakened her interest in psychology, and she began an in-depth study of homosexuality, especially lesbianism in 1968. In 1971, she published the first comprehensive study of lesbianism, Love between Women. In it, Wolff examined the lives of 100 lesbians as compared to those of a control group. Her observations led to conclude that lesbians often have problematic relationships with their fathers, which causes them to fixate on their mothers. She also ascertained that bonds between lesbians are more emotional than sexual.

Her second study focused on bisexuality, involved interviewing 150 men and women, from which she published in her 1977 work, Bisexuality: A Study. Her opinions were more progressive. There she stated that "bisexuality is the root of human sexuality."

Wolff went on to publish An Older Love, an autobiographical novel about the passionate lives of women in their 60s, and an actual autobiography entitled Hindsight. Her final book was biography, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Pioneer in Sexology. In 2004, her correspondence with East German essayist and novelist Christa Wolf was published as Ja, unsere Kreise berühren sich: Briefe (Yes, Our Circles Touch Each Other: Letters).

Her writings, most of which were first published in English, then translated into German, were eagerly received by the emerging German lesbian movement of the 1970s, to whom she became something of an icon. In 1978, she returned to Germany for the first time since her emigration to give a reading sponsored by the lesbian group L.74, and in 1979, she lectured in Berlin on "Lesbian Love and the Women's Movement."

Her life spanned nearly a century of almost unimaginable changes in the status of both women and GLTB's. Born in Germany during the Victorian era, she saw the Nazis come to power as a young working woman, fleeing her homeland, and survived to see her own groundbreaking writings about lesbianism and bisexuality inspire a new generation of lesbians in Germany.

Wolff died in London on September 2, 1986.