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Sylvia M. Payne was one of the first women to practice psychoanalysis in Britain. Though she became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, not a single scholarly work is dedicated to Payne's intellectual ideas—a substantial historical lacuna, especially when compared with the research on Ernest Jones, one of Sigmund Freud's early disciples and the president who preceded her. This essay presents the first exploration of her early work. It focuses on her belonging to a group of British analysts who challenged Sigmund Freud's thinking on sexual difference. The full scope of this challenge, I argue, as it emerged in interwar Britain, has remained unexamined until today. Adding to the scholarship on the prominent and lesser-known roles of women in psychoanalysis, the article shows that Payne made significant contributions to the field; she also developed the work of Melanie Klein, on whom we also need more research. The study describes the life and work of a woman who has been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century intellectual history. It engages with broader methodological questions of how to define the political, historical role of female psychoanalysts of her generation.

By 1939, W. H. Auden was able to publish a poem in memory of Sigmund Freud saying, "if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion." Indeed, despite the opposition to Freud's new discipline from the medical establishment and some members of the public, psychoanalysis in its various proliferations had become popular in Europe as early as before World War II, and its terminology had become part of everyday language. More importantly, it propounded new possibilities for diagnosing personal problems and understanding sociopolitical issues. When Freud was asked in 1923 whether he would like to "psycho-analyze Europe in the hope of finding a cure for her ills," he replied, "I never take a patient to whom I can offer no hope." But as the twentieth century progressed, Freud and his followers developed ideas that engaged directly and indirectly with the personal and political questions of the age of catastrophes.