Profile

Career Focus:

Pediatric nursing, child and adolescent psychosomatics, organizational leadership, violence prevention, sexual abuse, mentally distressed adults, feminist social work, therapy, and supervision

Biography

Charlotte Aykler is a feminist social worker, (Gestalt) therapist and supervisor who has worked mainly with women who have experienced violence or abuse in Vienna and Lower Austria. She also ran a home for retired women in Vienna and was a therapist at the psychiatric rehabilitation center in Rust. Since the end of the 1980s she has been working as a therapist and supervisor in her own practice in Vienna and Lower Austria.

Aykler was born shortly after the 1956 revolution in Tet, a small town in northwestern Hungary, and grew up in a female household with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Aykler’s grandmother and great-grandmother had lived through both world wars, were both widowed, and were also the female role models of her childhood. Her great-grandmother was "...a small delicate woman, very upright, very industrious, she was never loud, but she was noticeably an authority," and her grandmother "loving, gentle, very approachable."

However, when the seven-year-old Aykler, a very bright, curious child, emigrated to Vienna with her mother, she met her authoritarian, violent father and experienced a completely different image of women–the subordination of her mother to her father. This fueled the daughter's spirit of dissent, as she resisted her father and his paternalism.

Aykler, who until then had only spoken Hungarian, learned German at elementary school in Vienna, and was then able to attend the Allgemein Bildende Höhere Schule (AHS) and went on to train as a pediatric nurse at the Glanzing Children's Hospital.

She reported not being a well-adjusted girl, at times scoring 'only' a 2 in her school report for "Betragen" [note E.R.: overarching grade which evaluates the well-adjusted behavior of the students], which at that time was considered a "bad" grade in the Austrian school system. Nevertheless - or perhaps because of this - she met supportive advocates at a young age, such as benevolent teachers, principals and superiors.

After completing her education, Aykler was first employed in 1976 at the General Hospital in Vienna in the premature intensive care unit. She then lived and worked as a nurse for two years in Toronto, Canada in a nursing home, which she describes as a wonderfully instructive time in a vibrant multicultural community. In her early 20s, she was offered the opportunity to work in Vienna in the very progressive department of psychosomatics for children and adolescents (in the former Wilhelminenspital, now Clinic Ottakring). If she had previously been rather "unconsciously feminist", she developed a conscious feminist attitude in this committed, politically rather leftist team, and Aykler came into contact with different feminist therapeutic approaches. She realized, "There is more behind a symptom. Symptoms are mouthpieces of our system, our body, our soul, to express something that's wrong."

Aykler completed her training as a social worker at the Vienna Social Academy while working full-time. She was briefly employed as a social worker in the women's ward for alcoholic women at the Anton Proksch Institute in Kalksburg (in Lower Austria) before she started running the Women's Cafe in Vienna's Lange Gasse. This small venue was one of the oldest "Frauenorte" (engl. women's places) in the city and well anchored in the women's and lesbian scene. While there were parties, dances, chats, and events, there was also room for addressing social issues such as violence among women. Aykler, who had been in relationships with women since the age of 20, realized at that time that lesbian women did not necessarily have to be feminist and feminists did not necessarily have to be lesbian.

Feminist social workers from the field of violence protection "poached" her after about three years as the Director of the women's café, and Aykler began her career as a feminist psychotherapist working at the Women’s Shelter Vienna. Like many other feminists in Vienna, Aykler completed the part-time women-specific therapy training (with Sabine Scheffler and others) initiated by the Vienna Women's Counseling Center Frauen* beraten Frauen*, which sharpened her political stance.

For Aykler, being feminist meant, among other things, "...thinking beyond the intimate situation with 2 or 3 people, developing understanding of the political context, because that's helpful, thinking about the system, having tools, looking at the system."

In that sense, her nearly 10 years at the women's shelter were also very political.

It was a job she loved because it was effective on multiple levels. For her, it was concrete social work with the women and children, self-determined work in an autonomous team with a lot of team spirit, positive argument culture and community spirit, and the innovative political work that meant both organizing demonstrations and getting involved in parliamentary committees. This political work also led, among other things, to the development of police training sessions on violence protection with the aim of making clear to the police officers, which had recently expanded to include female police officers, the inequality between women and men in society. Subsequently, these training sessions and work conducted by Aykler and her colleagues led to the initiation and enactment of the “Violence Protection Act” (Federal Act for Protection against Violence in the Family).

Together with her feminist comrades and with the help of the ministerial support of Johanna Dohnal [note E.R.: first Austrian Minister for Women], Aykler fought for the introduction of the first “Protection Against Violence Act” in Austria. The Act came into force on May 1, 1997 and legitimized, among other things, the accompaniment of women affected by violence by social workers at court, as well as the expulsion of the perpetrators from the shared home to ensure a domestic protection zone for the women. Although Aykler critically notes that many things could not be achieved and feminists have to experience the backslash again and again in the field of violence against women and children, she recognizes this law was and is a legal milestone. She feels very fortunate that she was able to work with this law while still in her own professional career.

At the age of 42, Aykler, who had always enjoyed working with older people, changed careers and became the director of a Vienna retirement home, which she really enjoyed. On the occasion of an annual celebration, she initiated a survey of the 70- to 100-year-old female residents on their memories of food - from 1914 to the post-war period. The book "Mahlzeit" (published together with Gudrun Perko) was published in 2000.

The political approach of the board of directors, which did little for its own clients, suited Aykler less. When, as director, she was urged to focus more on the employer side, Aykler gave up her job and took over the management of the Violence Protection Center "Intervention Center against Violence" in Lower Austria. However, for Aykler, managing the Violence Protection Center in Lower Austria also meant having to travel many kilometers by car every day. After about 5 years, Aykler, who in the meantime lived in Lower Austria, sought employment closer to her home. She found this at Sonnenpark Neusiedlersee, an inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation center in Rust (Burgenland), where she worked until her retirement in 2017. Despite her retirement, Aykler has worked as a Gestalt therapist and supervisor in private practice in Vienna and Lower Austria since the late 1980s and continues to do so today.

Despite various experiences of discrimination, for example "because I’m not one of the very slim ones" or when a male colleague was proposed for a leadership position despite better qualified women in the team, up to the very humiliating experience of being forcibly outed by a resident in a retirement home and accused of sexual abuse without being allowed to react to it herself, Aykler experiences herself as privileged - her work was and is meaningful.

As a feminist, Aykler was always clear that women can only achieve something together. She has always been well networked with colleagues and in 1992 organized the 15th Women's Therapy Congress in Austria with like-minded women, which was followed by others in Austria and Germany. One of her most important mentors is the trauma therapist Luise Reddemann, in whose work she particularly appreciates the resource-oriented approach and with whom she also organized further training in Austria.

Being part of a feminist community, feeling that she belongs and still enthusiastically doing what she does, gives Charlotte Aykler joy and also means home to her.

By Emelie Rack & Susanne Hahnl (2023)

To cite this article, see Credits

Selected Works

Aykler, C. (2022, May 9). Interview with S. Hahnl [Audio recording].