Profile
Traude Ebermann
Birth:
1950
Training Location(s):
Mag., University of Vienna (1987)
Dr., Institute for Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt (AAU) (2017)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Psychotherapeutic practice in Vienna (since 1988)
Collaborator of Frauen beraten Frauen (1990- 2010)
Initiator of the Institute for Women-Specific Psychotherapy (IFP; affiliated with Frauen beraten Frauen) (since 2000)
Austrian Society for Applied Depth Psychology and General Psychotherapy Vienna (ÖGATAP) (since 1991)
Certified supervisor and coach of the Austrian Association for Psychotherapy (ÖBVP) (since 1996)
Trainer for clinical and health psychology at the Society of Critical Psychologists Vienna (GkPP) (since 1997)
University lecturer for gender-sensitive health behavior, Medical University of Graz (2006- 2013).
Career Focus:
Psychotherapist and trainer for Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy (OEGATAP), feminist psychotherapy scholar, gender expert in university teaching and training
Biography
Traude Ebermann grew up as the second-born child and only girl with three brothers in a village in Lower Austria. The well-established family on her father's side ran a business consisting of two inns and a farm with viticulture, requiring the siblings to help out as children. Her career as a girl seemed preordained: "The first-born takes over the business, the girl works unpaid in the business until her marriage, the third studies, and only the fourth child is allowed to develop free of a role assignment."
When Ebermann, at the age of 14, was planning to go to secondary school (business academy), her mother, who was the driving force in the family business, fell seriously ill. Conscious of her duty, the teenager put her desire for education on hold, began an apprenticeship as a "server" and took on important tasks in the inn, which was expanded into a nationally known specialty restaurant, something that filled her with pride: "I had internalized my sense of responsibility for the family business early on, so the common good was more important than my individual self-realization."
The close relationship with her best friend, whom she met in vocational school and who came from a similar background, was to become the essential resource for both of their self-realizations between the ages of 15 and 25. In 1970, they managed to leave their respective family businesses together. After half a year in London, the hotspot of the hippie movement at the time, they came back transformed, and not just on the outside: "Instead of dirndl and costume, colorful jackets, jeans, Jesus sandals, long hair, smoking, which caused shock in the family and important power struggles with the father."
When Ebermann was 20, they moved to Vienna and attended a hotel management school (HOFA). "Together we are strong!" formed the common thread of their friendship, binding them together and giving them the emotional support they needed to pursue their life dreams far from the expectations of their families of origin.
In Vienna, the young women enjoyed the more liberal atmosphere of the big city, discussions among their new student circle of friends, and their first exposure to feminist texts and issues. Simone de Beauvoir's major work "The Other Sex" with its famous dictum "We are not born women but made women" made them more sensitive to the criticism of internalized self-conceptions as women. Ebermann therefore states that "reflecting on all this made me a feminist."
Until the age of 25, Ebermann held various jobs in upscale restaurants and hotels in Zürs/Arlberg (Austria), Lausanne (Switzerland), Berlin (Germany) and Paris (France). Back in Vienna, she turned down the hotel career that had been predicted for her. In the wake of an existential crisis, she worked for a short time as a nurse's aide in a psychiatric ward, again causing confusion in her family. It was not until she was 25 that she made up for what she had actually wanted from the beginning: to satisfy her hunger for education. In addition to working full time, she attended high school and successfully passed the Matura (Austrian high school diploma) after four years.
In 1980, Ebermann began her studies in Psychology. Due to Bruno Kreisky (note E.R.: social democratic Austrian chancellor, in office from 1970-1983) and his policy of equal opportunities, this was made possible for her in Austria with a maximum scholarship for second-chance education offered to mature students. She was particularly interested in depth Psychology with the prospect of gaining more knowledge about herself and the inner life of the soul (in German = Seelenleben). While still a student, she began her own classical psychoanalysis: "It was only through analysis that I came alive; before that I mainly functioned.
During her studies, she attended the first lectures on feminism and psychology given at Vienna's main university, including those by Gretl Scherer (also known as Margareta Anna Vobruba), Agnes Büchele (who later became a colleague), and the German Sociologist and Philosopher Frigga Hauk. A milestone was the 1984 lecture by the Sociologist Christina Thürmer-Rohr, who postulated that women were accomplices of patriarchy if they did not actively resist their assigned powerless status in the patriarchal system.
It was the time of the second women's movement with its women's demonstrations (e.g. "The witches are on the loose" on Walpurgis Night) and its emphasis on solidarity and empowerment. Marxist influences motivated a group of students under the Psychologist and psychotherapist Dr. Günter Rexilius to found the Society of Critical Psychologists (GkPP) in Austria. Traude Ebermann has been with the organization since its founding, and still holds seminars there today.
Guided by the feminist motto: "Everything personal is political", Traude Ebermann made her humiliating experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace the subject of her scientific study of female and male hotel employees in her diploma thesis "Psychosocial conditions of waitresses and receptionists in comparison to male colleagues" (1987). The individually experienced feelings of powerlessness could thus be reinterpreted into general statements about so-called "normal working conditions" of discrimination and contribute to a breaking of taboos. As one of the first studies in Austria on this topic, her study was pioneering.
Ebermann's graduation was followed by jobs at the Vienna Crisis Intervention Center and at a psychiatric clinic before she decided to work at the first Austrian women's counseling center Women* counsel Women* in Vienna in 1990. She appreciated the organizational structure of an anti-hierarchical team and the shared responsibility for the association. This attitude had been familiar to her from an early age in her parents' business. Now it was meaningful for the implementation of feminist values and concerns; women could and should collectively change more.
In the women's counseling center, her professional experience in the hotel business, the
self-awareness gained from years of psychoanalysis and as well as her training in talk therapy according to Carl Rogers proved to be a broad resource. Influenced by the women-specific basic attitude of seeing the problems of women against the social background of structural discrimination and a questionable "normality", she focused her work as a counselor, Psychologist and psychotherapist, individually and in groups, on the topics: female identities, work and unemployment, mobbing, sexual harassment, psychosomatics, female sexuality, sexual orientation, as well as sexuality and violence, which also usually included the comprehensive treatment of trauma. Public relations and lecture activities on the aforementioned topics were also part of her self-concept as a team woman. In 1994, she initiated the Institute for Women-Specific Psychotherapy (IFP), which is still affiliated with the women's counseling center Women* Counsel Women*. She experienced the feminist discourse within the team of the women's counseling center as an enormous resource and support for her self-understanding of feminism as expertise. Together with three Viennese colleagues (including Charlotte Aykler and Anna Kubesch), she organized one of the international German-speaking women's therapy congresses in Ottenstein in Lower Austria in 1992.
In addition to her work at Women* counsel Women*, Ebermann also completed training in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy (KIP) and is still active today as a (teaching) therapist in her own practice. What excites her most about Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy is "the connection between psychoanalysis and imagination."
After 20 years of collaboration, Ebermann departed from the women's counseling center into retirement in 2010 with the edited volume "In Recognition of Difference. Feminist Counseling and Psychotherapy" (together with her colleagues Julia Fritz, Karin Macke and Bettina Zehetner).
At the age of 67, Traude Ebermann fulfilled a long-held wish and wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Education in Klagenfurt, Carinthia titled "Sexuality in the Imagination - Flowery Shell Stories. On the Effectiveness of Motifs in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy." This was also published as a book by the established publisher of social science literature Psychosozial Verlag in 2019. The work is a synthesis of her more than thirty years of experience with Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy and her legacy as a contribution to a feminist psychotherapy science. With a qualitative study she contrasts outdated and sexist connoted symbols for sexuality in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy with the cross-cultural positively occupied motif for the female genital "the shell". The result confirmed gender fluidity in the sexes contrary to normative binary gender roles.
Looking back, Ebermann considers it the great historical fortune of her life that as a young woman during the second women's movement she "studied" feminism by reflecting on her immediate life practice with other women, which only later led to academic, feminist discourse (and currently queer), in which she still actively participates.
She experienced her maternal great-grandmother as a role model and strong woman, who at the age of 38 continued the family business alone with her staff after the death of her husband. In addition, women in the village turned to her great-grandmother in need of a trusting conversation with a woman - which made her especially Ebermann's role model as a therapist.
Professionally, Traude Ebermann was accompanied by Psychology professor Sabine Scheffler and psychoanalysts Anna Koellreuter and Susan Heenen-Wolff as feminist role models, mentors and colleagues.
Traude Ebermann appeals to future generations: "Be loud, keep fighting! Partially acquired women's rights are not yet set in stone."
By Emelie Rack & Susanne Hahnl (2023)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
By Traude Ebermann
Ebermann, T. (1992). Sexuelle Belästigung am Arbeitsplatz [Tagungsband]. In Österreichisches Komitee für Soziale Arbeit: Sexuelle Belästigung am Arbeitsplatz. Wien: Eigenverlag.
Ebermann, T. & Böhme-Lindmaier, D. (1997). Fortunas Füllhorn nicht für Frauen ?! Bericht eines EU-Projekt [Conference Proceedings]. In Still und leise in die Unsichtbarkeit. Gegen Armut und soziale Ausgrenzung von Frauen. Frauen beraten Frauen Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2010). Feminismus und KIP oder: Was wir von den Amazonen lernen können. In Traude Ebermann, Julia Fritz, Karin Macke, Bettina Zehetner & Frauen beraten Frauen (Eds.), In Anerkennung der Differenz. Feministische Beratung und Psychotherapie (p. 147–160). Psychosozial Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2019). Sexualität in der Imagination – Blumige Muschelgeschichten. Über die Wirksamkeit von Motiven der Katathym Imaginativen Psychotherapie. Psychosozial Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2020). Sexualitäten & Gender: Imaginative Botschaften des Sexuellen. In E. Hermann-Uhlig (Ed.), Psychotherapie und Sexualität. Interdisziplinäre und methodenübergreifende Positionen. Facultas Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2022). Feminismus und (weibliche) Sexualität in der Psychotherapie: Wie die (Wieder-)Entdeckung der Vulva zum KIP-Motiv „Muschel“ führte. In F. Riffer, M. Sprung, E. Kaiser & J. Burghardt (Ed.), Sexualität im Kontext psychischer Störungen. Psychosomatik im Zentrum (5. Vol., p. 151–166). Springer Verlag https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-...
By and about Traude Ebermann
Ebermann, T. (2022, September 7). Interview by Susanne Hahnl [Video Recording].
Traude Ebermann
Birth:
1950
Training Location(s):
Mag., University of Vienna (1987)
Dr., Institute for Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt (AAU) (2017)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Psychotherapeutic practice in Vienna (since 1988)
Collaborator of Frauen beraten Frauen (1990- 2010)
Initiator of the Institute for Women-Specific Psychotherapy (IFP; affiliated with Frauen beraten Frauen) (since 2000)
Austrian Society for Applied Depth Psychology and General Psychotherapy Vienna (ÖGATAP) (since 1991)
Certified supervisor and coach of the Austrian Association for Psychotherapy (ÖBVP) (since 1996)
Trainer for clinical and health psychology at the Society of Critical Psychologists Vienna (GkPP) (since 1997)
University lecturer for gender-sensitive health behavior, Medical University of Graz (2006- 2013).
Career Focus:
Psychotherapist and trainer for Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy (OEGATAP), feminist psychotherapy scholar, gender expert in university teaching and training
Biography
Traude Ebermann grew up as the second-born child and only girl with three brothers in a village in Lower Austria. The well-established family on her father's side ran a business consisting of two inns and a farm with viticulture, requiring the siblings to help out as children. Her career as a girl seemed preordained: "The first-born takes over the business, the girl works unpaid in the business until her marriage, the third studies, and only the fourth child is allowed to develop free of a role assignment."
When Ebermann, at the age of 14, was planning to go to secondary school (business academy), her mother, who was the driving force in the family business, fell seriously ill. Conscious of her duty, the teenager put her desire for education on hold, began an apprenticeship as a "server" and took on important tasks in the inn, which was expanded into a nationally known specialty restaurant, something that filled her with pride: "I had internalized my sense of responsibility for the family business early on, so the common good was more important than my individual self-realization."
The close relationship with her best friend, whom she met in vocational school and who came from a similar background, was to become the essential resource for both of their self-realizations between the ages of 15 and 25. In 1970, they managed to leave their respective family businesses together. After half a year in London, the hotspot of the hippie movement at the time, they came back transformed, and not just on the outside: "Instead of dirndl and costume, colorful jackets, jeans, Jesus sandals, long hair, smoking, which caused shock in the family and important power struggles with the father."
When Ebermann was 20, they moved to Vienna and attended a hotel management school (HOFA). "Together we are strong!" formed the common thread of their friendship, binding them together and giving them the emotional support they needed to pursue their life dreams far from the expectations of their families of origin.
In Vienna, the young women enjoyed the more liberal atmosphere of the big city, discussions among their new student circle of friends, and their first exposure to feminist texts and issues. Simone de Beauvoir's major work "The Other Sex" with its famous dictum "We are not born women but made women" made them more sensitive to the criticism of internalized self-conceptions as women. Ebermann therefore states that "reflecting on all this made me a feminist."
Until the age of 25, Ebermann held various jobs in upscale restaurants and hotels in Zürs/Arlberg (Austria), Lausanne (Switzerland), Berlin (Germany) and Paris (France). Back in Vienna, she turned down the hotel career that had been predicted for her. In the wake of an existential crisis, she worked for a short time as a nurse's aide in a psychiatric ward, again causing confusion in her family. It was not until she was 25 that she made up for what she had actually wanted from the beginning: to satisfy her hunger for education. In addition to working full time, she attended high school and successfully passed the Matura (Austrian high school diploma) after four years.
In 1980, Ebermann began her studies in Psychology. Due to Bruno Kreisky (note E.R.: social democratic Austrian chancellor, in office from 1970-1983) and his policy of equal opportunities, this was made possible for her in Austria with a maximum scholarship for second-chance education offered to mature students. She was particularly interested in depth Psychology with the prospect of gaining more knowledge about herself and the inner life of the soul (in German = Seelenleben). While still a student, she began her own classical psychoanalysis: "It was only through analysis that I came alive; before that I mainly functioned.
During her studies, she attended the first lectures on feminism and psychology given at Vienna's main university, including those by Gretl Scherer (also known as Margareta Anna Vobruba), Agnes Büchele (who later became a colleague), and the German Sociologist and Philosopher Frigga Hauk. A milestone was the 1984 lecture by the Sociologist Christina Thürmer-Rohr, who postulated that women were accomplices of patriarchy if they did not actively resist their assigned powerless status in the patriarchal system.
It was the time of the second women's movement with its women's demonstrations (e.g. "The witches are on the loose" on Walpurgis Night) and its emphasis on solidarity and empowerment. Marxist influences motivated a group of students under the Psychologist and psychotherapist Dr. Günter Rexilius to found the Society of Critical Psychologists (GkPP) in Austria. Traude Ebermann has been with the organization since its founding, and still holds seminars there today.
Guided by the feminist motto: "Everything personal is political", Traude Ebermann made her humiliating experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace the subject of her scientific study of female and male hotel employees in her diploma thesis "Psychosocial conditions of waitresses and receptionists in comparison to male colleagues" (1987). The individually experienced feelings of powerlessness could thus be reinterpreted into general statements about so-called "normal working conditions" of discrimination and contribute to a breaking of taboos. As one of the first studies in Austria on this topic, her study was pioneering.
Ebermann's graduation was followed by jobs at the Vienna Crisis Intervention Center and at a psychiatric clinic before she decided to work at the first Austrian women's counseling center Women* counsel Women* in Vienna in 1990. She appreciated the organizational structure of an anti-hierarchical team and the shared responsibility for the association. This attitude had been familiar to her from an early age in her parents' business. Now it was meaningful for the implementation of feminist values and concerns; women could and should collectively change more.
In the women's counseling center, her professional experience in the hotel business, the
self-awareness gained from years of psychoanalysis and as well as her training in talk therapy according to Carl Rogers proved to be a broad resource. Influenced by the women-specific basic attitude of seeing the problems of women against the social background of structural discrimination and a questionable "normality", she focused her work as a counselor, Psychologist and psychotherapist, individually and in groups, on the topics: female identities, work and unemployment, mobbing, sexual harassment, psychosomatics, female sexuality, sexual orientation, as well as sexuality and violence, which also usually included the comprehensive treatment of trauma. Public relations and lecture activities on the aforementioned topics were also part of her self-concept as a team woman. In 1994, she initiated the Institute for Women-Specific Psychotherapy (IFP), which is still affiliated with the women's counseling center Women* Counsel Women*. She experienced the feminist discourse within the team of the women's counseling center as an enormous resource and support for her self-understanding of feminism as expertise. Together with three Viennese colleagues (including Charlotte Aykler and Anna Kubesch), she organized one of the international German-speaking women's therapy congresses in Ottenstein in Lower Austria in 1992.
In addition to her work at Women* counsel Women*, Ebermann also completed training in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy (KIP) and is still active today as a (teaching) therapist in her own practice. What excites her most about Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy is "the connection between psychoanalysis and imagination."
After 20 years of collaboration, Ebermann departed from the women's counseling center into retirement in 2010 with the edited volume "In Recognition of Difference. Feminist Counseling and Psychotherapy" (together with her colleagues Julia Fritz, Karin Macke and Bettina Zehetner).
At the age of 67, Traude Ebermann fulfilled a long-held wish and wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Education in Klagenfurt, Carinthia titled "Sexuality in the Imagination - Flowery Shell Stories. On the Effectiveness of Motifs in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy." This was also published as a book by the established publisher of social science literature Psychosozial Verlag in 2019. The work is a synthesis of her more than thirty years of experience with Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy and her legacy as a contribution to a feminist psychotherapy science. With a qualitative study she contrasts outdated and sexist connoted symbols for sexuality in Katathym Imaginative Psychotherapy with the cross-cultural positively occupied motif for the female genital "the shell". The result confirmed gender fluidity in the sexes contrary to normative binary gender roles.
Looking back, Ebermann considers it the great historical fortune of her life that as a young woman during the second women's movement she "studied" feminism by reflecting on her immediate life practice with other women, which only later led to academic, feminist discourse (and currently queer), in which she still actively participates.
She experienced her maternal great-grandmother as a role model and strong woman, who at the age of 38 continued the family business alone with her staff after the death of her husband. In addition, women in the village turned to her great-grandmother in need of a trusting conversation with a woman - which made her especially Ebermann's role model as a therapist.
Professionally, Traude Ebermann was accompanied by Psychology professor Sabine Scheffler and psychoanalysts Anna Koellreuter and Susan Heenen-Wolff as feminist role models, mentors and colleagues.
Traude Ebermann appeals to future generations: "Be loud, keep fighting! Partially acquired women's rights are not yet set in stone."
By Emelie Rack & Susanne Hahnl (2023)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
By Traude Ebermann
Ebermann, T. (1992). Sexuelle Belästigung am Arbeitsplatz [Tagungsband]. In Österreichisches Komitee für Soziale Arbeit: Sexuelle Belästigung am Arbeitsplatz. Wien: Eigenverlag.
Ebermann, T. & Böhme-Lindmaier, D. (1997). Fortunas Füllhorn nicht für Frauen ?! Bericht eines EU-Projekt [Conference Proceedings]. In Still und leise in die Unsichtbarkeit. Gegen Armut und soziale Ausgrenzung von Frauen. Frauen beraten Frauen Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2010). Feminismus und KIP oder: Was wir von den Amazonen lernen können. In Traude Ebermann, Julia Fritz, Karin Macke, Bettina Zehetner & Frauen beraten Frauen (Eds.), In Anerkennung der Differenz. Feministische Beratung und Psychotherapie (p. 147–160). Psychosozial Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2019). Sexualität in der Imagination – Blumige Muschelgeschichten. Über die Wirksamkeit von Motiven der Katathym Imaginativen Psychotherapie. Psychosozial Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2020). Sexualitäten & Gender: Imaginative Botschaften des Sexuellen. In E. Hermann-Uhlig (Ed.), Psychotherapie und Sexualität. Interdisziplinäre und methodenübergreifende Positionen. Facultas Verlag.
Ebermann, T. (2022). Feminismus und (weibliche) Sexualität in der Psychotherapie: Wie die (Wieder-)Entdeckung der Vulva zum KIP-Motiv „Muschel“ führte. In F. Riffer, M. Sprung, E. Kaiser & J. Burghardt (Ed.), Sexualität im Kontext psychischer Störungen. Psychosomatik im Zentrum (5. Vol., p. 151–166). Springer Verlag https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-...
By and about Traude Ebermann
Ebermann, T. (2022, September 7). Interview by Susanne Hahnl [Video Recording].