Charlotte Wolff

Charlotte Wolff (30 September 1897 – 12 September 1986) was a German-British physician who worked as a psychotherapist and wrote on sexology and hand analysis. Her writings on lesbianism and bisexuality were influential early works in the field.

Life and career Charlotte Wolff was born on 30 September 1897 in Riesenburg, West Prussia (now Prabuty, Poland) into a liberal middle-class Jewish family. She was educated in Danzig (now Gdańsk) and at the Viktoria Schule, a Realgymnasium (girls' academic secondary school) in Dresden. In 1920 she entered the University of Freiburg to study literature and philosophy; at the time she was writing poetry, some of which she published. She changed her academic focus to medicine and after further study at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and Tübingen, completed a degree as a physician at Berlin in 1926. Remaining in Berlin, she did her internship treating sex workers at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital, then in addition to private practice as a physician and psychotherapist, worked in clinics in working-class districts and did voluntary work in family planning. She became deputy director for pre-natal services and in 1932, director of the Institute for Electro-physical Therapy at the Neukölln clinic. in Berlin she had an "Aryan" partner who left her for fear of the Nazis. and wrote several books propounding hand analysis as a key to personality. The Human Hand (1942) was termed "a curious mixture of fact, theory, hypothesis, and conjecture" by one academic reviewer, and "unconvincing, to say the least" by another who nonetheless saw promise in the general approach, but a third wrote that it "merit[ed] serious reading." The disapproving reviewers noted that hand similarities had led Wolff to infer the descent of man and of Capuchin monkeys from a common origin in the Americas.

In her book The Human Hand Wolff expressed racist and ableist views. She referred to the anthropologists and race theorists Rudolf Martin and Otto Schlaginhaufen. Wolff suggested, one can see at the size of the thumbs, that black people are less developed than white people: "(…) adult Negroes have smaller thumbs than white men. As power of consciousness is more highly developed in Europeans than in Negroes, the anatomical difference tallies with the psychological significance of the thumb." Wolff compared the palms of a gorilla to those of a mentally handicapped man. Wolff concluded that the disabled man is mentally inferior to the gorilla: "As compared with the gorilla the idiot appears to be the less differentiated and developed being."

Her later book, The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis (1951) was evaluated as the result of "serious, extensive, devoted study" but having the defect of other versions of constitutional psychology of tending to shortcuts via the classification into "types".

After starting on the first of two autobiographies in the 1960s, she changed the focus of her research to sexology She argued that bisexuality was the natural human state, self-definition as heterosexual or homosexual the result of "brainwashing".

Shortly before her death she published a biography of Magnus Hirschfeld which has been regarded as her most important work.

Selected publications Tr. O. M. Cook. Studies in Hand-Reading. London: Chatto & Windus, 1936. The Human Hand. London: Methuen, 1942. 3rd ed. 1949. A Psychology of Gesture. London: Methuen, 1945. 2nd ed. 1948 repr. New York: Arno, 1972. The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis. London: Methuen, 1951. Love Between Women. London: Duckworth, 1971. Tr. Christel Buschmann. Psychologie der lesbischen Liebe: Eine empirische Studie der weiblichen Homosexualität. rororo 8040. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977. (Translation of Love between Women) Bisexuality: A Study. London: Quartet, 1977. Rev. ed. 1979, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. London/New York: Quartet, 1986. Manfred Magg. Professionelles Handlesen: Studien der Surrealisten in Paris mit Biografien und Horoskopen. Tuebingen: Chiron, 2024. (Translation of Studies in Hand-Reading)