Born in Germany in 1891, Paulssen received her doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1917. She soon began to work in the Lutheran Inner Mission societies of northern Germany, and to establish Women’s Auxiliaries in eastern provinces. She modernized youth services in Hamburg and began to teach social psychology. With the rise of Nazism, she emigrated to the United States, where she worked in settlement houses in New York City while teaching at the Philadelphia Deaconess Motherhouse and at Gettysburg, Wagner, and Muhlenberg Colleges.
Having taught for several years at Gettysburg Seminary, in 1946 she became the first full-time professor of Christian sociology and the first tenured woman at an American Lutheran Seminary. She remained at that institution until her retirement in 1963, and continued to live in Gettysburg until her death in 1973. At Gettysburg she trained a generation of pastors and lay persons, who became leaders in social ministry, communications, and pastoral counseling.