Freudians and Feminists

Edith Kurzweil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367004590
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the intellectual history of the interaction between feminists and Freudian thought, charting the essence of psychoanalytic theories through the years to show specific notions were adapted, readapted, and discarded by successive generations of feminists.

1
The Early Freudians’ Views of Women

At the turn of the century, women's liberation was a by-product of human liberation, and psychoanalysis was to be the principal means of attaining personal freedom. Freud had spent many years writing his first psychoanalytic publication, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), in which he advanced the principles of his new doctrine. As we know, he then was as bent upon convincing his fellow physicians that they would be able to cure their hysterical (women) patients by talking to them as he was to prove that such interventions would be in line with advanced, scientific tenets. To be listened to at all, he also had to present psychoanalytic ideas in the terms of the then acceptable intellectual discussions. These were dominated by psychologists and philosophers who in a variety of ways were attempting to explain by means of scientific cosmologies the psychic underpinnings of an inordinately eroticized yet innately repressed society.

Freud, of course, shared his contemporaries' conceptualizations and philosophers' customary ways of dividing the world into dualities such as nature/culture, sea/land, liquid/solid, gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, capital/labor, male/female. Historical progression was taken for granted; and so were generalizations about little girls that derived from psychological assumptions about little boys. So after he had become convinced that the Oedipus myth is universal and that the boy's first desires are for his mother, he also could expect that the girl's are for her father (1900a, p. 257). Moreover, even though Freud was not religious and did not believe that Eve had sprung from Adam's rib, the society he lived in certainly was organized as if this were the case. And no one seriously questioned the sexual division of labor or the division of privilege, although the mostly liberal philosophers expected to eliminate these divisions. In this context, Freud's notion of the bisexuality of both men and women went against both the scientific and taken-for-granted assumptions of most of his contemporaries. Humanists, laypeople, and scientists were shocked at the idea that innocent children had knowledge, however unconscious, of sexuality and at the possible psychosomatic consequences of its repression. Thus they all were bound to deny the validity of psychoanalytic presumptions.

The handful of followers who chose to take Freud seriously and to explore his views also were living with the unexamined dualisms. They too did not question that men and women were different in every conceivable way. The (widely dispersed) disciples were too busy establishing psychoanalytic enclaves and defending these against detractors. That not a single woman joined Freud's Wednesday Society between 1902 and 1909 was not due to discrimination but to the fact that no woman applied. After all, the University of Vienna allowed women to enter only in 1897.

On April 21, 1909, at the Seventy-sixth Wiener Psychoanalitischer Verein (WPV), Dr. Margarete Hilferding presented the paper "Propaganda Among Physicians" and thereby was the first woman to qualify for membership in the Freudians' circle. (Dr. Sophie Erismann had been at the Salzburg congress of psychoanalysts in 1908 and belonged to the Zürich Society until 1914, and Dr. Maria Gincburg [later Oberholzer] was already studying with Jung in 1909.) She was officially elected to join on April 27, 1910, by "twelve yeas and two nays" (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, 2:499). The nays belonged to Dr. Fritz Wittels and to another one of the three people (most likely Isidor Sadger) who, on a previous occasion, had wondered whether it was advisable to welcome women. By then, Wittels's biases were legend. Already on December 16, 1908, he had presented a paper questioning women's innate intellectual powers on "scientific" grounds: Going beyond (or undercutting?) Freud's (1905d) assumed parallel between male and female sexuality, he had argued that women were inferior because their thinking was rooted in "converted sexuality" (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, 2:83). Freud questioned this supposition indirectly by contending that the sexual life of men was accessible to research but that of women was "still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity" (Freud, 1905d, p. 151). He did not convince Wittels. However, this loaded issue was intrinsic to the larger purposes of a number of psychoanalysts. Alfred Adler's sharp response made that clear. He attacked Wittels's assumption that psychoanalysis by itself would revolutionize thinking and thereby facilitate the transition to a truly socialist society. He accused Wittels of underestimating women and of "sharing the attitudes of the philistines" (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, 2:91)—the uncultured who were the bane of all intellectuals, including psychoanalysts.

Another time, Wittels dug in his heels even further. He presented a rather questionable, anthropological thesis about the unconscious meaning of menstruation and concluded, this time over the objections of most of the participants, that women who are feminists originally wanted to be born as men. Adler repudiated him in explicitly Marxist terms and maintained unequivocally that women's fate arose from patriarchal and property relations:

Whereas it is generally assumed that the framework of present relationships between men and women is constant, Socialists assume that the framework of the family is already shaky today and will increasingly become so in the future. Woman will not allow motherhood to prevent her from taking up a profession; motherhood may either remain an obstacle for some, or else it will lose its hardship. (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, 2:352)

Although Adler was not exactly prophetic about the future of socialism, he certainly foresaw the changes that would occur in the relationship between the sexes. He articulated clearly not only the opposing opinions among the early Freudians but those among intellectuals and politicians.

Undoubtedly, none of the men around Freud were feminists. But all of them were going against the grain; all of them were disdainful of the philistines among whom they lived; all of them shared utopian visions; and they expected psychoanalysis to free society not only from psychological but from every other repression. In other words, they were idealists who, together, were striving to liberate humanity with the help of their new science in the making.

Viennese Women

Since men's psyches could not be explored without considering their relation to women, particularly to their mothers, women ipso facto were part of the Freudians' subject matter—even though men alone participated in the formulation of early hypotheses. The women who soon would join them were emancipated, going against Vienna's Zeitgeist. (Among the things expected of women was being coquettish and flirtatious while remaining chaste.) Freud himself remarked more than once that society was subjugating woman to man in every sphere and making impossible demands of her. Commenting on his own translation of John Stuart Mill into German (in 1880), he stated that even Mill had "overlooked the fact that a woman cannot earn a living and raise children at the same time." At a meeting in 1909, he concluded that "women as a group profit nothing by the modern feminist movement; at best a few individuals profit" (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, 2:351). Wittels had been nearly alone in actively opposing female membership, and gradually more women were entering the group.

Alfred Adler, along with other members of this group (among them Wilhelm Stekel, Margarete Hilferding, and Karl Furtmüller), agitated for changing social conditions, for severing the chains of the existing order so that feminism would be able to thrive. (Nevertheless, Freud did not notice the contradiction in the fact that he encouraged his youngest daughter, Anna, to become a teacher rather than a doctor.) Unlike Adler, who proseletyzed for his watered-down psychoanalytic theories and coupled them to his Marxism, Freud assumed women would automatically be liberated. Consequently, Adler played a larger role in the Austrian left than the Freudians and had more impact on the Viennese educational establishment, which urged all of the city's school teachers to adopt Adlerian ideas.

In 1911, Adler started the Verein für Freie Psychoanalytische Forschung (VFPF), which was to put psychoanalysis at the service of socialism. Freud, however, advocated patience and focusing on individuals' liberation through psychoanalysis. This disagreement triggered the first split within the original circle. But not all the women were led to separate from Freud. The records indicate that those of Freud's followers who stayed in the Wiener Psychoanalytische Verein, though less intently supporting revolutionary activities, nevertheless were on the political left.

At the Weimar Congress (an international meeting of pyschoanalysts) in September 1911, the year of the break with Adler, the picture of fortyone participants includes eight women: All of them are seated in the first row (Jones, 1955, 2:86). The name of one is omitted, and only one, Emma Jung, is a wife, though she too later on would become a (Jungian) analyst. Beatrice Hinkle, who came from America, is missing in this picture. Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been Rilke's and Nietzsche's lover and already in 1900 had written and spoken publicly on the intricate elements of eroticism, was studying with Freud and became his lifelong friend. She sat at the center of the picture, in front of Freud and Sandór Ferenczi, the Hungarian disciple whose contributions would stress clinical empathy, including physical contact, over abstract theory. (His ideas currently are being reintroduced by American psychotherapists.)

Even though the early Freudians made no. special effort to attract women to their movement, they readily accepted those, such as Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, who wanted to join. By 1912, this schoolteacher had written a number of papers on child analysis, among them "Analysis of a Dream of a Five and a Half Year Old Boy." The boy in the analysis was her sister's illegitimate child, whom they were bringing up together. Influenced by psychoanalysis, Hug-Hellmuth raised him permissively, particularly after the death of her sister. When this nephew, Rolf, reached adolescence, he apparently was unable to take frustration and engaged in all sorts of asocial behavior. Eventually Hug-Hellmuth, in desperation, put him into a home for delinquents. In 1924, he escaped and broke into her house to steal money once again. When HugHellmuth screamed, he panicked and strangled her.

In 1913, Hug-Hellmuth published the first of seven daring papers, "On Female Masturbation," in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie.¹ There, she noted that neither male nor female physicians ever talked to their female patients about their habits of masturbation, or even about how to avoid stimulating their infants' erotogenic zones while taking care of them, and that male physicians and psychologists tend to overemphasize the frequency of girls' masturbation and their female colleagues take its absence as "a special immaculateness" (Maclean and Reppen, 1991, p. 220). Hug-Hellmuth differentiated among masturbatory acts and their accompanying fantasies (some of them included past experiences with men) according to age, psychic experiences and autoerotic activities away from the genital zones and their varied replacement in later life. Because she requested that none of her writing be disseminated after her death and her analyst and friend, Isidor Sadger, saw to it that this wish was granted, Hug-Hellmuth's contributions on both children's and women's sexuality were being forgotten until recently. Clearly, she qualifies as a feminist.

Later, as I will note further on, some of the women who joined Freud, such as Marie Bonaparte, Eugenia Sokolnicka, and Sabina Spielrein, ended up playing major organizational and intellectual roles; and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein eventually vied for overall leadership of the movement. There were also indirect influences on women. Freud's argument against sexual repression appealed, for instance, to Emma Goldman, a revolutionary and defender of free love. According to her, in his lectures at Clark University in 1909, Freud presented proof that repression cripples the intelligence of women (Hale, 1971, p. 22). But this sort of broad-based influence on the larger culture cannot be substantiated directly or definitively.

Nellie Thompson, a historian, carefully examined the early records to locate all the persons who turned to psychoanalysis between 1902 and 1930. She found that overall, 653 individuals belonged to psychoanalytic organizations, of whom 133 (about 20 percent) were women, and that a higher proportion of women remained lifelong members (79 percent as opposed to 70 percent of men). Moreover, Thompson noted that between the second and the third decade of the century, the number of women who joined the international movement more than doubled (from 39 to 92), and the number of men remained stable (from 221 to 219) (1987, pp. 393-394). This leads to the conclusion that psychoanalysis was more open to women than other professions—either because, like other not-yet-established movements, the Freudians welcomed whatever support they could garner or because, along with Freud, they felt that they had better listen to women in order to help Freud find out "what woman wants." Inevitably, the women psychoanalysts bared their unconscious, opened it up to scrutiny, and were eager to better comprehend the obstacles that prevented all women from achieving equality with men.

Responses to Freud’s Evolving Theories

In general, Freud was more flexible than his male followers, more inclined to admit what he did not know and to offer tentative hypotheses he expected them to explore—some of which he felt at liberty to reject or at least alter at a later date. But because he too was a product of his time, albeit an exceptional one, it should not surprise us that he postulated the masculine as the cultural and sexual norm and then defined the feminine in the same terms as a sort of appendage. However, long after his first full depiction in 1900 of the oedipal conflict, the linchpin of psychoanalyis, he reiterated in "The Ego and the Id" (1923b) that what was true for the boy followed for the girl. Even though he synthesized his earlier findings, Freud restated that the processes surrounding the dissolution of the Oedipus complex were "precisely analogous" in boys and girls. (Yet his preanalytic as well as many of his subsequent clinical observations were based on work with female hysterical patients.) In a footnote to the "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" in 1905, he went out of his way to make clear that he did not mean to equate "masculine" with "active" and "feminine" with "passive":

Activity and its concomitant phenomena (more powerful muscular development, aggressiveness, greater intensity of libido) are as a rule linked with biological masculinity; but they are not necessarily so, for there are animal species in which these qualities are on the contrary assigned to the female. ... In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found in the psychological or biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones. (1905d, pp. 219-220)

In "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes" (1925j) Freud elaborated on the fact that for both sexes, the child's first love object is the mother and that the ambivalences due to bisexuality inherent in both sexes are expressed in early childhood and then reactivated in all later love relations. Certainly, one could deduce that his interpretations of this process are as dependent on social as on biological elements. According to Freud, the boy starts out by loving his mother (a member of the opposite sex), and during the oedipal phase, when this attachment is sexualized, he first begins to fear his father as the unbeatable rival and then identifies with him. This transition allows him to preserve his heterosexual love and to hope for a wife and children of his own when he is grown up. For the girl, however, the task is more difficult: She too begins by being attached to her mother (a member of her own sex) but must shift to loving her father. And while she is learning to identify with her mother and finding out that she must abandon her as her love object and move toward her father, she also realizes that she will never have a penis. This recognition (in conjunction with other factors) may make her "wish" for one or deny that she doesn't have one. But when she has realized that this is the universal condition of being female, "she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect... and insists on being like a man." She knows that her mother "sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped," and this knowledge may emerge in fantasies, in jealousy toward a sibling, and in a curtailment in masturbation (the small clitoris cannot compete with the superior penis) (1925j, p. 252). This is why the little girl enters the Oedipus complex by wanting a child from her father and perceives her mother as a rival and why there is less impetus for her to dissolve this complex—and to develop a strong superego.

Clearly, these (unconscious) events are experienced as a series of defeats and are bound to be the mainspring for feelings of inferiority and defeatism and of fears of conflict, struggle, and competition. Thus, the theory gets grounded in a biological determinism that does not allow for the enhanced chances psychoanalysis itself was to open up for women.

All in all, the question is not only whether Freud relied too strongly on biological parallels to other species at the expense of sociological determinants but whether women can be socialized in a way that leads to more equitable results. Among Freudians the concept of bisexuality did remain central. Soon, none of them questioned the fact that each sex carries the biological characteristics of the other. Consequently, research into bisexuality went hand in hand with research into the sociological aspects of the personality formation of both girls and boys. Because it is the repression of early sexual instincts that plays havoc with our unconscious and that triggers the onset of neurosis, psychoanalysts conducted thousands of inquiries into the unconscious of the adult patients they attempted to cure and also published thousands of clinical and literary contributions. Some focused on specific moments of preoedipal, oedipal, and postoedipal development; others dismissed the oedipal period as central; and a few said that the Oedipus complex was Freud's own neurosis. But the deepest roots of the human unconscious, both male and female, ultimately have remained hidden.

Outside the Freudian camp (in both intellectual and therapeutic fields), people have picked up selectively on whatever notions contained in Freud's or his disciples' oeuvres they happened to appreciate. American feminists, who until the mid-1970s condemned Freud for his concepts of castration and penis envy, since then have made amends by championing components of these conceptions, although they have often been incorporated into more of the literary rather than the clinical theories. But at first, Freudian men and women analyzed literary works to gain insights. And the original disputes about the genesis of women occurred in the 1920s.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud essentially relied on his self-analysis, on his associations to dreams, daydreams, wishes, experiences, and literature that were derived from his own unconscious. Therefore, psychoanalysis often has been rejected as an artifact of Vienna at the turn of the century. However, Freud himself was a composite of his Jewish origins and of the masculine ethos rooted in patriarchy, so his unconscious inevitably was molded by these social forces. And because, with a few rather debatable exceptions, most known societies have been dominated by men (in one form or another), I go along with those feminists who believe that psychoanalysis—that is, the inquiry into conscious and unconscious mental mechanisms—is the best means of inquiring into the formation of male/female identity and, eventually, of bringing about the psychological conditions that might usher in social equality. Therefore, I am putting aside the objections of anti-Freudian feminists and dealing only with the discussions by feminists who have attempted to apply psychoanalysis to the liberation of women which, incidentally, was what Freud did in his "Studies on Hysteria" (1895d).

The 1920s Debates

Freud and his disciples agreed that the castration complex is caused not only by biological factors but by psychological and social ones as well. Yet at their meetings they focused, for the most part, on male castration and continued to conceptualize female development in relation to it. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Early Freudians' Views of Women
• 2 The Freudian Feminists Cross the Atlantic
• 3 From the Quiet 1950s to the Storm in the 1960s and 1970s
• 4 Feminists' Views of Freud in the 1970s
• 5 Jacques Lacan and French Feminism
• 6 From American Feminism to French Psychoanalytic Feminism
• 7 Feminism in Germany
• 8 Postmodern Feminism in America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index