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  • Ariadne’s Thread
  • Liliane Weissberg (bio)

You’re dreaming of taking on a braid or a weave, a warp or a woof, but without being sure of the textile to come, if there is one, if any remains and without knowing if what remains to come will still deserve the name of text, especially of the text in the figure of a textile.

—Jacques Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own”1

In her memoirs, My Three Mothers and Other Passions, Sophie Freud describes a visit to her aunt Anna, an ardent knitter and maker of dresses. “‘You sew all your own clothes by hand?’” Sophie recalled asking her aunt while looking at her garments with surprise. Anna Freud, in turn, could only wonder about her niece’s question. “‘Of course,’” she finally responded, “a bit impatiently,” no less: “‘it would after all not be practical to use a sewing machine while I see patients.’”2

Many female psychoanalysts today are probably following the footsteps and handiwork of Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, knitting or stitching during analytic hours. My questions here are very simple ones. Is this occupation of cloth making an accidental one, or is this practice in some way related, or already inscribed, in Freud’s own work? Could such a practice or its history have possibly influenced [End Page 661] psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalytic theory? And would it relate in any way to Freud’s own Eastern European Jewish origins?

I. Handiwork

Let us forget for a moment the fashion designers of Paris or Milan, and even early twentieth-century tailor shops in Vienna or New York. For Freud, as for many of his contemporaries, actual fabric production and needlework—spinning, knitting, stitching, and weaving—were largely female occupations. Moreover, Freud’s references to the craft of cloth making would concentrate mostly on its non-professional nature. Indeed, in much of his work, Freud seemed less interested in the professional occupations of weaver or seamstress but rather in the voluntary nature of each enterprise.

Thus, Freud had to adjust his views in regard to the perceived genderedness of these tasks. While tailor shops had been filled with female workers at the turn of the twentieth century, there were certainly male tailors as well, and especially male supervisors in urban sweatshops. And if tasks like spinning and knitting could have been integrated into a women’s history, the craft of weaving often had a specifically male tradition.3 Freud, however, was less focused on the history of individual cloth making processes, and more attuned to the pastimes of the women in his family—his needle-working sister-in-law Minna Bernays, for example, and that of his female, bourgeois patients.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the course of progressive urbanization, the number of women whose lives were more or less restricted to their homes grew. Bourgeois domesticity became a prevalent model. Men were supposed to earn the family’s livelihood, while it was the woman’s task to raise the children, provide for the meals, and keep the house in order. Freud’s patients were often described as daughters of these bourgeois families—such as “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim) or “Dora” (Ida Bauer)—who would try to find their place in this domestic world, and a modicum of independence in- and outside the house. In the well-to-do families of Vienna’s middle class, hysteria seemed to flourish, no doubt supported by specific family constellations as well as the woman’s need to comply with strict and [End Page 662] restricted gender roles.4 Dora, for example, would complain about her mother’s constant efforts to keep the apartment clean and tidy, an effort that Freud would describe simply as a “housewife’s neurosis”— without having met her mother, and easily agreeing with his patient’s view. Dora, however, was one of the few young girls and women who did not show much interest in needlework; she would prefer the card game, bridge, and even gain an Austrian title in bridge competition a few years after her analysis with Freud ended.

The late nineteenth century was not only the time of...

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