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Chapter 9: Woman as Theory and Theory-Makerin the Early Years of Psychoanalysis
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WOMAN IN THE EARLY YEARS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 153 Chapter 9 WOMAN AS THEORY AND THEORY-MAKER IN THE EARLY YEARS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS ANNA BORGOS “Throughout history, people have speculated a lot on the enigma of femininity.… You will not have escaped worrying about this problem, those of you who are men. To those of you who are women, this will not apply, as you yourselves are the problem.” Sigmund Freud’s lecture “Femininity” (1933) starts with the above reflection (translated by the author from the Hungarian version of the text, Freud 1999,127–28).This sentence quintessentially demonstrates that the representation of women in classical psychoanalytical theory and therapy largely reflected and reinforced other forms of the cultural representation of women at the time. The masculinization of production and activity was part of public discourse. Women could hardly have voices of their own in the dominant discourse about themselves, as they constituted the “problem” for “neutral” (male-dominated) science, and passive objects in art, which was also dominated by men. Women were the Other, riddles to be solved by the male imagination, but they were also real people fulfilling everyday and mostly traditional gender roles. On the other hand, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries women were beginning to see and to understand the possibilities and conflicts that had been brought about by changes in the social space, and they took part in inducing these changes. This social and psychological transition is very well expressed in a sentence from Robert Musil’s essay “Woman Yesterday and Tomorrow” (215): “Woman does not want to be an ideal anymore.She wants to create ideals herself.” Through this transition and transformation, women contributed to an important GaMiCE.indb 153 4/6/10 8:01:16 PM 154 GENDER AND MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE degree to the extension of movements, ideologies, and social expectations, and, by the same token, to the blurring of the dichotomy between subject and Other (see Gambrell and, in relation to Hungary in particular, Szapor). As Rita Felski emphasizes, the images of femininity played an emblematic role in the anxieties and intellectual revolutions of modernity. Women thus did not simply stand for the Other, but rather represented the complexity of difference and identification, isolation and multiple attachments (marital, social, professional, activist, and so on). Different authors have expressed this duality in different terms: “shared and unique” (Friedman, 40); “familiar strangeness” (Gambrell, 9–39); “against and within” (De Lauretis, 301). This paper explores two main questions. First, in what ways did classical psychoanalytic theories represent women and femininity? Here, women appear as the objects of research, serving more or less as devices with which to outline certain elements of the theories. Second, how did the first practising women psychoanalysts think about and contribute to Freudian theories about femininity from their own points of view? Here,in contrast,the focus is on women as creative subjects who managed to find their place in psychoanalysis as a new discipline and for whom Freud himself provided valuable support. Freud himself perceived the rather ambiguous relation between the place of women within psychoanalytic theories and their actual work as psychoanalysts. In his lecture “Femininity,” he resolved and closed the debate by addressing his fictional audience of female analysts with the following words (Freud 1999, 131): “This does not apply to you. You are the exception. In this respect, you are more masculine than feminine.” The Place of Woman in the Freudian System of Thought The development of psychoanalysis is closely intertwined with discourses on femininity.As Dianne Hunter writes (272): “Psychoanalysis entered the history of consciousness in dialogue with feminine subjectivity.”A significant part of Freud’s oeuvre comprises his thoughts on femininity.On the one hand,he wrote extensively on female hysteria, one of the paramount neurotic symptoms that opened the way toward the discovery of the unconscious and served as a basis for Freud’s early theory on the significance of sexual traumas (Mitchell, 8). On the other hand, he developed his views on the “female way” of psychosexual development, which established the fundamental psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex, and, by the same token, the theory about the formation of the superego. GaMiCE.indb 154 4/6/10 8:01:17 PM [44.222.116.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:21 GMT) WOMAN IN THE EARLY YEARS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 155 Freud’s theory and practice regarding women...