Freud on Women: A Reader Paperback – August 17, 1992

Necessary and extremely useful to those interested in a curated collection of Freud's essays related to women. Some surprisingly apt choices of less-canonized essays in here. Important read for those of us working on Freud.

So much is said and filmed about Freud and so much of his theories are still alive and kicking among psychiatrists (specially male ones), that it becomes paramount to know exactly what his theories were. If you still believe (or are still being told) that you are a hysterical woman or have a "neurosis", then give your little gray cells a treat with this extraordinary detailed account of 19th century ideology. You will laugh until your sides split! Do not miss the chapter on homosexuality, it is a hoot!

While this edited volume of a select collection of articles does not take sides on the controversy about Freud's sexual theories on women, it does add up to a rich and robust historical trail of his intellectual development on the issue. In particular it shows more or less step-by-step how he boot-strapped his way from one proto-theory to another, final ending up with a two-sided theory of the Oedipal complex, with transference. This narrative is the reviewer's compiled summary of the articles in the book. To him they reveal this development as having emerged somewhat in the follows way:

Freud's work in psychoanalysis of course began with his work on hysteria in women, which at the time was thought to be an ailment that was peculiar only to women. His theorizing began by noticing the very real differences in sexual attitudes between men and women: Women invariably adopted a defensive or a passive stance, while men did the opposite: They were aggressive and more open about sex.

This coupled with the fact that the problems of hysteria within many of his patients began in the marriage bedroom, where sex took on the character more of a violation than an erotic seduction, led Freud to suspect that these attitudes probably had a pre-sexual root that began in childhood. From there he slowly discovered from his patients, that, more often than not, hysterical symptoms had been triggered as a result of some form of sexual abuse (real or imagined) by a father, or father figure.

He thus became more and more convinced that memories from childhood sexual traumas lay in the background of adult hysterias. Locating the precise timing of the triggering event seemed to be of paramount importance. So he drew up a table of childhood stages that would suggest "what primal experiences" could lead to "what hysteria symptoms." He and his colleagues concluded that such symptoms could have begun as early as the age of four.

This prompted him to posit a theory of erogenous zones -- of the mouth, the anus, and the genitals -- areas that were exciting to children at various ages and thus at different stages of their sexual development. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction with these experiences, which incidentally could also have involved auto-erotic pleasures even before they involved passive or seductive experience with adults, undoubtedly made up an important part of the psychic history of his hysteria patients.

First he tried to associate particular sexual experiences with particular neuroses. Being especially aware of the role childhood fantasies play in generating hysterical symptoms, Freud no longer assumed that the father -- either through actual or imagined abuse -- was necessarily always the only source of the neurosis. Later this "train of thought" would be referred to as his "seduction hypothesis." Summarized succinctly, it hypothesized that "sexualized fantasies" had been repressed in females -- especially in those representations where the female felt more masculine.

Freud would find this hypothesis to be unproductive and he eventually gave it up in favor of the richer framework called the Oedipal complex. The Oedipal complex posited a framework that assumed opposite-sex love and same-sex rivalry in both girls and boys. Its foundation assumption was that both genders have a death-wish for the parent of the same sex, and a corresponding fantasized sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex.

Since a single source for hysteria could not be found, Freud then focused on correlating "wish fulfillment" of repressed thoughts in dreams and fantasies with hysterical symptoms -- always being alert to the possibility that the symptoms might have deeper bisexual meanings, especially in women who tended to strongly repress masculine meanings within their sexual representations.

In the case of Dora, the only case publish among his his written research, the puzzle of her hysteria kept getting more complex the deeper it went. The Oedipal elements remained prominent, but they took on ever more complex forms: Her repressed sexual representations now had two objects, both her father and his mistress (recomposed and refocused as a second-order repressed representation of her mother).

As Dora fled from analysis, Freud understood why she had to flee: A treatment can relive existing symptoms and stop formation of new ones without actually halting the "productive powers" of the neurosis, which in Dora continued through an ever deeper and more subterranean mechanism called transference: Freud, the therapist himself, had become Dora's replaced sexual object -- a recomposed and refocused "stand-in" for one of her repressed parental sexual objects. Freud understood that Dora's love had been played out in a transference onto him.

Since he was not sure of these materials, he did not stop until he had worked them through and tested them in a non-pathological domain. This resulted in a monograph called "The psychological Pathology of Everyday Life."

Even if in the final analysis a reader is not convinced of Freud's theories about sexuality in women, no one will be able to deny that he and his team engaged in research of the highest order. This sample of articles convinces me that this is indeed the case. Five Stars

It's very convenient to have all Freud's key writings on this topic on one place. He has less to say about women than you'd think, but just to see how sparse the dossier is, is itself valuable. Well introduced and annotated.