PROGRESS IS NOTHING BUT the victory of laughter over dogma.
BENJAMIN DE CASSERES
LIKE ALL OF US, Phyllis Freud was born of two parents. Her mother was an improvisation I used to do at lectures in the 1970s, which finally grew into an essay called “If Men Could Menstruate.” It illustrated a lesson I was just then learning: that anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be. Thus, menstruation, something even self-respecting and otherwise body-proud women are often made to feel ashamed of, would suddenly become terrific—providing only men had it.
Think about it:
There would be ceremonies to mark the onset of this envied beginning of manhood.
Men would brag about how long and how much.
A National Institute of Dysmenorrhea would spend millions on researching monthly discomforts.
Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free.
Men would claim greater sexual powers, heightened intellectual skills, and improved athletic abilities at their “time of the month.”
Corporate consultants would charge double for greater intuitive powers in those sensitive days at the onset of their cycles, and…
Well, you get the idea. You can improvise on this reversal, too, and can also meet Phyllis’s mom, who’s still around1—though as you’ll see, Phyllis has appropriated some of her ideas, as daughters are wont to do.
Phyllis’s father, the American Psychiatric Association, is more distant and difficult to explain; fathers so often are. In 1981, when I first met the APA, this very establishmentarian, overwhelmingly white organization had 24,000 members, 89 percent of them male; thus, it was hard to imagine that such a group could have anything to do with a feminist fantasy of men menstruating. As Freud himself had warned his colleagues: “We must not allow ourselves to be deflected … by … the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.”2
In fact, the illicit meeting took place only because I was asked to speak unofficially (very unofficially) at an APA convention by one of its internal caucuses, Psychiatrists for Equal Eights, a group started mostly by women APA members. They needed an outside agitator to help with their project of getting the APA to move its national meetings out of states that hadn’t ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, thus putting its money where its mouth had been since 1974, when it voted to endorse that constitutional amendment.* (I don’t mean to be a nudge, but do read that footnote.) Led by two feminist psychiatrists, Jean Shinoda Bolen and Alexandra Symonds, this caucus of well-organized subversives had been mailing out studies that showed equality to be necessary to women’s mental health (which was the carrot that had persuaded the APA’s board of trustees to endorse the ERA in the first place). They were also circulating reports on the numbers of women who were deserting traditional psychiatry for group and other less Freudianized therapies, plus petitions signed by individual psychiatrists who pledged not to attend meetings in unratified states (which combined into the economic stick they hoped would persuade the rest of the APA to stand up and show the world that psychiatry had changed).
All this organizing paid off. About fifteen hundred psychiatrists left their scheduled events to cram into a hotel conference room for our unofficial meeting. I did my best to explain how much their support would mean to women as a departure from Freudian tradition—not only on equality but on activism itself.† In fact, the psychiatrists who came were mostly women and men who were trying to change their profession, and they turned the post-lecture discussion into a spirited organizing meeting. They, too, had been experiencing a contrast between the content of their training and the needs of their patients, and they wanted to take on the gender politics that were causing so much of the pain they witnessed. By the next day, the energy of this diverse and hopeful group had seeped into other meetings, and the APA trustees had actually voted to support the boycott.
Of course, this didn’t happen without controversy. Jean Shinoda Bolen and I inadvertently hit a professional nerve when we suggested publishing the registration lists for the next national meeting—which was already scheduled for unratified Louisiana—so patients would know whether or not their psychiatrists were supporting this ERA boycott and be able to act on that knowledge should they so choose. What seemed a consumerist suggestion was such a reversal of the usual power relationship between (overwhelmingly female) patients and their (overwhelmingly male) psychiatrists—if only because it highlighted the usually forgotten fact that the patient was actually the employer—that it turned out to be one of the most controversial things either one of us had ever said in our long lives of controversy.* Nonetheless, the wind of change was coming from other parts of the mental health profession too. In supporting the pro-ERA boycott, the APA would be joining the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and most other associations of mental health professionals.
Unfortunately, what Jean called the “morning-after syndrome” set in once the APA trustees got home from San Francisco. They were countered by colleagues who hadn’t been at that mind-changing convention and who pressured them to overturn their decision—which they did. The next convention was held in very unratified New Orleans.
Nonetheless, the sight of at least some psychiatrists willing to support equality in an activist way had given me hope. Marching outside the convention in demonstrations organized with spirit and humor, for instance, there had been a few dignified, tweed-jacketed men carrying signs with slogans like: “Warning: Your Psychiatrist’s View on ERA May Be Dangerous to Your Mental Health”; “APA Stance on ERA Is Depressing”; and even “APA Is Schizoid About ERA.” It must have been in that romantic moment that something new was conceived.
By the time the APA was planning its 1983 convention, however, the ERA had missed its ratification deadline—and by only three states. At a minimum, nine years of women’s nationwide hard work would have to be done over again. Whether feeling guilty or just extending an olive branch in general, the APA invited me to speak, this time as part of the official program. However, any hope of diminished controversy was dispelled when the APA’s Committee on Women asked me to address a subject on which they were trying to get APA permission to survey its membership: the alarming number of psychiatrists who took advantage of power and privacy to exploit their patients sexually.7 Not only a betrayal of professional trust, this was an act with some of the implications of incest, since by psychoanalytic definition, the analyst became a parent in the patient’s eyes.* Though Dr. Nanette Gartrell and others leading the survey project were the ones taking the professional risk, I could see this wasn’t going to be easy for an outsider either.
As you can imagine, I spent some anxious days. Clearly, I was going to need all the research I could get, plus accounts from the few women with the courage to go public with their experiences—and also any bridge-building devices I could think of. Even if psychiatrists were willing to listen to an outsider, what could I say that would help them look at the world through the eyes of their female patients, many of whom said they felt doubly and triply disempowered: by their gender, by their position as patients, by the knowledge of their deepest selves this process had invited them to give, and by whatever trouble had caused them to seek help in the first place. How could these guys walk in women’s shoes, much less, as it were, lie on their own couches?
That’s when I realized that the menstruation fantasy of the 1970s must have been gestating with the 1981 APA experience all along. Because suddenly there she was, full-blown as if born from the head of Athena, an entirely new creature—Viennese accent, cigarette holder, tailored suit, and all—Dr. Phyllis Freud.
I noticed immediately that she looked a lot like Margaret Thatcher, with her assertive style, but wore Gertrude Stein’s timeless long skirts and capes. Also that Phyllis wasn’t at all nervous about confronting an audience of male psychiatrists. On the contrary, like Norman Mailer at a Ladies’ Literary Luncheon, Dylan Thomas before an audience of Wellesley girls, Mick Jagger looking over a new crop of groupies, or Clarence Thomas instructing his staff, she seemed perfectly confident that anything she chose to say to them would be an honor, indeed a gift.
Clearly, this was a woman whose very existence could help members of that august and authoritative body imagine how they would feel if:
• society and psychiatry were reversed so that women were 89 percent of APA members and men were three fifths of their patients;
• female psychiatrists and psychoanalysts were imbued with the philosophy of this female Freud, the founding genius who had proved that men’s lack of wombs made them anatomically inferior and terminally envious;
• men who dared protest were doubly pathologized by a diagnosis of womb envy, thus it was a belief system with no way out;
• Freudian thought was accepted as a semiscientific rationale for men’s lower status in a matriarchal society—not just within the profession but within the culture at large.
Once at the APA, I had time only to introduce Dr. Phyllis Freud briefly and do a few reversals as a preface to the main purpose of the speech. Nonetheless, she did break the ice, turn the tables, create some laughter and, I think, some empathy too.
Perhaps her outrageous presence also loosened tongues. The post-lecture discussion turned into something far more revelatory than the usual sober, APA-type exchange. A first volley came from a psychiatrist who rose to object to my objections to having sex with patients. “You don’t understand,” he said plaintively. “My patients behave very seductively with me.” It took me a minute to realize that he was not only admitting something but defending it.* In the ominous silence that followed, someone else stood up to praise the APA for having expelled a member who published an article in support of “overt transference” (sex with patients was apparently common enough to warrant a euphemism of its very own), in which he maintained that psychiatrist-patient sex could be therapeutic—for the patient, of course. Then several others explained that the psychiatrist in question had got in trouble mainly for going public with those ideas, not for acting on them. Suddenly, professional reserve broke down. Those psychiatrists who seemed as surprised as I was by the attitudes of their colleagues began saying things like “I can’t believe you call yourself a psychiatrist!”
From that moment on, I didn’t need to say another thing. Professionals were discovering what many patients had known all along: the abuses of power going on behind closed doors.
In the decade since then, I’ve gained a lot of faith in reversals—of all kinds. They create empathy and are great detectors of bias, in ourselves as well as in others, for they expose injustices that seem normal and so are invisible. In fact, the deeper and less visible the bias, the more helpful it is to take some commonly accepted notion about one race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability—whatever—and see how it sounds when transferred to another. Consider the implications of simple examples:
What if white actors and writers, sports stars and politicians, criminals and preachers, were identified first by their color, as their black counterparts so often are?
What if heterosexual male teachers were prejudged as sexual abusers of children, in the way that gay males often have been (which would make more statistical sense, since heterosexual males are the majority of abusers of both girls and boys)?
What if the jogger who was raped and brutally beaten in Central Park had been a black woman instead of a white one—would she have made the national news? Would she have even made the local news?
Suppose everyone who wasn’t bisexual were suddenly labeled “monosexual”?
Of all reversals, however, the sexual ones may be the most necessary. Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature. To uncover the difference between what is and what could be, we may need the “Aha!” that comes from exchanging subject for object, the flash of recognition that starts with a smile, the moment of changed viewpoint that turns the world upside down.
While getting to know Dr. Phyllis Freud in her new, full-grown incarnation, for instance, I’ve found that she has inspired all kinds of learning moments in my day. There are now reality checks when I think about the news: What if a female chief of state had thrown up on the Japanese and fainted as President Bush did? There is education when I’m looking at entertainment: What if movies about “masochistic” women who are portrayed as falling in love with their torturers were about Jews who fell in love with Nazis? What if TV jokes that are told about dumb blondes were told about dumb blacks? There are also reminders that sexual politics are still deep enough to be called “culture” or “religion”; Why do I hear only women struggling with combining career and family? If men could get pregnant, would abortion be a sacrament? I’ve found that Phyllis—however inadvertently—is a better therapist than Sigmund ever was.
But my purpose in creating Phyllis Freud has one thing in common with the technique of psychoanalysis as it exists today: something I greatly admire. An analyst in training has to go through years of his or her own analysis before being certified, thus making psychoanalysis the only profession I know of that has incorporated the technique of reversal into its very identity. Each professional must experience the process through which he or she will later lead others. This opportunity to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes—or lie on the same couch—may not always help, but at least it lessens the danger of doing harm. I think more of us should try it.
As a journalist, for instance, I discovered that I got better at my job the moment I was written about. Understanding the weight of words in print, feeling their ability to hurt and haunt when they were careless or inaccurate, helped me to become more responsible in writing about others. I’ve come to believe a dose of activist reversal might improve almost anybody’s work. Journalism schools could require students to pick from a hat the name of a professional reporter, submit to an interview with all the usual research, and be profiled for an article that would stay in the research files for all future reporters to use—and might even end up as an obit. Applicants for television jobs could wake up one morning to find cameras and TV reporters on their doorsteps, waving microphones and shouting questions about some real or imagined misdeed. 20/20 could do an exposé on the producers of 60 Minutes—and vice versa. The host of one tabloid TV show could be the subject of another. Professionals dealing with children could be treated like their charges for a while—for example, disbelieved about sexual abuse, forced to live in foster homes, and generally regarded as property. Or how about requiring cops and judges to spend a few days in the jails they send others to? Or new health professionals to wait for examinations in too-short gowns, coax medical records out of Kafkaesque bureaucracies, and spend a week in a hospital bed? What if would-be politicians had to listen to campaign speeches every day and then be denied at the end of their training whatever they’d been promised at its beginning? Suppose psychiatrists had to have shock treatments before prescribing this electroconvulsive therapy, in order to show the skeptical patient just how “harmless” it was?
Well, you see the possibilities.
But here’s a clue about what’s coming. Sigmund Freud himself, the Father of Psychoanalysis, may have been the only man in his trade to exempt himself from therapy. Indeed, he continued all his life to ignore colleagues who could have supervised his analysis. He also destroyed his personal and professional papers several times in his life, plotted when he was an obscure twenty-eight-year-old to leave any future biographers in the dark, kept his emotional life hidden, and falsified details of his dreams when he did write about them so they couldn’t be analyzed. Why? Because he insisted he’d analyzed himself.*
His story not only was accepted but became part of the birth myth of psychoanalysis.† At the same time, Freud denied that self-analysis was possible for anybody else and advised even practicing psychoanalysts to reenter analysis (especially if they were to have any position of responsibility in Freudian organizations, in which case he often analyzed them himself—a means of quality control if you feel kindly toward him, and emotional control if you don’t). But the real reason that Freud refused to have himself or his dreams analyzed, according to Carl Jung, then still his most trusted disciple, was his objection, “ ‘But I cannot risk my authority!’ ” It was a revelation that Jung said sounded the death knell of Freud’s power over him. “Freud was placing personal authority above truth.”‡ 16
So there was no reversal for Freud, no brake on hierarchy, no putting himself in the patient’s shoes. On the contrary, as Sándor Ferenczi, one of his most brilliant and compassionate disciples, noted in a clinical diary he kept toward the end of Freud’s life, a diary that wasn’t made public until 1985 and was only recently published in English, Freud said, “Patients are a rabble. Patients only serve to provide us with a livelihood and material to learn from.” He described Freud as “levitating like some kind of divinity above the poor patient, reduced to the status of a mere child….”17 Especially in later years, this attitude seemed to engulf his colleagues. As Freud put it, “Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?”18
But there’s another aspect here that has been neglected, even by Freud’s critics. It goes deeper than a problem of his honesty as a professional. There was no help for the poor guy himself. Never in his life did he seem able to go back and air out the secret compartments of his early life, see that what had happened to him was separable from the experiences of others and perhaps not synonymous with the human condition; no chance to unfreeze the patterns that shaped his view of the world and later became canonized as his theories. Does that seem odd to say about a man who is supposed to be the Big Therapist in the Sky? Listen to Freud quoted by Giovanni Papini, an Italian writer who said he interviewed him five years before his death: “I taught others the virtue of confession and have never been able to lay bare my own soul. I wrote a short biography, but more for the purposes of propaganda than anything else. … Nobody knows or has even guessed the real secret of my work.”* 20 Jung said: “Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually of sex, why this idea had taken such possession of him. … When he spoke of [his sexual theory], his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and skeptical manner vanished. … Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his neurosis.”21
And it’s true, he seems never to have asked for or accepted help with any of his array of big-time problems: to name just a few, a need for women’s worship, extreme hostility toward his father and father figures in general, a suspicion that any men around him with minds of their own were out to destroy him, and a belief that masturbation and birth control were dangerous but cocaine was just fine.† He went on projecting the fiery outlines of his own experience onto the words and lives of his patients, often turning them into a screen for his theory rather than a source of it. “Anatomy is destiny” could have been joined by “Biography is destiny.”26 That is, Freud treated his biography as our destiny.
So don’t be surprised by the subtitle of Phyllis Freud’s biography, or by a certain detective-like quality to the footnotes. After all, we should be more able now to guess what the “real secret” of his work was, and figure out why those “long hard years” were not “worth remembering.” More information has become available in the past few years as primary sources have been discovered, and thanks to therapy movements that let us listen to each other instead of to theory, we have a greater understanding of what certain kinds of early wounds tend to look like in later life. Disproving Freud’s beliefs has continued as the women’s movement has brought women and men one of its most valuable lessons: tell personal truths and challenge general theories. We can laugh and also sympathize.
But to understand that Freud isn’t one of the gods who’s dead, you have only to pick up a psychology text that still credits “drive theory” (wherein everything is reduced to the urge toward sex or death), or turn on a TV show where women talk about “phallic symbols” (with no idea that there are female symbols of sexual power too), or read that women in pornography or violent marriages “want” to be beaten (with Freud’s theory of beating fantasies and female masochism for backup), or notice that even therapists who wouldn’t say hello to Freud still behave as if the individual damage they repair is disconnected from what is damaging in society. Even some of his most devoted critics credit him with collective human discoveries as they would nobody else—at least, not without laughter. Marx isn’t said to have discovered poverty or class, and we know that Gandhi had many predecessors in nonviolence. Yet Freud is credited with inventing a science called psychoanalysis (which is neither science nor his invention—more like a trademark on a découpage), discovering the unconscious (which is rather like getting the credit for discovering breathing), and bringing sex “out of the closet” (though he put us all in a closet with “SEX” on the door).
Our problem isn’t Freud but his existence as a code name for a set of cultural beliefs that serve too deep and convenient a purpose to be easily knocked off. Otherwise, his reputation would have been bubkes* long ago. But since his persona conjures up so much of the problem, it owes us some of the solution.
So to see how it feels to be on the wrong end of the Freudian myth, as well as to exorcise its power with laughter once and for all, I propose that everyone in the psychology trade, male or female, plus male human beings in general—indeed, all of us in this Freudianized culture—imagine a profession and a society influenced by the work, even the worship, of the greatest, most written about, mythic, and fiercely defended thinker in Western civilization: Dr. Phyllis Freud. Her biographer here is a scholar who has been made somewhat defensive by criticisms of the old matriarch but is still star-struck; has years invested in the Freudian vineyard and isn’t about to see them go down the drain; doesn’t believe for a minute that anti-Freudian nonsense about childhood sexual abuse being more common than children’s desirous fantasies of it; and is confident that serious thinkers see problems as timeless and insoluble, while only superficial ones try to solve them—in other words, the very model of a modern major Freudian.
I can vouch for the fact that everything in Phyllis’s life and work springs from something in Sigmund’s. Only words having to do with gender have been changed. It may sometimes be anything from painful to impossible to imagine a woman thinking as Freud did, but that should remind us that any imbalance of power can create problems, no matter which way it cuts.† I’ve added footnotes—a tribute to a great academic tradition and a story in themselves—wherever I feared the reader might think Phyllis had gone off the deep end, or some piece of information seemed to cry out for inclusion, or I just couldn’t resist. As in so much of life, the fun is in the text, and the truth is in the footnotes. Read both.*
My only regret is that Phyllis and Sigmund will never meet.
* (Good. You’re looking down here. You’ll need the habit—you’ll see why.) The Equal Rights Amendment would make discrimination based on sex as unconstitutional as that based on race, religion, or national origin. Its exact words are: Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. Radical, huh?
† “Politics spoils the character,” Freud once wrote to a friend.3 Governments could do little more than keep the lid on rape, murder, and the inevitable “conflicts among the ego, id, and superego which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—the same events repeated on a wider stage,” as he elaborated in Civilization and Its Discontents. Whether it was Marxist revolutionaries in Russia or Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, he was critical of those foolish enough to try to make social revolutions; especially feminists, who he thought were opposing biology itself. As he wrote to his fiancée: “nature” intended woman, “through beauty, charm, and sweetness, for something else.”4 He also told her: “you write so intelligently and to the point that I am just a little afraid of you.”5 (Down here, we dish the real stuff.)
* Though the APA registration lists were never made public, the controversy got picked up by the press. Some women and pro-equality men did query their psychiatrists as a result and reported responses that were, shall we say, illuminating. As I write this in 1994, the APA has grown to 38,000 members, three fourths of whom are male—while three fifths of their patients are female. Still sounds like a case for consumerism to me. As Ethel Spector Person has reported from her psychiatric practice and research, the desire of more women patients to go to women professionals has resulted in “the increasing difficulty finding a well-trained woman therapist with open therapy time. No comparable problem exists when placing a patient in therapy with a man.”6
* These abuses were so common that in 1972, Phyllis Chesler reported in her landmark book, Women and Madness: “There are even therapists who ‘specialize’ in treating other therapists’ ‘guilt’ or ‘conflict’ about having sexual relations with their patients.” By 1986, when the national survey initiated by Dr. Nanette Gartrell and her APA colleagues was finally finished and released—with money they had raised privately, since the APA had stalled and never approved the survey—65 percent of psychiatrists, responding anonymously, said they had treated patients who had been sexually involved with a previous therapist. Though 87 percent of those psychiatrists said sexual contact was always harmful to the patient, only 8 percent had reported it.8 Since then, the APA’s Principles of Ethics have been tightened to forbid psychiatrist-patient sexual contact, but the APA still doesn’t require reporting, within its own ranks or otherwise. What requirements do exist have been instituted by state law, the political system Freud spurned.
* Later, I learned that his attitude wasn’t rare. Even when warning against sexual contact with patients in the prestigious Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Leon J. Saul seemed to worry more about the analyst: “Let the analyst beware. In the face of sexual love needs, let him recall the Lorelei and Delilah and the many other beauties who have revealed that appearance need not be reality. … No matter how obvious Eros may be, hostility is the inevitable middle link.” Some psychiatrists had decided that sex with patients might be OK or even “good” under certain circumstances. Their arguments included the idea that sexual surrogates were harder to find for female patients than for male ones (supposing that surrogates were a good idea in the first place). In both cases, the psychiatrist was presented as risking himself for the patient’s benefit and as the exploited one.
* Now that Freud’s unedited letters to his bosom buddy Wilhelm Fliess have been published, we know that during this period of his putative self-analysis he was writing: “My self-analysis once more is at a standstill. … My analysis remains interrupted. … True self-analysis is impossible, otherwise there would be no illness. … Still groping about, entirely in the dark. … My self-analysis is at rest in favor of the dream book.”9 Later, when challenged about whether the first generation of analysts had undergone analysis, Freud said he had insisted on it, but that he retained the “right to an exceptional position.”10 He also tried to buy and burn the Fliess correspondence—probably for a lot more reasons than this one.
† “It is hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was,” wrote Ernest Jones, Freud’s official biographer. “Yet the uniqueness of the feat remains. Once done it is done forever. For no one again can be the first to explore these depths.”11 Kurt Eissler, founder of the Freud Archives, presented this self-analysis as even more heroic: “His findings had to be wrested in the face of his own extreme resistances—the self-analysis being comparable … to Benjamin Franklin’s flying a kite in a thunderstorm in 1752, in order to investigate the laws of electricity. The next two persons who tried to repeat his experiment were both killed.” After Freud’s death, Jones wrote: “Copernicus and Darwin dared much in facing the unwelcome truths of outer reality, but to face those of inner reality costs something that only the rarest of mortals would unaided be able to give.”12
Freud’s self-analysis was a source not only of his personal myth but supposedly of his famous discoveries; for instance, infantile sexuality. Since, by his own admission, his wife wouldn’t let him into the nursery to observe their children, and since his only child patient (called “Little Hans” in his famous case history) was treated long distance through the child’s father, he seemed to get his first insight into childhood sexuality from a sample of one—his own. As Frank Sulloway reported on the myth in Freud: Biologist of the Mind, “only by first overcoming his own infantile sexual repressions was Freud then able to elucidate the truly dynamic nature of the unconscious mental life that is common to all human beings.”13 But as Sulloway and others reported, Freud also claimed to be the only person who noticed that infants masturbated. (Wait. It gets better.)
‡ There was an additional twist. Jung believed that Freud had withheld the details of a dream because they betrayed an affair between Freud and Minna Bernays, the unmarried sister of Freud’s wife, Martha, who lived in the household, helped with the six children, and often traveled with Freud. Jung said Minna herself had felt guilty and consulted with him about the affair. According to Oskar Rie, a Freud family friend and pediatrician, “For children, Freud went with Martha; for pleasure, he took Minna.”14
True or not, what’s more interesting than the affair—which might turn out to be the most normal thing about Freud—were his Watergate-type efforts to conceal this and other parts of his life, efforts adopted by his followers. Even now, Freud’s letters to Minna for the period in question are reported to be mysteriously absent from a numbered sequence at the Library of Congress.15 In Freud’s own time—according to John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method—he and Jung sort of mutually blackmailed each other into a standoff, because the married Jung had an affair with Sabina Spielrein, a patient who was a major influence on Jung. Later, she discussed with Freud becoming his patient, and did become a very personal pipeline of information about Jung. She confirmed his growing independence of Freud’s theories—a deviation Freud thought was a son’s attempt to kill the father. In fact, his male relationships all seemed to follow his own Oedipal, father-son paradigm. Males who started out as his father/mentors were often overthrown with hostility, and Freud himself viewed male followers as loved and obedient sons—until they showed independence. He then turned his vengeance on them, from Adler to Jung, while feeling they had victimized him. (Didn’t I tell you it would be revealing down here?)
* You should know that some say this interview was a hoax. On the other hand, Freud partisans don’t seem to think it’s bizarre that he said of his “long hard years” of childhood, “I think nothing about them was worth remembering.”19
† Here’s a starter set of a few more: As described in almost every biography, Freud identified with the likes of Hannibal and Alexander the Great, and was depressed when he met anyone whose “impulse, which defies analysis, leads that person to under-estimate me.” Why? Because his mother believed her firstborn son, her “Golden Sigi,” deserved greatness. As Helen Puner reported in her 1947 biography of Freud, he was the only one of seven children who rated a bedroom of his own; yet he still complained that his sisters’ piano practice was disturbing his studies. Though his mother was musical and his five sisters also had talent, he asserted that either the piano went or he did. The piano went—“and with it,” as his sister Anna recalled, “all opportunities for his sisters to become musicians.”22 We’re talking a major Jewish Prince here. (Or Catholic Prince or whatever—pick your patriarchy.)
Did Freud, famous self-analyst, examine the narcissism-producing burden of having all his strong mother’s ambitions instilled into him? Did he write much about mothers at all? No. He just normalized his own experience. “The only thing that brings a mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to her son,” he wrote. “Even a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and acting the part of a mother towards him.”23 As he often stated, mother and son were “the most perfect, easily the most ambivalence-free of all human relationships.”
His endlessly analyzed father-son relationships were all patterned on his hostility to his father—who was distant or worse, depending on what clues you believe. He normalized that too. “Hostility to the father is unavoidable for any boy who has the slightest claim to masculinity.”24 As Jung observed about two cases of Freud’s famous propensity to faint, “I was alarmed by the intensity of his fantasies—so strong that, obviously, they could cause him to faint. … The fantasy of father-murder was common to both cases.”25 Getting curious? Good.
* According to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish: “Something trivial, worthless, insultingly disproportionate to expectations.” Don’t worry—Freud would have looked down here, too. He was proud that he “never learned or spoke Yiddish.” He also wrote Moses and Monotheism, in which Moses, with whom Freud greatly identified, turned out to be the illegitimate son of an Egyptian princess, not Jewish at all, and monotheism was an Egyptian creation. (Of course, Freud’s mother spoke Yiddish almost exclusively. Hmmm.)
† Here’s a recent news item to get you in the mood: “ ‘It’s only natural for the woman to be superior to the man, and it always has been,’ says Maria Vazquez, a fruit vendor at the market. ‘Isn’t it that way everywhere in Mexico?’ … The people of Juchitan descend from the Zapotec Indians, a tribe whose distaff side is famed among anthropologists for its Amazonian traits. … During a railroad strike in the 1950s, women here blocked the tracks and filled their skirts with rocks so the train couldn’t pass even if its wheels crushed their bones. … As important to Juchitan women’s dominance as their physique is their armlock on the local economy. … But the iguana trade isn’t men’s greatest challenge. ‘Catching an iguana,’ says Jose Antonio Francisco, ‘isn’t as hard as catching a wife.’ … He parks his daughter’s stroller in front of the former Juchitan boxing arena. ‘The baby won’t be disturbed here,’ Mr. Francisco says. Indeed, she won’t. In a nation of rabid male fight fans, Juchitan is practically the only village of any size without boxing. … [Women] are also given to unsolicited and effusive displays of affection toward more diminutive members of the opposite sex. … Traffic cop Ricardo Cervantes is also well aware of the ebb and flow of power in this town. He blocks a busy intersection as a strapping Juchitan woman comes bobbing along with a case of beer balanced on her head. ‘It is a mistake to get in a woman’s way,’ he says, ‘especially if she’s headed for a party.’ ”27
* You can read both together or come back to the footnotes later. To buttress their content, let me quote The New York Review of Books, an intellectual-establishment source no one could accuse of being feminist. In a November 18, 1993, review, Frederick Crews said new Freud books reveal: “a figure so radically different from the Freud we thought we knew that readers may understandably wonder which version comes closer to the truth. But it is really no contest. Until recently, most people who wrote about Freud in any detail were open partisans of psychoanalysis who needed to safeguard the legend of the scientist-genius-humanitarian, and many of the sources they used had already passed through the censorship of a jealously secretive psychoanalytic establishment, whose leaders have been so fearful of open historical judgment that they have locked away large numbers of Freud’s papers and letters in the Library of Congress for periods extending ahead as far as the twenty-second century. … Some sensitive documents, having already served their Sleeping Beauty sentences, make their way into the light.”