Did Freud hate women?

At the end of his life, he admitted that the feminine remained a mystery to him. Meanwhile, psychoanalyst Svetlana Fedorova notes, Freud was surrounded by women all his life: his mother Amalia, who died at 95, just nine years before his death, five younger sisters, his daughters, and among them Anna, who became a psychoanalyst, like a father , and whom he nicknamed «my Antigone» in honor of the daughter of King Oedipus. Faithful wife Marta and her younger sister Minna, a trusted friend of Freud: their relationship was so close that some biographers suspected a love affair between them.

And also female psychoanalysts, as charming as they are intelligent: Princess Marie Bonaparte, Lou Andreas-Salome (with whom Nietzsche was passionately in love) and Sabina Spielrein (who came from Rostov-on-Don to be treated by Jung and then defended her thesis in psychology) — all of them contributed to the development of the theory of psychoanalysis. Finally, his patients, with their fantasies and dreams… It can be said that Freud owes everything or almost everything to women.

Infantile sexuality

At the same time, his judgments about women can be shocking to those who are not familiar with psychoanalysis. The mystery of femininity, according to Freud, is based on anatomical reality: women do not have visible genital organs, and this feature of the body structure makes them impenetrable to knowledge. To prove this hypothesis, he relies on infantile sexuality, at the moment when young children discover the difference between the sexes. In place of the penis in girls … there is nothing.

Freud claims that on the basis of this discovery, boys and girls develop a belief that will last a lifetime: a woman is something insignificant, a castrated man, a male who has lost his organs. There is nothing that tells us anything about femininity. Why, when people grow up and discover the existence of the vagina, do they stay in these infantile phallocentric positions? Why don’t they evolve?

Freud does not explain this. And his depreciating words about aging ladies who no longer interest men and become grumpy, quarrelsome, petty and mean, often served as a pretext for denunciations of psychoanalysis by feminists in the 60s and 70s. Moreover, Freud’s theory links femininity with passivity, dependence, and masochism.

Universal complex

All these characteristics look derogatory towards women — if you do not know the wider context, emphasizes Svetlana Fedorova. “In fact, Freud held very democratic views, including on gender issues. He generally considered a person to be a bisexual being, arguing that each of us has both male and female, although this manifests itself differently in different sexes.

So, initially he spoke about the castration complex in a man — that is, about the boy’s fear that for his desire to possess his mother he would be punished by his father (castrated). However, he came to the conclusion that in the oedipal phase, the same fear is inherent in girls (the so-called «penis envy»). Thus, the castration complex is universal.”

In the same way, the psychoanalyst continues, by observing little girls, Freud came to the conclusion that their aggressiveness is not inferior to that of a boy. This is not about aggression in the ordinary sense as a gross violation of other people’s borders, but, on the contrary, about the strength to defend one’s borders, to show one’s own desires.

Child of his time

And what about Freud’s opinion that a woman suffers from incompleteness, envies a man and dreams of devouring him — therefore it is necessary to direct this potential «gluttony» in the right direction, demanding obedience and respect from a woman? “Women are made for domestic work,” he writes to his student Carl Abraham in 1925, and severely criticizes those women whom he considers too “frivolous” (in his youth he forbade his bride Martha to communicate with such).

This patriarchy does not seem to fit in with the image of a scientist who dared to break so many taboos of philistine morality. But even geniuses are not completely free from the limitations that time, culture, family history impose on them. “Still, Freud came from a traditional Jewish family, where a woman was given a certain place,” Svetlana Fedorova reflects. — And although the mind and curiosity allowed him to discover many secrets of the human psyche, he was to some extent wary of questions related to femininity, which he called the «dark continent.»

On the one hand, Freud was frightened by female fertility, because his wife bore him six children one after another. On the other hand, his respect for his mother interfered: having penetrated deeper into the secrets of a woman, he could learn something forbidden about his mother. Several times he approached the analysis of his dreams and fantasies about her and stopped halfway, afraid to find out something with which he would find it difficult to live.

In addition, their relationship was not easy. He was her favorite son, she believed that Sigmund would become great, and this inspired him. But there was also expansion on her part, she invested too much in him, and it is not surprising that her son had a fear of absorption.

Permission of desire

But although Freud was not at all a supporter of gender equality, he nevertheless guessed that the supposedly existing mental inferiority of women is connected with the suppression to which women are subjected, and the fact that they rarely receive a systematic education. “No, Freud was not a misogynist,” sums up Svetlana Fedorova. She recalls that psychoanalysis was born due to the fact that Freud worked with patients who suffered from hysteria.

He saw that their illness was a consequence of the suppression of sexual desire, which was forbidden in bourgeois families. And the results of this discovery turned out to be much broader than the way to cure this mental illness. Ultimately, it was Freud who allowed women to desire, to be sexual, and to talk about it.