Freud’s views on lesbians

shamelesslyunladylike:

sespursongles:

“ December 3 [2015 was] the 120th anniversary of Anna Freud’s birth. She was a profoundly influential child psychoanalyst. Still, her main claim to fame was as Sigmund Freud’s daughter. What most people don’t know about Anna Freud is that it may have been particularly difficult for her to be Sigmund’s favorite child. Let’s jump right into how and why that was the case.

1. Sigmund believed that homosexuality in men is neurotic but not particularly problematic. Lesbianism, however, he considered a gateway to mental illness.
2. This (according to Sigmund) is because only men have moral sense. We all evolve from apes, so no human is born with it. But boys acquire morality through the castration complex—the fear that their fathers will emasculate them for their misbehavior.
3. Having nothing obvious to neuter, girls and women are essentially amoral, lying and conniving to get what they want. Girls must be guided through civilized life by a father, and women by a husband. And because they choose not to marry, lesbians remain loose cannons, fundamentally untrustworthy and unstable.
4. His daughter Anna was his closest intellectual and emotional companion. Yet she was a lesbian.
5. Freud taught that lesbianism is always the fault of the father and is curable by psychoanalysis.
6. Freud cautioned followers that analysis is an erotic relationship.  Analyst and patient together must scrutinize the amorous feelings that flow between them. This being the case, by rules he asked his followers to honor, Freud could not attempt to cure his own daughter’s lesbianism.
7. When Anna was 23 and enjoying an especially close friendship with another woman, he took her into analysis anyway.
8. In that six-night-a-week, several year analysis he and Anna dissected her masturbation fantasies, which featured an angry father figure (Freud?) beating a child who had made a mistake over which she had no control (Anna and her homosexuality?).
9. He spoke publicly about her fantasies at a conference while Anna sat on stage in “the wife’s’ chair” near the podium. (He did not, however, name the patient under discussion. We know the patient was Anna because, when she wanted to become an analyst, she described  the same fantasies in a paper called “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.” She also wrote to her friends about her fantasies. )
10. Try as he might, Freud failed to “correct” Anna’s lesbianism. She enjoyed 54 years of happy monogamy with Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune. ”

In Psychology Today, 10 Things About Sigmund Freud You’ll Wish You Hadn’t Learned by Rebecca Coffey

Relevant since we gonna have to deal with conversion therapy bullshit over here.