Freud's Women

Plot

No modern writer has affected our views on women as powerfully as Sigmund Freud. And none has been so virulently attacked both for his theories of the feminine and for his alleged elevation of personal prejudice to the height of universal pronouncement. Libertarian, old-fashioned moralist, Victorian patriarch, prophet of polymorphous perversity - these are only some of the contradictory epithets Freud has borne. True, the women in Freud's domestic life, with the exception of Anna, his Antigone, were conventional enough, as were many of his views on their role in society. Yet Freud's closest women friends were anything but conventional. From the writer and turn-of-the-century femme fatale Lou Andreas-Salome, to the socialist feminist Helene Deutsch, early theorist of femininity, to Princess Marie Bonaparte who moved from couch to royal court with amazing facility and became head of the French psychoanalytic movement, Freud's female friends and "pupils" were extraordinary. And then there were his patients - the famous and infamous cases of women crucial to his theories and his method of analytic investigation. In many ways psychoanalysis is as much their creation as that of the young Viennese doctor.