Eli Zaretsky

Bisexuality, Capitalism
and the Ambivalent Legacy
of Psychoanalysis

By the time Freud died in London in 1939, he was already a legend.1 By

the 1950s, he exerted a grip on many imaginations comparable to that of
the great figures—Moses, Leonard, Goth, Dostoyevsky—about whom he
wrote. Equally important, Frankfurt School theorists placed his work at the
centre of twentieth-century critical theory. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist
and gay critiques certainly called into question Freud’s stature, but in some
ways they also enhanced it. Kate Millett called Freud ‘the strongest individ-
ual . . . force’ in the twentieth-century gender counter-revolution, which granted
him great power. Other feminists, beginning with Juliet Mitchell, argued that
psychoanalysis, far from being counter-revolutionary, actually laid bare the
psychodynamics of sexism. Gayle Rubin, for example, called psychoanalysis
‘feminist theory manqué.’2
69
Around the same time, scholarly works began to appear which called
for a downward revision in Freud’s standing. Henri Ellenberger’s The
Discovery of the Unconscious (1971) challenged Freud’s originality by
situating his thought in the context of nineteenth-century dynamic psy-
chiatry. Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) did the same
with nineteenth-century biology. In 1986, Adolf Grünbaum’s The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis rejected Freud’s claims to scientific stand-
ing on technical philosophical grounds that would also delegitimate vast
areas of social and cultural theory, and that normally would have been
of little interest to anyone outside Grünbaum’s research speciality.3
But Grünbaum’s work was taken very seriously, not least by analysts
who were by this time losing faith in their project. These first wounds
opened the way for media-driven polemics. In his 1984 book, The Assault
on Truth, Jeffrey Masson, editor of the then unpublished letters by
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, held that the letters would show that Freud
had suppressed his knowledge of infantile sexual abuse. When the
letters were published, of course, they showed no such thing, but the
story is still widely believed. Finally, Frederick Crews put forth a wholly
negative view of Freud combining an attack on his character, his theory
and the analytic method of treatment.4 Crews’s attack has proven
widely influential; I have even heard it described as ‘speaking truth
to power’. In light of this history, how are we to understand psycho-
analysis today?
There are certainly important issues involved in evaluating the scien-
tific status of psychoanalysis, but Freud defended psychoanalysis as a
Wissenschaft, a research programme that included a speculative dimen-
sion, and not as a positivistic and predictive science. It was the American
ego-psychologists of the 1950s and 1960s who defined it in those terms,
thus leaving themselves open to Grünbaum’s critique. In contrast to
rival depth psychologies, notably Jung’s, Freud sought to keep psycho-
analysis open to developments in the natural sciences. Of course, work
in such areas as neurophysiology, evolutionary biology or the psychology
and anthropology of the emotions may modify or disprove specific an-
alytic formulations. But before discarding analytic thought in toto, I
would want to know why normally exploratory criteria in the philos-
ophy of science were in this case being used in a prescriptive way. As for
the efficacy of analytic treatment, about which many doubts have been
raised, all forms of psychotherapy, other than drugs or behavioural modi-
fication, are based on some variation of psychoanalysis. So this evaluation
should only occur as part of a much vaster exploration of psychotherapy

1
I wish to dedicate this essay to Nancy Fraser. In addition, I wish to thank José Brunner,
Jim Miller and the nlr for helpful comments. Finally, I wish to thank the Robert Stoller
Foundation which awarded an earlier version of this essay its 1995 annual prize as the best
essay on psychoanalysis.
2
Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of
Women, New York 1975, p. 185.
3
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York 1971; Frank Sulloway,
Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, New York 1979; Adolf Grün-
baum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, Berkeley 1984.
4
Frederick Crews, ‘The Unknown Freud’, The New York Review of Books, 18 November
1993, and ‘The Revenge of the Repressed’, The New York Review of Books, 17 November
and 1 December 1994. These articles and the exchanges they elicited have been collected
in Frederick Crews et al, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, London 1997.

70
in general and, even more broadly, of the whole system of modern
‘health’. As for the attacks on Freud’s character, we owe largely to Freud
our appreciation of how ‘flawed’ all of us are, and I am not aware that
Freud exempted himself from this judgement.

By contrast, the important question is whether psychoanalysis was, and

can still be understood as, a critical theory, one that challenged the forms of
domination and ideology that characterize our society, or whether it was an
essentially conservative, anti-political and sexist body of thought. Even
now, almost a century after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams,
the most sophisticated writings on psychoanalysis are still polarized over
this question. Critics of Freud stress his sexism and homophobia. Sander
Gilman, a recent example, argues that Freud projected onto women nega-
tive stereotypes of the Jew taken from the medical literature of his time.5
Meanwhile, Freud’s advocates in the sphere of sexual politics, reflecting the
repudiation of 1970s ‘essentialism’, argue that his texts destabilize fixed
meanings of gender and upset conventional assumptions about sexuality.6
Terms like ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘destabilize’ are new, but some ver-
sion of this polarization goes back to the earliest years of our century.

For or Against Freud

Why are discussions of Freud still polarized in this way? A key reason is
the absence of a genuinely historical understanding of psychoanalysis. In
spite of all that we know concerning its past, we still have not histori-
cized Freud. For most of those who stress Freud’s contribution to gay or
feminist theory, there is not even the pretence of history; there is only
close reading of Freud’s texts. Gilman offers the appearance of history,
but only that. As in other new historicist approaches, there is little sense
of an institutional matrix or social order. The reasoning is analogical, not
causal. Gilman seems to think that because he has demonstrated homo-
logies between anti-Jewish and anti-female literature, he has explained
the relation between the two discourses.

We do, of course, have a vast non-theoretical historical literature on

psychoanalysis situating it, for example, in such contexts as fin-de-siècle
Vienna (by Carl Schorske, William McGrath, Peter Gay), London in the
1940s (Phyllis Grosskurth, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl), New York City in
the 1920s (Ann Douglas) and 1950s (Nathan Hale, Elizabeth Kurzweil)
and Paris in the 1960s (Elisabeth Roudinesco, Sherry Turkle). But know-
ing the past is not the same as historicizing it. Historicization requires a
deeply conceptualized context, and places the question of critique at its
centre in a way that academic history and biography normally do not.

The two most important scholars who have attempted to historize

psychoanalysis in this sense were Carl Schorske and Christopher Lasch.7
5
Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender, Princeton 1993.
6
Elizabeth A. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, New York 1990; Leo Bersani,
A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, Boston 1976; Leo Bersani, The
Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York 1989.
7
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York 1980; Christopher
Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York 1978. (Along with Schorske, I have in mind
those he influenced, notably William McGrath and John Toews. William McGrath,

71
Schorske supplied the most important overall explanation of the nine-
teenth-century origins of psychoanalysis; Lasch, of its place within twen-
tieth-century Fordist mass-consumption and the welfare state. Both
scholars were deeply influenced by the Frankfurt School framework,
especially by the idea that there had been a decline from nineteenth-cen-
tury liberalism and ‘independence’—the general outlook of an ascendant
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie—to the psychologization and mass cul-
ture of the twentieth century. Schorske called analysis ‘counter-political’,
meaning that it reduced an outward-looking liberal rationalism to a pre-
occupation with inner, psychological conflicts. Lasch followed Philip
Rieff in describing analysis as marking a shift from ‘economic man’ to
‘psychological man’, which Lasch explained as the result of the depen-
dence or ‘narcissism’ provoked by the modern welfare state. There
already exists, therefore, an important line of thought situating analysis
in the context of the shift from liberal or competitive to developed or
Fordist capitalism. I will take this body of thought as my starting point,
from which, however, I will quickly diverge.
The choice of a historical context in which to situate Freud depends
on how one interprets him. I interpret Freud as a theorist of psychology
and culture and, especially, of the relation between psychology and cul-
ture. From my point of view, his most important idea was that socially
imposed categories and distinctions dissolve within the individual and
are remade as the individual’s own unique wishes. In this essay, I will
use this idea as the pivot of my argument. I will argue that this insight
made psychoanalysis subversive of key aspects of nineteenth-century lib-
eralism, but that it also made it adaptable to twentieth-century mass
culture. Ultimately, psychoanalysis was reshaped by the culture it influ-
enced so that its critical possibilities were not only largely unrealized,
but in fact were turned into modes of oppression.
I shall make my argument in three parts. First, I shall describe the nexus of
nineteenth-century cultural assumptions that Freud’s thought subverted.
I shall focus on a particular tension in those assumptions centred on the
ideal of self-control or self-mastery. An ancient ideal, increasingly general-
ized during the nineteenth century, ‘self-mastery’ had a social counterpart:
classes capable of self-mastery were to oversee those that supposedly were
not—the poor, the working classes, the racially other. The tension came in
the gendered character of the ideal: control was enjoined on both men and
women but at the same time control was coded masculine.
In the second part, I shall describe how Freud’s writings helped subvert
these assumptions. Freud encountered the tension surrounding gender
7
cont
Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria, Ithaca 1986); John Toews,
‘Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in his Time and for Our Time’, Journal of Modern
History, vol. 63, September 1991, pp. 504–55. In addition, Foucault described his work as
‘an archaeology of psychoanalysis’, continued the Frankfurt School critique of the En-
lightenment, and demonstrated epistemic connections between psychoanalysis and pre-
scientific discourses. See my forthcoming book, Psychoanalysis: From the Psychology of
Authority to the Politics of Identity, New York 1998. Nonetheless, Foucault did not address
the social reasons for psychoanalysis’ appeal. In a hostile account of the movement, Ernest
Gellner did address precisely this issue. See The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of
Unreason, London 1983.

72
and control in the medical context. From the middle of the nineteenth
century, the relevant branches of medicine, neurology and psychiatry
were focused on phenomena seen as involving the breakdown of control.
Simultaneously, they turned from somatic to psychological explanations
of these phenomena. This was the paradigm Freud revolutionized.
Virtually all scholars agree that the late 1890s, when Freud wrote The
Interpretation of Dreams, was the period of his conceptual revolution. But
there is still no agreement as to what that revolution was. I shall argue, as
I said, that it lay in his account of the dissolution of external social codes
and their reformulation as internal or psychological. My evidence centres
around a shift in Freud’s use of the language of ‘bisexuality’ in that
period. Understanding that shift, I contend, allows one to see how Freud
undermined the cultural assumptions in which the medical model of his
time was rooted.

Finally, in the third part of the paper, I shall situate Freud in the context
of twentieth-century mass culture. Here I will show how the very
achievement that made analysis a critical discourse when applied to the
cultural codes of nineteenth-century society—namely, its psychologiza-
tion of socially derived categories—for several decades made it instru-
mental to the developed capitalist or Fordist social imaginary. This, in
turn, will help explain why the dissolution of the Fordist imaginary
beginning in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a reaction against
psychoanalysis.

I shall conclude by rejecting the form in which the debate over whether
Freud is a critical thinker is currently posed, namely whether his thought
is intrinsically critical or reactionary. Freud was a profound critic of many
assumptions underpinning our culture but his criticisms also proved
highly adaptable. The real question is what insight the historicization of
psychoanalysis brings to our understanding of the self-contradictory and
conflicted nature of capitalist modernization.

I. Nineteenth-Century Liberal Culture

Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna situated psychoanalysis in the crisis
of late nineteenth-century liberalism. According to Schorske, analysis
reflected a turn from an outward looking, self-confident liberalism to
an introspective modernism, provoked in Freud’s case, by the rise of
mass, anti-Semitic politics. The term ‘liberalism’, as used by Schorske, is
a broad enough category to encompass a range of issues including Freud’s
personal struggles for autonomy, his quasi-assimilationist Judaism, and
even his efforts to formulate a philosophy of science.8 I will modify
Schorske’s account in three ways. First, I will situate the crisis of late
nineteenth-century liberalism more broadly within the framework of
capitalist development; second, I will shift the focus from Austria, where
liberalism was weak and psychoanalysis marginal, to the mainstream of
nineteenth-century capitalist development, especially in England and
America, where analysis was centrally important; and, third, I will put
gender at the centre of the discussion.

8
Toews, ‘Historicizing Psychoanalysis’.

73
For human beings to experience their own humanity, they require a cul-
ture that recognizes the commonality and interconnectedness of their
lives. For the nineteenth-century middle classes that recognition was
already shallow. In place of interconnectedness, nineteenth-century lib-
eral society, if we think in ideal-typical terms, developed an ethic centred
on self-control, stoicism and self-mastery. Key terms included ‘charac-
ter’, ‘habit’, and ‘industry’, as well as ‘malingerer’. Key values included
domesticity, cleanliness, punctuality, temperance, discipline and thrift.
New practices expressing these concerns included public education,
political economy and psychiatry, which was revolutionized in the nine-
teenth century. Of course, reality was infinitely more complicated, and
nineteenth-century culture also stressed sentiment, expression and intro-
spection. Nonetheless, a common thread running through the culture
was the demand that one repress or deny passivity, weakness or depen-
dency to fulfil one’s responsibilities. Although we associate this value
with the middle class, the emphasis on self-mastery also pervaded artisan
republicanism, early trade unionism and cooperative and self-help move-
ments among farmers, workers and ex-slaves.

Self-control was linked to social control. The predominant model of the

mind, according to which the will controlled or repressed ‘disorder’, had
a social counterpart. The reasonable, self-controlled, British (or Ameri-
can) gentleman controlled the heathen, African slave, the ‘primitive’, the
‘working class’, the cheap-labour immigrant, the drunk. Control was
supposed to proceed primarily by civilizing practices, not force. If one
were to put this in ‘post-Victorian’, that is, Freudian, terms, one might
say that the nineteenth-century middle classes ‘projected’ their own
dependencies, their sexuality, their feelings of vulnerability, fears of their
own violence, and so forth, onto ‘inferior’ groups. In a particular way,
however, they projected these qualities onto women, even though the
‘they’ that did the projecting included women as well as men.

Gender distinction, of course, was at the heart of nineteenth-century

culture. Scientists and doctors agreed with moralists and publicists that
there was an absolute and unambiguous difference between men and
women. Distinctive traits and expectations, physiologies and sexualities,
and regions of social space—the public and the private—were associated
with each gender. Even more sharply than in the past, the values of self-
control, mastery, or reason were equated with men. Women were identi-
fied with passivity, dependence, emotionality.

But this characterization was contradictory because women were also

enjoined to the same requirements of self-control and self-mastery as
men. No less than men, they were supposed to deny their dependency
needs, their emotionality, their passivity, at least in most contexts and for
most purposes. At the same time, any breakdown of self-control was
coded feminine. As a result, the understandings surrounding gender
were a particularly sensitive register of the tensions in the culture.

The focus on the family and self-control in the nineteenth century, ulti-
mately, was an attempt to forestall social conflict, especially class con-
flict, by redefining problems in terms of individual character.
Institutions like education and the family were raised in importance
74
because they were intended to overcome the societal conflicts spawned
by industrialization. Gender, in the sense of ‘sex-roles’, was central to
this attempt. Any systemic change would necessarily be calibrated with
changes in the gender order.

II. Freud and the Crumbling of

the Victorian Family System
Freud was born in 1856. As an upwardly mobile young researcher and
doctor, he shared the values I have just described, but he also lived at
a time when industrialization and immigration were eroding their
currency. In 1883, he wrote to his fiancée, ‘the mob gives vent to its
appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to
maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for
enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing
for what. And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts
gives us the quality of refinement.’9
Freud began to question the assumptions of his culture more deeply
in the course of his study of the problem of hysteria, one of a group of
newly defined ‘diseases’ known as neuroses. The term ‘neurosis’ had been
coined in the eighteenth century to signify an overly sensitive or irritable
nervous system but, when Freud was a student, neurotics were identified
as a discrete group.10 Between 1869 and 1873, neurasthenia, anorexia
nervosa, and agoraphobia were identified for the first time. Hysteria,
known earlier, moved to the forefront of neurology.11 At the time, these
conditions were considered to be reaching near-epidemic proportions.
Descriptions were pervasive in literature, and soon many cultural figures
such as Jane Addams and Max Weber were known for their experience
with them.
The neuroses had three characteristics important to my argument. The
first, exemplified in hysteria, was that they represented a breakdown of
self-mastery, a feeling of being overwhelmed by emotion and by feelings
of passivity, a feeling of losing control. The distinguishing mark of hys-
teria was an ‘outbreak of affect’. Neurologists used such terms as lability,
suggestibility and psychoplasticity.12
Second, the neuroses were defined by a shift from somatic to psychologi-
cal complaints. Neurasthenia was the first neurosis described wholly in
psychological terms. Anorexia was ‘discovered’ when patients shifted

9
Sigmund Freud to Martha Bernays, 29 August 1883, in Ernst L. Freud, The Letters of
Sigmund Freud, New York 1960, p. 50.
10
Jose M. Lopez Pinero, The Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis, London 1958, p. 58.
11
Neurasthenia was first described by George Beard in an address to the American
Neurological Society, Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 3, no. 217, 29 April 1869. See
James Gilbert, Work Without Salvation: America’s Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation:
1880–1910, Baltimore 1977, p. 33; Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘The Place of George M. Beard
in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 36, 1962, pp.
245–59; Gillian Brown, ‘The Empire of Agoraphobia’, Representations, no. 20, Fall 1987,
p. 148.
12
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey et al., Vol. xiii, London 1953, p. 172.

75
from complaints of stomach pain to complaints of an unwillingness to
eat.13 Hypochondria, once a medically respectable disease, ‘acquired the
connotation of an imaginary illness.’14 Hysteria was unique in that the
complaints were somatic, including, for example, paralyzed limbs, but
the explanations proffered were increasingly psychological.

Finally, all the neuroses were described in gendered terms. Hysterion, of

course, is Greek for womb. Many of the neuroses involved intensified
stereotypes of ‘femininity’: emotionality (hysteria), obsession with body
image (anorexia), fear of going out alone (agoraphobia). ‘Femininity’, in
turn, was a code word for the need for greater control. The ‘over-sensitiv-
ity’ and the ‘suggestibility’ that scientists and doctors ascribed to neu-
rotics, they also linked to alcoholism, to Latin culture, to mob
psychology and to socialism, but especially to women.15

The aim of the tradition of psychological treatment in which Freud

worked was to get the patient to re-establish self-control. The means,
which reveal the internal contradictions involved in the emphasis on
self-mastery, was to create a dependent relation with the doctor and then
use the doctor’s authority to end the dependency. The model was hypno-
sis: ‘when you awake you will do “x” and remember nothing.’

The origins of this method lay in a form of psychiatry developed during

the Enlightenment called ‘moral treatment’. Ultimately based on John
Locke’s work, moral treatment rested on the theory that disordered ‘asso-
ciations’ could be rearranged to cure insanity. Although its founders
stressed the impact of institutional regimes, such as the asylums, in the
early nineteenth century psychiatrists soon realized that the ordinary
doctor could be trained to elicit submission. Benjamin Rush, for exam-
ple, the founder of American psychiatry, gave a series of rules for doing
so: ‘catch [the patient’s] eye . . . Secure obedience . . . by the voice . . . the
countenance . . . should be accommodated to the state of the patient
. . .’16 And so the rules continued.

Bisexuality and Hierarchy

Nineteenth-century psychiatry, like the culture generally, combined

hierarchical control and gender. The psyche was understood in terms of
levels determined by evolution. The elementary levels were reflexes;
higher up were sensations, then perceptions, and finally, at the top, came
‘individuality’. Hysteria was caused by an ‘unruly’ piece of the ‘lower’
mind that had not been brought into connection with the higher part
of the mind or ‘consciousness’. The purpose of hypnotism, Freud was
taught in Paris in 1885, was to access the ‘lower’ parts of the mind, and
13
Edward Shorter, ‘The First Great Increase in Anorexia Nervosa’, Journal of Social History,
vol. xx, no. 1, Fall 1987, pp. 77ff; Alan Krohn, Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis, New York
1978.
14
Barbara Sicherman, ‘The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia’,
Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences, vol. xxxii, no. 1, (1977) p. 41.
15
Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France,
New Haven 1981.
16
Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, New
York 1962, pp. 174–8.

76
make them available for discharge. The gendered character of this model
particularly came to the surface in discussions of hypnosis. The ‘lower’ or
‘cut-off’ part of the mind was linked to femininity. Hypnotism, wrote
one practitioner, utilized ‘the dominance that nature has given one sex
over the other in order to attach and arouse.’ ‘The magnetized (the pas-
sive feminine part) is in sympathy with the magnetizer (the active mas-
culine part)’, wrote another.17

Freud inherited this framework of thought and throughout the 1890s

used it to try to explain hysteria. Studies in Hysteria (1893–95), the
unpublished ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) and the ‘seduc-
tion theory’ (1896) are all examples. They follow the established think-
ing, which in part goes back at least to the Greeks, according to which
some ‘lower’ part of the mind—an impulse, a suggestion, an unassimi-
lated memory—is cut off from the higher part of the mind, reason, mas-
tery, consciousness. Freud also followed established thinking in arguing
that the lower part of the mind was a repressed wish, especially a sexual
wish. Where Freud eventually differed was in explaining hysteria as
the repression of an infantile sexual wish, rather than a ‘normal’ adult,
heterosexual one. He learned about infantile sexuality from a new dis-
cipline, sexology, which also studied the ‘perversions’, especially homo-
sexuality. It was from this discipline, especially as he was introduced to
it by his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, that Freud learned about bisexuality.

‘Bisexuality’ in the late nineteenth century did not have its contempo-
rary meaning of choosing sexual partners from both sexes. Instead it
meant that there were ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ currents within each
individual. Bisexuality was an ancient idea that had been reborn in many
late nineteenth-century cultural spheres, as a way of portraying devia-
tions from the established gender order. The sexologists especially
applied the concept to homosexuals, whom they described as a ‘third’ or
‘intermediate’ sex, combining elements of the other two. In this way,
they sought ‘tolerance’ for homosexuals while affirming the dichoto-
mous nineteenth-century conception of gender.

Freud’s interest in the concept of bisexuality took off around 1895, the
year in which he interpreted his first dream. Part of what Freud did in
the following decade was to bring together the literature on the ‘neu-
roses’ and the literature on the ‘perversions’. The concept of bisexuality
served as his bridge. In trying to explain hysteria by bisexuality, Freud
brought the gender assumptions of nineteenth-century, middle-class
culture to a new level of explicitness. He began, following Fliess, with
the assumption that there were male and female substances in both sexes
and that the male substance ‘produce[d] pleasure’ while the female sub-
stance was associated with repression. Soon he dropped the language of
substances but not that of masculinity and femininity. For example, at
one point, he hypothesized that each sex repressed the opposite sex in
itself. Next, he suggested that both sexes repressed masculinity.18 In

17
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York 1971, p. 160.
18
25 May 1897. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, trans. and ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, Cambridge, Mass. 1985, p. 245. See also Freud, Stand-
ard Edition, Vol. ix, pp. 233–4.

77
1889, he wrote to Fliess: ‘Bisexuality! I am sure you are right about it. I
am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a
process in which four persons are involved.’19 While Freud’s precise
meaning here is unclear, he appears to sense a tension between sexuality
and gender binarism. Throughout these formulations, Freud held to the
view, that ‘repression and the neuroses, and thus the independence of the
unconscious, presuppose bisexuality.’20

Freud never renounced these or similar formulations but after complet-

ing The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 he stopped using them. By 1905,
when he wrote Three Essays on Sexuality, the language he used to discuss
psychology was that of sexuality, not gender. By sexuality, Freud meant
the whole range of excitations and activities that can be observed from
infancy on, and that ‘procure a pleasure that cannot be adequately ex-
plained in terms of the satisfaction of a basic physiological need.’21 This
range of infantile activities, in Freud’s theory, gradually constellate in the
adult forms of love. ‘Perversions’ and ‘repression’ now became variations
on this process. A perversion is a piece of infantile sexuality that has not
been joined up and connected with the rest of a person’s form of loving.
A repression is the denial of an infantile current. Every person’s sexuality
is unique. In 1912, Freud defined transference as the subject matter of
analysis because it brought to light each person’s ‘special individuality in
the exercise of the capacity to love’ that is, in the conditions a person sets
up for loving, the impulses a person gratifies, the aims they set out to
achieve.22

Object-Choice and Gender

Gender does not disappear from Freud’s work after 1899. On the con-
trary, it is everywhere, but not in the earlier sense of masculine and femi-
nine currents of the personality. With one key exception, to which I will
turn in a moment, Freud resisted using the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘fem-
ininity’ after 1899. They largely dropped out of his writing until 1915
when he added a footnote on them to a revision of the Three Essays. When
debates over female sexuality erupted in the 1920s, the terms also re-
turned, but Freud was almost embarrassed by them. We make use, he
wrote, ‘of what is obviously an inadequate empirical and conventional
equation: we call what is active, male, and what is passive, female.’ After
1899, in place of a division between masculinity and femininity, Freud
spoke of ambivalence or of sexual conflict. The result was a body of writ-
ing, at least until the 1920s, in which gender dichotomy shadowed or lay
in the background of mental conflict, rather than supplying the psycho-
logical basis for explaining it.

The exception is the question of object choice, meaning whether one

chooses to love a man or a woman. This idea first appeared in the Dora.
case (1900), originally intended as an addendum to The Interpretation of
Dreams. In ‘Dora’, Freud offered his solution to the problem of hysteria.

19
1 August 1899. Masson, Letters, p. 364.
20
19 September 1901. Ibid., pp. 450–1.
21
J. LaPlanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, New York 1973, p. 418.
22
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, 1912; Standard Edition, Vol. xii, p. 99.

78
He defined hysteria as an inability to choose between love objects of dif-
ferent sexes. In contrast to the language he used in the 1890s, Freud did
not describe Dora’s hysteria as a conflict between her masculine and femi-
nine sides. Rather, he described her as vacillating between Herr K and
Frau K, to both of whom she was attracted. Dora—Ida Bauer—repressed
neither masculinity nor femininity; she repressed sexual wishes that, for
the most part, could be directed at either sex.

The relation of repression to gender did not disappear. But after The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud regularly argued against equating mas-
culinity with control, rationality or consciousness. Similarly, he argued
against equating passivity, masochism, defeat, withdrawal from the
world, or ‘castration’ with ‘femininity’, that is, with the representation of
women. Although he used the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, he
now spoke of them as associated with non-gendered polarities such as
sadism and masochism to which they do not correspond.

Consider, for example, the concept of obsessional neurosis which Freud

formulated in 1907 in the so-called ‘Rat-Man’ case. Ernst Lanzer, the
young lawyer who was the subject of the case, was tied up in knots both
in talking to Freud and in his romantic relations. Freud described Lanzer
as having two irreducible conflicts. One was between attachment to his
father, a man, and attachment to his lover, a woman. This conflict, Freud
wrote, was hysterical or bisexual, terms he now equated. The second con-
flict, however, was between passive and active aims, roughly between a
desire to be loved and a need to maintain control. An insistence on con-
trol such as Lanzer manifested, Freud wrote, ‘cannot be described as
“masculine” or “feminine”’ but it ‘can persist throughout life and . . . per-
manently attract a large portion of sexual activity to itself.’23

An analogous point informed Freud’s 1911 account of Judge Daniel

Schreber, who fell ill in response to a humiliating election loss. Mute for
several years, Schreber eventually began to think of himself as a volup-
tuous woman whom God wanted to impregnate.24 On one hand, Freud
described Schreber’s problem as a narcissistic injury of a sort that was not
peculiar to either sex. At the same time, Freud linked narcissism to
‘homosexuality’, by which he meant Schreber’s infantile wish to be like,
and to be loved by, his father. Schreber’s fantasy of himself as a woman,
Freud argued, was a way for him to accept this infantile wish and thus a
step toward recovery, not a manifestation of illness.

Likewise, Serge Pankejeff, the 1914 ‘Wolf Man’, spent his life lording it
over women. Freud, however, described his basic wishes as passive and
masochistic, derived from seeing or imagining his mother having sex
with his bullying father. A man’s wish to suffer or be humiliated, Freud
argued, could be at least as powerful as his wish to dominate, and more-
over was more likely to be unconscious.25 Pankejeff’s need to intimidate
women was an attempt to bolster his narcissism, not an expression of his

23
Standard Edition, Vol. x, pp. 158, 167; Vol. vii, pp. 198–9.
24
Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1902), Cambridge, Mass. 1988, pp.
147–9, 204–10.
25
Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. xvii, pp. 100, 110–12.

79
‘masculinity’. Indeed, Freud wrote ‘the ego has no sexual [that is, gen-
dered] currents but only an interest in its own self-protection and in the
preservation of its narcissism.’26

With such formulations, Freud went a long way toward cracking the
code of nineteenth-century liberal culture. This was not his intention
—which was to explain neurosis. But in doing so, he showed that
the ‘problems’—passivity, lack of control, dependency—that the nine-
teenth-century middle classes had assigned to women, to the working
class, to ‘Africans’ and to ‘inferior’ or ‘uncivilized’ people were universal.
The logic of the distinction between those in control (male professionals)
and those in need of control (women, homosexuals, racialized others)
began to break down. In a sense, Freud can be described as ‘outing’ the
white, male professional’s dependency. In so doing, however, he ques-
tioned the underpinnings of a whole system by which identity and social
place were being maintained.

It is in this sense that Schorske’s emphasis on the introspective, as well as

the Jewish, roots of psychoanalysis is so important. Analysis was born as
a reflection upon experiences of defeat, loss, mourning and withdrawal.
It was not a heroic ethic. If we examine the internal culture of early
analysis, as revealed in the letters between Freud and his followers, what
was new was the emergence of a language centred on recognizing the
universality of passive wishes. ‘I confess this to you with a struggle’,
Jung wrote to Freud, my veneration for you is disgusting and ridiculous
because of its undeniable erotic undertones.’27 I wish you ‘had torn your-
self from your infantile role to place yourself next to me as an equal com-
panion’, Freud wrote to Ferenczi; ‘I would prefer an independent friend
but if you make such difficulties I will have to adopt you as a son.’28

Leaving aside, for a moment, its implications for women, it can still be
seen that Freud’s language held the potential for a ‘Copernican’ reorien-
tation. Nineteenth-century scientific and medical explanations of psy-
chological phenomena alternated between emphasizing heredity and
environment. Lacking was a conception of motivation. That is what
Freud provided. His theories made room for both constitutional and
environmental factors, but only as components of a larger explanation
that foregrounded individuals’ desires and the way in which those desires
led men and women to live in worlds largely of their own construction.

The basis for this reorientation was Freud’s conception of sexuality,

which encompassed both infancy and the unconscious. This conception
was so polymorphous, so ‘linguistic’ in today’s terminology, that it had
the capacity to dissolve fixed distinctions of gender. As these distinctions
threatened to dissolve, so did an entire universe of cultural controls
through which assumptions concerning gender reverberated. As Freud’s
advocates argue today, his ‘anti-essentialism’ opened the possibility for a

26
Ibid.
27
Robert Steele, Freud and Jung, London 1982, p. 206.
28
2 October 1910 and 17 November 1911. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia
Giampieri-Deutsch, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Vol.i,
1908–1914, Cambridge, Mass. 1993, pp. 215, 314. My translation.

80
far-reaching dissolution. Thus, a utopian moment followed their public-
ation. This moment centred on a latent vision, not generally voiced, of a
world in which socially inscribed categories and hierarchies disappear.
Utopianism potentially serves a critical function—it provides a standard
for judging the existing society. But utopianism can also serve the inter-
ests of domination and illusion, as Freud’s critics have rightly insisted.

III. Mass Culture and Personal Life

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna broke off in 1900, while Christopher Lasch’s The
Culture of Narcissism described the United States in the latter part of the
twentieth century, but they tell a consistent story. As we have seen,
Schorske called analysis ‘counter-political’, meaning that it encouraged a
retreat from politics and a compensatory preoccupation with intrapsy-
chic reality. Lasch distinguished ‘pseudo-self awareness’ or psychologiza-
tion from genuine introspection but, like Schorske, he identified the
inward turn, the preoccupation with the self historically associated with
psychoanalysis, with the decline of the nineteenth-century liberal ethic
centred on ‘independence’ or ‘self-control’.

According to Lasch, a preoccupation with the self is integral to twen-

tieth-century corporate capitalist society. In making his argument, how-
ever, Lasch did not begin with an analysis of capitalism, understanding
by that term the social system that results from the buying and selling of
labour power. Rather, Lasch meant the welfare state. He criticized the
welfare state, and the ‘helping’ professions associated with it, for creating
‘dependence’, thereby sustaining the myth that nineteenth-century
middle class culture fostered ‘independence’. He thereby romanticized
the nineteenth-century family and failed to appreciate the many ways
in which corporate capitalism, including the welfare state, advanced the
cause of women and gays. Ultimately, he described the shift from nine-
teenth- to twentieth-century society as negative, rather than analyzing it
dialectically.

A more fruitful approach to the shift from liberal or competitive to cor-

porate capitalism rests on appreciating the vastly increased role assigned
to consciousness, knowledge and science in the productive process. There
was an increased awareness of the role of mental labour in production, as
well as an increase in mental labour itself. The resulting productivity led
to a shift from an emphasis on saving, thrift and sacrifice to one on ex-
panding consumption. The same productivity encouraged the shift from
a conflict model of society centred on the relation between capital and
labour to a cooperation model, suggested in the us in the phrase, ‘the
progressive era’.

Corporate capitalism eroded many of the bases of nineteenth-century

culture, including its ideal-typical family and its model of separate
spheres. The result is best characterized as the historical emergence of
‘personal life’—forms of life separate from and no longer directly deter-
mined by the sphere of production.29 The distinction between public

29
Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, New York 1976.

81
and private spheres remained important but the private sphere of the
family was now subsumed in a larger context. Adolescence, youth and
the issues important to youth, especially sexuality and identity, emerged
as new, and by the 1920s, dominant concerns. Familial repressiveness,
which had served a function in an era of scarcity and competition, sud-
denly seemed antiquated and idiosyncratic. Gender remained important
but there was a new emphasis on ‘similarity’. Modernity seemed to many
to contain the potential for realizing Wollstonecraft’s famous wish that
the difference between the sexes be restricted to the sphere of sexual love.

Personal life had a dual aspect. On one hand, it led away from politics
and toward a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. This was the
aspect that Schorske and Lasch emphasized. On the other hand, it could
also imply a redefinition and deepening of politics. This redefinition
went beyond the framing of new ‘issues’ and expressed the possibilities
of forms of life no longer dominated by social necessity. In pre-modern
societies a common way of life meant that the internal world of individ-
uals was homologous with the larger cultural symbolic. Traditional ther-
apy aimed to reintegrate the individual with their world.30 Freud’s
insight was that the symbols by which modern men and women lived
were personal and idiosyncratic. Thus, when Freud insisted that ‘we ana-
lysts refuse . . . to turn a patient who puts himself into our hands in search
of help into our private property, to decide his fate for him, to force our
own ideals upon him, and with the pride of the Creator to form him in
our own image and see that it is good’, he was in part actually articulat-
ing the new possibilities of subjectivity, plurality and personal freedom
that had emerged in his time.31

The significance of personal life, over and against the nineteenth-century

emphasis on the family, was expressed in a new culture—mass culture.
Its main characteristic was its apparent inclusiveness. Reflecting the
changed character of corporate capitalism, the new culture idealized
personal freedom, mass consumption and cooperation. Dime novels,
amusement parks, the movies, sports, reflected immigrant and working-
class traditions with important democratizing elements, but they also
reflected the elaboration of a new social imaginary, one which worked on
the basis of a wishful solution to both personal problems and social con-
flict: harmonious reconciliation in an imaginary sphere.32

Psychotherapy was at the centre of mass culture. Whereas nineteenth-

century psychiatry had functioned by excluding and isolating the
so-called ‘mad’, twentieth century ‘psychotherapy’ stressed the univer-
sality of a ‘subconscious’, a secondary or subliminal self, in which one
30
The pre-modern ‘therapist’ or shaman was effective because he or she mobilized collec-
tively shared symbols. Claude Lévi-Strauss, explaining a shaman’s effectiveness in a dif-
ficult childbirth, wrote that it does not matter whether or not the god being called upon
to help exists. What matters is that ‘the sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to
a society which believes in it.’ Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’,
Structural Anthropology, New York 1976.
31
Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. xvii, pp. 161, 164–5.
32
‘No Toryism. No Socialism’, the filmmaker D.W. Griffith put it in 1909, ‘the ordinary
virtues of American life triumph.’ Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass
Culture and the Motion Picture Industry, New York 1980, p. 61.

82
could transcend the conflicts and travails of everyday existence. Whereas
the nineteenth-century psychiatrist stressed self-control, the early twen-
tieth-century therapist stressed catharsis and release. Psychotherapy
sanctioned the idea of transcending conflict, especially social conflict,
through mental means. It also provided the culture with many of its key
schemata for self-interpretation.

Late nineteenth-century precursors of psychotherapy such as ‘mind cure’,

Christian Science, and the Emmanuel movement, had anticipated the affin-
ity between psychotherapy and mass culture. These movements, too, arose
out of a rejection of ‘Victorianism’, as nineteenth-century middle-class cul-
ture now came to be called.33 The mind cure movements used meditation
to access ‘inexhaustible subconscious powers [with] roots in the Infinite.’34
In 1901, William James wrote approvingly of these movements. ‘Official
moralists’, he remarked, ‘advise us never to relax our strenuousness . . . Be
vigilant, day and night . . . hold your passive tendencies in check.’ But many
people ‘find that all this conscious effort . . . only makes them twofold more
the children of hell . . . Their machinery refuses to run . . . when the bearings
are made so hot and the belts so tight. Under these circumstances the way
to success . . . is by an antimoralistic method . . . relaxation, not intentness,
should be now the rule.’35 These movements helped prepare the ground for
psychotherapy in the United States.

Psychoanalysis and Mass Culture

The emerging therapeutic professions, especially those tied to medicine,

struggled intently to distinguish themselves from mass culture. In doing
so, they betrayed their underlying affinity with it. Hugo Munsterberg’s
Psychotherapy (1909) is an example. Munsterberg, a professor of philoso-
phy at Harvard, wrote the book to combat mind-cure amateurism.
Arguing that the ‘big marketplace of civilization’ had weakened ties, he
called for ‘a conscious social program of symbol building and communal
reintegration led by professionals.’ Psychotherapy, he wrote, should
inhibit pain, suppress emotion, and substitute pleasant ideas ‘until the
normal equilibrium is restored.’36

Needless to say, Freud’s idea of analysis was very different from that of
Munsterberg. Freud believed in a slow, painful process by which infantile
wishes become accessible to consciousness. And his thought had a critical
dimension. But the very thing that had made his thought subversive in
the Victorian context, namely, his demonstration that empirical events or
messages received from the society were remade by individuals under the
impetus of their own needs, also gave it a recuperative or integrative
function in the emerging culture.
33
The key book was Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) ‘the first book of the
“twenties”’, according to Cyril Connolly. Leon Edel notes that Eminent Victorians was writ-
ten in ‘a new kind of ink—the ink of Vienna, of Sigmund Freud.’ Leon Edel, Bloomsbury, A
House of Lions, Philadelphia 1979, p. 228.
34
Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and
Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale, Garden City, ny 1965, p. 14.
35
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge, Mass. 1985, pp. 6, 108–9.
36
Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Birth of Psychoanalysis in the United
States, 1876–1917, New York 1971, pp. 127, 140.

83
That it would serve this function was by no means inevitable. In the
1920s, intellectuals in Bloomsbury, Weimar Berlin, Surrealist Paris,
Greenwich Village and throughout revolutionary Russia, struggled to
articulate the critical dimension of psychoanalysis. Yet the integration
of analysis into psychiatry in the us proved decisive. By 1919 the us
already boasted the largest number of analysts in the world. In Europe,
the psychiatric establishment rejected analysis; in the us, analysts virt-
ually dominated psychiatry. Ernest Jones understood how important
the English-speaking world would be to the development of psycho-
analysis. One of his many legacies are the English translations of Freud,
which culminated in the Strachey edition and are still the only com-
plete and edited edition of Freud’s work in any language.37
From its beginnings, American analysis reflected the close connection
of professionalism and mass culture. Mind-cure supplied the in-
spiration for G. Stanley Hall’s invitation to Freud to speak at Clark
University in 1909. Hall was a king-maker. The audience included a
cross-section of America’s medical and academic elite, among them,
Edward Titchener, William James, Franz Boas, and Adolf Meyer,
arguably America’s leading psychologist, philosopher, anthropologist
and psychiatrist. The important thing, Ernest Jones advised Freud, was
‘to aim first at the recognized people . . . There is so much vulgarization
and exploitation [in America], that one has a strong weapon in insist-
ing on the exact scientific side.’38 Freud did not take Jones’s advice.
Enjoying his first taste of American-style mass consumption—Coney
Island, Chinatown, Niagara Falls—he aimed his lectures at a broad
audience stressing ‘the practicality, the optimism, the comparative
simplicity of psychoanalysis.’39 Later he described the experience as
‘the unfolding of an incredible daydream.’ ‘In Europe I felt like some-
one excommunicated; here I saw myself received by the best as an
equal.’40
The Clark lectures produced the first Freudian generation of Amer-
ican psychiatry: younger, hospital-based doctors discontented with
somatic interpretations. By 1915, the main psychiatric text, White
and Jeliffe’s Diseases of the Nervous System, recommended analysis at
‘higher psychological levels.’ Although it could not cure psychotic
patients, it could at least relieve their symptoms.41 American psy-
chiatrists had no interest in analysis except as a technique. In 1925, they
mandated that only mds could practice analysis, cutting it off from
its connections to literature, history and social thought. Later, when
they discovered what they regarded as more efficient techniques, they
dropped analysis.
The Clark lectures also produced Freud’s mass celebrity. By World War i,
the coverage of analysis eclipsed that of all other therapies, especially in

37
The Gessamelte Werke contain the texts but without any editorial matter. The best schol-
arly edition, the Studienausgabe, is incomplete. A French edition is underway.
38
February 7, 1909. R. Andrew Paskauskas, ed., The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund
Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939, Cambridge, Mass. 1993 p. 15. February 7, 1909.
39
Hale, Freud and the Americans, p. 5.
40
Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. xiv, p. 7.
41
Hale, Freud and the Americans, pp. 443–4.

84
magazines aimed at women.42 After the war, the Hearst papers serial-
ized their first analysis, that of Mabel Dodge Luhan, in whose salon
the first analytic group had met. Amid the birth of mass advertising,
Edward Bernays, the ‘Father of Public Relations’ popularized his uncle
Sigmund Freud’s teachings on the breaking down of ‘resistances.’43 In
1924, Sam Goldwyn sailed for Europe announcing that he would offer
Freud $100,000 to assist in devising ‘a really great love story’. Failing
that, that he would get Freud to ‘come to America and help in a “drive” on
the hearts of this nation.’ Who better than Freud?, asked Goldwyn, Freud
with his insight into ‘emotional motivations and suppressed desires.’ A
few years later, Hearst tried to get Freud to come to Chicago ‘at any price’
to ‘analyze’ the young murderers, Leopold and Loeb.44
Managing the Mind
Interest in psychoanalysis was part of a global shift toward psychologiza-
tion. That some analysts, including Freud, were hostile to the new devel-
opments was of little significance. A main theme in progressive era
America had been the belief that questions previously defined as political,
were in fact technical, to be solved by experts. In the 1920s, political sci-
entist Harold Lasswell drew on Freud to argue that those ‘overly’ involved
in politics acted from psychological hang-ups.45 The famous Hawthorne
experiments, begun in 1929, purported to show that workers were more
interested in whether anyone paid attention to them than in their actual
conditions of work. Struck by the experiments, Elton Mayo founded the
field of industrial relations on the premise that conflicts between labour
and management could be best treated as displacements from private
life.46 When World War ii broke out, Talcott Parsons urged that the gov-
ernment not respond to anti-war protests ‘hysterically’, as it had during
the First World War. A propaganda agency, Parsons wrote, should assume
a ‘disinterested’ role and decline to respond to hostile interpretations of
government policy—thus defeating them in the manner of a therapist
whose non-responsive behaviour undermines neurotic perceptions by
withholding confirmation from them.47 This was the milieu from which,
after World War ii, essentially as part of the Marshall Plan, American ana-
lysts re-exported their version of analytic psychiatry to Europe where,
except for an isolated proto-feminist enclave associated with Melanie
Klein, it had been destroyed by fascism.
Psychological thought, which proved so liberating in some contexts, opened

42
Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences, New
Haven 1984.
43
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty, New York 1996, p. 34.
44
Hale, Freud and the Americans, p. 399; Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol.
iii, London 1954, p. 103.
45
Fred Matthews, ‘The Utopia of Human Relations: The Conflict-Free Family in
American Social Thought, 1930–1960’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
vol. 24, October 1988, p. 348; Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War i
(1927), Cambridge, Mass. 1971, pp. 4–5.
46
Elton Mayo, ‘The Irrational Factor in Human Behavior: The “Night Mind” in
Industry’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 110, November
1923, pp. 117–30. Mayo was actually more influenced by Pierre Janet than by Freud.
47
Talcott Parsons, ‘Propaganda and Social Control’ (1942), in Essays in Sociological Theory,
Pure and Applied, Glencoe, Illinois. 1954, pp. 89–103.

85
the way in others for the reimposition of authoritarian and hierarchical rela-
tions. Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century middle-class culture empha-
sized individual character as the alternative to social conflict. But the
twentieth-century dream of transcending socially imposed limitations was
sustained by Freud’s brilliant vision. Partly as a result, the newer forms of
social control were more deeply internalized than the older. The nineteenth-
century emphasis on ‘self-mastery’ actually left more space for failure, disor-
der and eccentricity than the twentieth-century emphasis on the personal
which, because it was seen as coming from within, could never be evaded.

Self-denial, more characteristic of the nineteenth century, and escapism,

more characteristic of the twentieth, are not mutually exclusive alterna-
tives. The attempt to set up boundaries between classes, races and gen-
ders and the attempt to create an imaginary space within which social
differences are discounted, are two versions of self-deception. Both are
attempts at mind over matter: in both periods, the same individuals
alternated between them. The latter, in fact, with its dream-like aspects,
regularly collapsed back into the former. Thus, many analysts wound up
resurrecting, even as they claimed to reject, the normalizing aspects of
the psychiatry they ostensibly supplanted.

As a result, the history of analysis has an ironic structure. Although

analysis began by using the literature on the perversions to dissolve
assumptions based on gender, it turned into a bulwark of prejudice
against women and homosexuals. In place of a world defined in terms of
masculinity and femininity, Freud had opened a world of psychosexual
stages: oral, anal, genital; paranoia, obsessional neurosis, hysteria; auto-
eroticism, narcissism, object relations; subject/object, active/passive,
male/female. The endpoint of each schema was the heterosexual couple.
Thus gender, suppressed as a psychological current, had reappeared as
the end point of object choice. Once heterosexuality was reinscribed as a
norm, homosexuality would be necessarily pathologized. Gender and
homophobia, finally, were the pivots through which a whole series of
stigmatizations and exclusions were put in place.

Reconstituting the Family

The destabilization of fixed gender norms had been at the centre of what
was most progressive about psychoanalysis and it was through the re-
establishment of these norms that analysis became a repressive force. Not
only was gender itself fundamental to modern forms of regulating the
individual, but in addition, the assumption that sexual difference was
foundational helped naturalize and essentialize a whole body of thought.
Thus, the first step toward the destruction of a critical perspective was to
re-establish the foundational character of the distinction between the
sexes. A tension over the meaning of this distinction had repeatedly
emerged throughout the history of analysis.

If Freud opened up the possibility of re-establishing conventional norms

of gender and sexuality, others were quick to enter the breach. Every one
of Freud’s important analytic opponents, no matter how they other-
wise differed, returned to the standpoint that psychoanalysis began by
rejecting, namely, that a theory of the psyche must be grounded on the
86
distinction between the sexes. In the 1890s, Fliess, and a decade later
Jung, argued that the psyche should be understood in terms of ‘mascu-
line’ and ‘feminine’ principles. In 1910, when Alfred Adler revived the
older theory of bisexuality as ‘psychical hermaphroditism’, Freud re-
sponded that in psychology ‘the concepts “masculine” and “feminine”
are of no use.’ The proper dichotomy, he said, is not between masculine
and feminine but between libido and repression. In the 1920s, Freud’s
opponents in the debates over female sexuality, such as Karen Horney
and Ernest Jones, began with the distinction between the sexes and then
explained what difference that distinction made to subsequent develop-
ment.48 While the content varied, the same disagreement over the status
of gender as a psychological category kept recurring.
The naturalization of gender norms began early. The debates over
female sexuality of the 1920s and 1930s led to the reorientation of ana-
lytic theory around the relationship between mother and infant. This
reorientation brought some undeniable gains. Even the beginnings of
the specificity of female development could not be understood without
studying the girl’s relation with her mother, and with this turn of
emphasis, the centrality of the mother-infant or ‘pre-Oedipal’ relation-
ship to all development quickly became clear. Moreover, the early ana-
lytic focus on authority deepened into an understanding of dependence.
But the reorientation of psychoanalysis around the mother-infant rela-
tionship and around a deepening understanding of dependence acquired
an increasingly tendentious character during World War ii. Analysts
responded to the bombing of London by arguing that separation of
small children from their mothers ‘introduces major psychological
problems.’49 Although their arguments contained genuine insights,
they also served to bolster efforts to return women to the home after the
war and to institutionalize the family wage in the post-war welfare
state. The welfare state sustained the family, especially the working-
class family. It did not undermine the family, as Lasch maintained. The
problem was that the ‘cell’, the basic unit of the welfare state, was the
individual, male-headed, heterosexual family with its presumption of
strict gender difference and not the community or society. Thus per-
sonal life could not be freed from familial determination.
Once again the us, to which almost all the emigrés eventually moved, was
crucial. In Cold War America psychoanalytic ideas pervaded the culture.
Its practitioners influenced a vast network of satellite organizations and
activities including counselling, testing, education, personnel, religion and
law, especially new branches such as juvenile and domestic relations. The
integration of analysis into a system of disciplines was inseparable from a
McCarthyite insistence on the ‘American way of life’.50 Analysts now held
that ‘every homosexual is a latent heterosexual’, that ‘the anatomical

48
It has often been observed that Freud maintained a sharp distinction between biology
and psychology but many analytic concepts—for example, ‘orality’ or ‘anality’—have an
intimate relation to biology. Where Freud insisted on drawing a sharp line between biol-
ogy and psychology, it was invariably to reject a particular application of biology, one
which seeks to ground the distinction between the sexes.
49
Adam Phillips, D. W. Winnicott, Cambridge, Mass. 1989, p. 62.
50
Peter Berger, ‘Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis’, Social Research,
vol. 32, 1965, pp. 27–8.

87
equipment of the female child puts her at a disadvantage in relation to
the possessor of the phallus’, and that Kinsey’s ‘erroneous conclusion in
regard to homosexuality’ will be ‘used against the United States abroad,
stigmatizing the nation as a whole in a whisper campaign.’51 Norman
Podhoretz wrote that Freud supplied ‘the most persuasive . . . foundation
for believing that human possibilities were . . . fixed and given and not, as
the “liberal imagination” would have it, infinitely malleable.’52

Even in the 1950s, however, this was never the whole story; Freud con-
tinued to remain the standard bearer for transformative possibilities in
such works as Herbert Marcus’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Norman
O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959), both of them motivated by what
Brown called ‘the superannuation of the political categories which
informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s.’53 Nonetheless, given
the way in which psychoanalysis had become integrated into a conserva-
tive way of life, by the 1960s, many found its repudiation compelling.
Howard Brown, a Commissioner of Health in New York City, was told
by his analyst that he ‘was inherently impaired because of [his] sexual
orientation.’ In 1973, Brown told the American Psychiatric Association
that it took him twenty years to recover from his analysis.54 Erica Jong’s
heroine confronted her analyst in the Fear of Flying, published in the
same year: ‘Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a
woman. Are you a woman?’ And then: ‘As in a dream (I never would have
believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years
had I been lying there?) picked up my pocketbook, and walked . . . out . . .
No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free!’ In
the birth of today’s us culture and politics in the 1960s, Freud may
have been more important than Marx, although primarily as a figure
to oppose.

The new social movements of the 1960s arose on the same terrain of
personal life that earlier gave rise to psychoanalysis. Like psycho-
analysis, these movements reflected the real conditions of modern per-
sonal life, namely that ‘identity’ had become a project for individuals,
rather than being determined by the economic and familial structure of
society. Thus they, too, have to grapple with the problem of relating a
critical understanding of identity to an older, but still indispensable,
critique of capitalism. A key to doing so is a historical understanding
of personal life.

Such an approach makes it possible to transcend the debates between

Freud’s late twentieth-century critics and his advocates. Freud’s advo-
cates focus on the liberatory moment of release in his writings, and miss
the way in which modern social control works by producing ‘freedom’

51
Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, New York 1988, p. 137;
Sandor Rado, ‘A Critical Examination of the Concept of Bisexuality’, Psychosomatic Medicine,
vol. 2, no. 4, 1940; Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of
Diagnosis, New York 1981, pp. 28, 30; Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography,
New York 1988, pp. 4289; Edmund Bergler, ‘Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report’, in
Aron Krich, ed., The Homosexuals as Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities, New York 1954.
52
Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir, New York 1979, p. 48.
53
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, Middletown, ct 1959, p. ix.
54
Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, pp. 55, 95, 1034.

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and ‘subjectivity’. Conversely, Freud’s critics focus on his contributions
to contemporary forms of control and miss the sense in which his writ-
ings helped initiate the potentially liberatory politicization of personal
life that continues in our time.

In addition, such an approach helps us situate the question of gender at

the centre of personal life. In justifying his resistance to defining mas-
culinity and femininity, Freud described the equation of masculinity with
activity and femininity with passivity as merely ‘empirical’ and ‘conven-
tional’. Thus, the idea that gender is cultural was implicit in psychoanaly-
sis but was not made explicit until the feminist movements of the 1970s.
Yet psychoanalysis also destabilized the opposition between men and
women on which most forms of feminism still rest. It did not destabilize
the concept ‘woman’ in the way that many contemporary feminists do in
attempting to make room for lesbians, women of colour and so forth.
Rather, it destabilized the concept when it is opposed to the concept
‘man’. In this regard, contemporary movements of identity have not
yet caught up with the liberatory moment in psychoanalysis which held
that, at least under the conditions of modernity, no individual could
be reduced to a socio-cultural determination, whether as ‘bourgeois’ or
‘worker’, as ‘man’, or ‘woman’, or as a member of a particular race.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by recapping my argument. The nineteenth-century

emphasis on individual character was based on the denial of fundamental
aspects of humanity. Weakness, vulnerability, dependency, passivity, sex-
uality and more, were coded by gender, assigned to stigmatized groups
and pathologized. Psychoanalysis, potentially, pointed toward a com-
mon basis for solidarity by its demonstration that fear, exclusion, depen-
dence, humiliation and ‘castration’ were common to a huge range of
modern experience. It is a great lie, one in which Freud was only partially
complicit, that the subject matter of analysis was ‘neurosis’. At the same
time, because of its discovery that nothing social exists without first
being reworked and made the individual’s own, it appealed to that aspect
of twentieth-century culture that stressed the free determination of iden-
tity and the overthrow of past constraints. That aspect, however, was ide-
ological. Like the nineteenth century, the twentieth has been based on
denial and social division. As a result, the psychological domain that
analysis brought into focus was often used to affirm the world as it is.

Reclaiming cut-off parts of our humanity is inseparable from reclaiming

the repressed or evaded parts of the social world: Africa, Palestine, people
with aids. Both repression and escapism, Victorianism and modern mass
culture equally dissimulate interdependence as rooted in labour, expressed
in culture and forged in bonds of love. The disputes between pro-Freudians
and anti-Freudians situate Freud in too narrow a compass and interpret his
thought at too shallow a level. Schorske, Lasch and the thinkers associated
with them made a brilliant beginning but their work founders due to the
overly pessimistic and unilinear Frankfurt School influence. Intrinsically
related is their failure to engage the questions of gender and homosexual-
ity. Only a deeply conceptualized historical approach can enable us to
appreciate Freud’s contribution, while moving beyond his sway.
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