Father and Daughter

I posted a month back on Bryan Appleyard's breathless account of Mark Edmundson's new book "The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism". Now (via ALDaily) we have Edmundson himself. He's writing about Anna Freud, in an extract from the book:

Freud had not always held his youngest child in high esteem. Anna had never been pretty, at least according to Freud, and she was not precocious; as a girl, she was dutiful, thoughtful, and thorough, with a capacity for hard work not unlike her father's. Over time, though, Freud came to see that what Anna lacked in quickness of understanding, she made up for in depth. She immersed herself in his work and his world — when she was still a girl she attended the seminars Freud held for his disciples in his apartment at Berggasse 19, sitting quietly in a room blue with cigar smoke — and became as well versed in her father's thought as any of his followers. Anna's relation to Freud's vision was never creative. She took it all in; she learned its terms by heart; but it never seems to have occurred to Anna that her father's thinking required revision or even much development.

Freud's authority with Anna was absolute; he had established it early in her life, in part by psychoanalyzing her himself. Looking back on the psychoanalysis, Anna said that her father never permitted her to indulge in halfway measures. He compelled her to offer the whole truth about everything, including her erotic life. It seems that she shared with him accounts of her sexual fantasies and of her initial forays into masturbation, and that Freud took it all in with characteristic equanimity. Anna emerged from the analysis grateful to her father and more committed to him than ever. From that time on, Freud's attitude toward his daughter was protective in the extreme, especially when sex was the issue. Even as Anna reached her 20s and began to attract men, including one of Freud's disciples, the devoted womanizer Ernest Jones, Freud continually proclaimed that she was too young and not at all ready to leave the family. Once, during the period of Anna's analysis, when she had gone off on vacation and left her mother and father, Freud, writing to the Russian psychoanalyst Lou Andreas Salomé, said, "I have long felt sorry for [Anna] for still being at home with us old folks, ... but on the other hand, if she really were to go away, I should feel myself as deprived as I [would] now if I had to give up smoking!"

Edmundson goes to great lengths to tell us that he's aware of Freud's faults, but it's remarkable how lightly he passes over the whole business of Anna's childhood and upbringing. He doesn't seem to realise quite how grotesque the whole business is: the young daughter, the Freuds' sixth child, always told by her father that she wasn't pretty, denied any contact with male suitors on the grounds that (in her twenties even) she wasn't ready, gradually replacing the wife in her father's affections until, by the end, she was charged with the care of what Freud referred to as his "baby", the psychoanalytic cult. On its own that would be enough to fuel some dark Victorian tales about patriarchy and repression with not a little whiff of incest - recalling Karl Kraus's dictum that psychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure.

On top of all that, though, is the quite extraordinary fact that Anna was - for goodness' sake - psychoanalysed by her own father. Psychoanalysed: that is, she had to relate, in brutal detail, every little fantasy, which, in Freudian terms, would've had to involve a childhood obsession with having sex with her father. Her father: the very man who was sitting there analysing her dreams and fantasies in a supposed attempt to enable her to accept and then move beyond these repressed emotions. The extent of Freud's determination to control his daughter, and the degree of self-delusion in his belief that it was all for Anna's own good, are quite remarkable.

According to Richard Webster, Anna's analysis followed the path set by the earlier notorious case of Dora, where excessive youthful masturbation was "uncovered", which is to say determined in advance by theoretical requirements, and then forced on to the hapless analysand as recovered memories. So Anna became convinced that her adolescence was spent in "beating" sessions, which then became forgotten, excluded from memory, but were dragged back into consciousness by the efforts of the dutiful therapist.

As a good well-educated girl, shy and obedient, it may be doubted that the young Anna did in fact spend so much energy fiercely masturbating over fantasies connected with her father, only to forget all about them. Freudian dogma, however, demanded that such was the case. It is, of course, a happy male fantasy that women, underneath the demure exterior, are really sex-crazed. How much more exciting for Freud, then, to slowly force these supposed memories from his daughter's Unconscious, revealing that the old goat himself, her father, was the everlasting object of her lust. And, crucially and most disgracefully, poor Anna was in no position to do as Dora did, and walk away in disgust. As Freud's daughter she was trapped there. It's difficult to conceive of a more thoroughgoing example of the betrayal of a child - of, indeed, child abuse.

Comments

[Dom]

"As a good Catholic girl ..."

Was she catholic? I don't think Freud's wife was.

[Mick H]

Good point. Where did that come from? I think I'll quietly go in and change it to "As a good well-educated girl..." and hope no one notices.

A Freudian slip.

[mikeovswinton]

So lets get this clear; at "Unspeakable evil" below ridiculous comparisions etc are shredded. But here, on the basis of a couple of second hand accounts we are told that you cannot imagine a more thoroughgoing example of child abuse than the way Sigmund Freud brought his daughter up? Don't you read the papers?

[John J. Coupal]

It appears that Freud's politically incorrect analysis of human thought and human behavior elicits emotional "hatchet jobs" on psychoanalysis from many otherwise smart people.

[Mick H]

Well that's me told.