← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hello again my lovely betwixters. It's me. Do you remember earlier this year when we went completely mad and we did a betwixt live show? Well, it went so well that we are now doing it again next year only we are doing two shows. We have one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May and one in London town on the 25th of May and tickets are available right now. Just in time for Christmas. Go to Fane f a n e.co.uk and search for betwixt and we will see you there.
- [00:34]
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- [01:05]
Kate Lister
Hello my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixt the Sheets. And as you probably know, we do like to get a little bit smutty around here, but for some reason that isn't really clear to anybody apart from the lawyers, I have to tell you that it's going to get a bit saucy around here. So here we go. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering arrange adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. We call that the fair dues warning because, well, fair dues, we did tell you it was going to get rude. Right, on with the show. Dreams of flying, dreams of falling, dreams of climbing, dreams where all your teeth have fallen out. Have you ever had that one? That's a weird one. Slips of the tongue, jokes, painting, writing, inventing, hysteria, obsession, anxiety, phobias. And what is sucking your thumb all about? All of these things. Maybe not the teeth thing, but the rest of those things. Sigmund Freud linked to sex.
- [02:02]
Carolyn Law Bender
Of course he did.
- [02:03]
Kate Lister
He linked just about everything to sex. And I guess that is all something to do with the subconsciousness. Or it's something to do with Freud, but probably something to do with the subconsciousness. Shall we find out more about it? I think so.
- [02:34]
Carolyn Law Bender
Foreign.
- [02:38]
Kate Lister
Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Sigmund Freud is a man known as the Father of Psychoanalysis. Although with the work he would later do on fathers and sons and what they wanted to do to their wives and mothers, I'm not sure he'd want that particular title, but Father of Psychology it is. And Freud liked to link things to sex. That was a big deal for him. But for a man who spent so much of his life professionally analyzing the sex lives of other people, how is his own? What skeletons did Freud have rattling around in his closet? Today I'm joined by Carolyn Law Bender from the University of Essex to explore Freud's life and his theories on sex, and to ask the question, was he as kinky as you might expect him to be? Notepads at the ready, betwixters. We're going in. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Carolyn Lawbender. How are you doing?
- [03:43]
Carolyn Law Bender
I'm wonderful. It's nice to be speaking with you.
- [03:45]
Kate Lister
It's fabulous to be speaking with you to do. You know, I think this episode is actually long overdue. Mr. Freud, Professor Freud, Sigmund Freud. Like, how have we been going for this long with a podcast about the history of sexuality? And he hasn't had his own episode yet?
- [04:01]
Carolyn Law Bender
Cause love him or loathe him, he is incredibly important.
- [04:04]
Kate Lister
He's so important, isn't he? They call him the father of psychology. Is that fair, do you think the.
- [04:11]
Carolyn Law Bender
Father of psychology is interesting? Because I think if you were like, a 101 psychology student taking an Introduction to Psychology class, you'd maybe hear Sigmund Freud's name once in passing as a joke, maybe attached to kind of staged development, and then they'd very quickly move on. He's certainly the father of psychoanalysis, but I think especially, especially in, like, the Anglophone context, he's not as popular anymore in psychology. And there's a big distinction between psychoanalysis and psychology.
- [04:41]
Kate Lister
Oh, is there? Can you explain what that difference is? That's probably really in depth, isn't it? That's probably very technical. But could you do it really quickly and in simplified terms?
- [04:51]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, totally. I mean, psychoanalysis is super complicated, and I'll do my best to, like, keep it in as layman terms as we can. But, like, psychoanalysis for Freud was defined by, like, two key characteristics. One of them was a belief in the unconscious, and then the other was the idea of free association as a clinical technique. So these were, like, two key ideas that he came up with at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century that really distinguished him from his colleagues who were who were much more kind of focused on the brain, let's say like neuroanatomy.
- [05:20]
Kate Lister
Did he invent, discover the subconscious? Was he the first person to come up with this idea that there is something going on below the surface?
- [05:31]
Carolyn Law Bender
No, he didn't. He didn't at all. Even the word unconscious, and that's an important little distinction that Freudl insists on throughout his career. Unconscious, not subconscious. But like even the unconscious as a word had been in existence for at least a hundred years. There's like, yeah, there's great writing on the Romantic's belief in the unconscious. Philosophers use of the unconscious, but they meant it in like a very different way than he meant it. So like what Freud did was sort of systematized the unconscious. And when I say like subconscious versus unconscious, the reason that we make that distinction is like a sub gives the idea of a space like it's below something, like it's hiding underneath the surface. And Freuda thought of the unconscious as like a process, not like a space so much. So he always was really active in insisting that it was something like unconscious rather than subconscious. It's all a bit nuanced, but he didn't invent the idea. Like a lot of his great ideas, he sort of picked them up from his collaborators, his colleagues, the literature around him. But what he always did was he sort of redescribed them or sort of reinvented them in a way that became utterly unique to him.
- [06:35]
Kate Lister
Like him or loathe him. And many people feel strongly both ways. That is a big deal to come up when you think about how we understand the psyche today and all the work that's been done in psychoanalysis and therapy and all this stuff that to someone to actually come along and go there is an unconscious, that's huge.
- [06:56]
Carolyn Law Bender
Absolutely. I mean, you know, with Freud I'm both a like him and a loath him. I'm sort of a love him and a loathe them creature. Oh, very much so. I don't think that there's a way you can be like a feminist and a queer theorist and not have a really ambivalent relationship with Freud. I've spent a lot of my career kind of teasing out exactly what that relationship is. But yeah, he's. For all of his faults and flaws, of which there were many, he was an incredible thinker. An incredible thinker of his generation for sure. And that, you know, that's like Karl Marx for instance. You can say what you will about his ideas, but they were both incredible, you know, intellectuals of the 19th century.
- [07:32]
Kate Lister
So before we get on to his, well, some of his theories and the work that he did, we should do a bit of a background on him because I don't know very much about him at all. Where did he even come from?
- [07:41]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, so Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856. So he was very much. He sort of transitioned from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. He lived until 1939. And he lived almost all of his life in the city that he both loved and hated, Vienna. So he was Austrian. He was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire at the time. He came from a kind of complicated family background himself. His mother was his father's third wife and she ended up being closer in age to some of his siblings than to his own father. So there's all kinds of complexity in his own family background, but he grew up pretty middle class. He grew up as the academic star of his family for sure. He always had his own bedroom, despite the fact that he had six other siblings in the house. They all had to share. One of the best stories that kind of shows how like prioritized Sigmund was within his family house growing up was that he had his own bedroom. And as a teenager he was like studying for exams, studying for exams. And all of a sudden his sister Anna downstairs is playing the piano. And Freud hates music. He never comes around to it in his life, he hates it. So he gets really bothered by the sound of Anna playing the piano and he complains to his parents. It's like a 14 year old, you know, kid. And all of a sudden the piano is vanished from the household. Within a week, it just disappears from the household. So tell, like how much his parents valued his academic future, his academic career. He became proficient in like eight languages. By the time he'd finished university, he was really a star of classics and he thought he was going to go into law when he was a university student, but he ended up becoming a medical researcher who worked on like the spinal cords of fishes and eels and then found his way from that into what would become psychoanalysis. So he was always very gifted, but he never really saw himself becoming a doctor, let alone a kind of, you know, a founder of an intellectual movement that, that all came later.
- [09:40]
Kate Lister
And when he's working, when he's writing, this is such an interesting time when it comes to the study of sexology, but also the study of what would go on to become psychoanalysis, because there's some crazy ideas going round at this point in the late 19th into the early 20th centuries. People are saying stuff that it's not that no one said it before, but like, it's so radical, people saying maybe gay people aren't evil, things like that, like for the first time. And he's kind of fitting right into that.
- [10:10]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah. Sexology was one of the most important contexts for some of Freud's most interesting ideas, in my opinion, which are around sexuality. My view about Freud is that he was a theorist of sexuality and of sex and the libido. And these were some of his major and most kind of stalwart contributions to psychology, was insisting on the centrality of sex in the mind, in our lives, all of that. And sexology was a really important intellectual and political context for him. So just to give some background in the 19th century, because I'm sure, you know, many people don't spend their free time reading through the sexology of that period, sexuality, homosexuality in particular. But many forms of what they would the time called perversion were criminalized throughout the 19th century. So it was a criminal offense, for instance, to commit an act of what was described as sodomy. Sodomy was a pretty capacious category at that time. And it could have been used to describe lots of different acts. Sexual acts, let's say. Yeah, it was a criminal offense. And so sexologists, who were really varied about their own backgrounds, some of them were anthropologists, some of them were activists and social reformers, some were scientists, some were legal scholars. What they were doing was they were rethinking the idea of sexuality and the quote unquote, perversions. One of the most important terms for Freud and for sexologists working on what we now call homosexuality at the time was a concept they called inversion, which is, again, it's what we now mean when we say homosexuality. But we actually didn't start using that word as a culture until the 1910s, something like that. Lots of early, even gay rights activists didn't like the word homosexuality, hilariously, not for any reasons you might assume, but because it as a word blended Latin and Greek together. And they thought it was monstrous for. Because of its lexical, you know, it's lexical combination. So they were against the. As a word, they preferred the word inversion. But at the time, they were starting to think what they were doing was like making essentially a legal argument for the right of homosexuals to not be imprisoned, like Oscar Wilde was during Freud's own lifetime. Right. Like to not be imprisoned for criminal offenses for acts of sodomy on the basis that homosexuality was A medical category, right? Inversion. It was this inversion of the sexual instinct, as they were describing it at the time. And so it's very pathologizing discourse in some ways, to think of homosexuality in our contemporary way as like a medical pathology. Everybody would be like, oh, you know, that's a. That's an incredibly homophobic and pathologizing way of thinking about sexuality. But at their own time, it was their attempt to not have it be a jailable offense. Right? Like, if it's a medical category, it's not something you can control. It's not something that you've chosen volitionally. It's not a sin even. It's a disease. Right? These were the debates that were happening around the year, you know, 1890 into. Into about 1900, when Freud was developing some of his most significant ideas around sexuality. And he starts writing this book called Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, which is actually on my shelf right behind me. But he begins developing these ideas in around 1900, and then they culminate in the publication of three essays on a theory of sexuality in 1905. And essentially what this book does is it takes existing sexological theory at the time, this idea of inversion, this idea that homosexuality is a medical category, and it turns it all on its head. So Freud begins by thinking that the sexual instinct itself is entirely untethered from any objects in the world, meaning any other bodies. At the time, people thought that the sexual instinct was definitionally heterosexual. Like, you're born with the sexual instinct, like a kind of, you know, like an animal instinct, definitionally heterosexual. It's tied to members of the other sex. And so the idea of inversion is. It's like if you're attracted to members of the same sex as you, then it's an inverted instinct. Freud's like, all instincts are the same. You know, the. It's. It's simply that different. We attach to different objects in the world, meaning that everybody's equal in their sexuality. It sounds like a small idea at the time, but this was an uproarious suggestion, one that totally redefined the way we think about sexuality, because it means that sexuality comes from internally, and it's just only kind of tangentially attached to the external world. There's nothing natural or innate about being attracted to one gender or the other gender. And at various points, Freud even says that a problem that we as a culture need to attend to is the exclusivity of heterosexual people's fixation on the opposite sex. Because if the idea is, if this entity, this Instinct is sort of like. And this is what he calls the libido. If this could attach to anything, then thinking about it kind of rationally, as he would say, right. It's just as much as of a problem that heterosexuals are so exclusively focused on the opposite sex as homosexuals being exclusively focused on the same sex. So he was decades, if not centuries ahead of his time in this suggestion about sexuality. And this is where you get, you know, Freud gets a really bad reputation around femininity, which is well earned, and we'll. We'll talk about that, I'm sure. But when it comes to his views on sexuality and the libido and homosexuality, he never once said that gays and lesbians were pathological. He never once said that they should be certainly incarcerated or that it was a medical disease. All throughout the end of his career, he insisted that homosexuality was no disease, no sin, no vice, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. He pointed out that great artists and intellectuals like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, you know, arguably Shakespeare, had homosexual inclinations. And he even said that if we think about the unconscious and its links to sexuality, it was the case that we had. This is a direct quote from him in three essays. We have all made a homosexual object choice in our unconscious. Meaning that, I mean, to use the parlance of today, everybody's a little bit gay, right? Like, we've all been homosexual.
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Kate Lister
Look how early he was there.
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Carolyn Law Bender
Absolutely. He was an early kind of queer theorist, if you want to think about it that way. He didn't fully understand sometimes the implications of what he was saying, but he absolutely said, we have all made a homosexual object choice in our unconscious. We've all transgressed in our minds.
- [16:56]
Kate Lister
See, that's light years ahead. But can I ask a question that I shouldn't really ask? Because as someone who studies sex, I get asked this question a lot and it kind of always irritates me. It's the question about your own sex life of, like, what is going on in your own sex life to make you want to research this? But with Freud in particular, I don't know anything about his personal life. Was he married? Was he a gay person himself? Was he swinging from the rafters in fireman's helmet and a wetsuit, all in the name of research. What was he doing that kind of led him to where he was?
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Carolyn Law Bender
So Sigmund Freud led an incredibly conventional life according to every biography that's ever been written about him. So after he finishes his kind of medical studies or during his medical studies, he falls in love with a woman and has only ever been in love with a one woman that we know of named Martha Bernays, who is living in Hamburg at the time. He falls very head over heels in love with her, but he's too poor to get married so he's got to like bide his time for four or five years as he's establishing his career so that he has enough money to get married. And then he and Martha get married in 1896 and they pretty swiftly have six kids in eight years.
- [18:06]
Kate Lister
Oh Martha, Wow. Okay.
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Carolyn Law Bender
A true champion Martha.
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Kate Lister
Real champ Martha. Way to power through.
- [18:15]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah. After that they have no more children. And what Freud writes about that is that it's because they stop having sex. So from about 1895, which is when his last child is born, Anna Freud, from about 1895 on, Freud is more or less celibate and Freud doesn't die till 1939. So you can do the math on exactly how long that is. But it's a good span of his adult life. And he kind of alludes to maybe little interludes with Martha, but really more or less celibate throughout his life. And he lives in Vienna in his one house, 19 Bergasse for until 1938. He lives with, you know, he raises his six children, he lives with Martha. The only kind of mar, if you will, on this kind of perfect middle class, bourgeois heterosexual life is rumors about his relationship with his sister in law, Minna Bernays, who moves in with the family fairly soon after he and Martha get married. Now my kind of preface to this is that it wasn't super uncommon at the time for extended families to live together for years, decades. It's only a post war invention really that we. It's like a nuclear family set up in a single house. Minna never gets married herself. By all accounts she's like the more intellectual sister of the two, Martha and Minna Bernane. And she moves in with the freuds. Yeah, in 1896 I believe it is. And she lives with the Freuds for the rest of their life. For the rest of her life. This becomes interesting and a little kind of gossipy because while Martha Freud's wife is raising these children, tending to the home, making lunch, ordering Freud his cigars, doing all of this domestic labor in the background, unpaid domestic labor. That's the condition of possibility for Freud's great adventurous intellectual life. She's not really talking to Freud about his ideas. She sometimes thinks that his ideas are quote unquote pornographic. So she doesn't really concern herself with Freud's theories, but her sister Minna does. So Minna becomes Freud's intellectual companion, if you will. Through the early 1900s, all the way through to the end, Freud and her have long conversations. They take holidays, sometimes unaccompanied holidays together.
- [20:40]
Kate Lister
See, that's slightly more convincing that one. That would have raised an eyebrow at the time, I think. And I think actually that would today raise an eyebrow if your mate was like, I'm going on holiday. You're going all right with the missus? No, no, with the Mrs. Sister. Yeah, it would, wouldn't it? That would be. It's a weird one.
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Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, it's. Yes.
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Kate Lister
What do you think? Do you think they were.
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Carolyn Law Bender
Oh, gosh. Personally, I don't know. I sort of don't think so. And more than that, I think I'm a little suspicious of the rumor because first circulated by one of Freud's, I always think of them as his former boyfriends. But it was one of his disciples named Carl Jung, who's the founder of analytic psychology, who Freud had a big falling out with. From, like 1912 to 1914, he and Jung stopped speaking. It was bitter fracture. And Jung, they never forgave each other. Right. Like. And Freud has a bunch of these fallouts with his male disciples, breakups, if you will. Freud was heterosexual consciously throughout his life, but he had these attachments to men that ended disastrously. And I mean, I'm talking about, you know, tens to dozens of them. And Carl Jung was one of the bitterest of them. And so Jung was the one that popularized this idea in the 1950s. So there's some element of, like, you know, how much can you trust the gossip coming from your ex mate? You know, who you've. Who you've had a bit of a falling out with. But the most, I think the most.
- [22:03]
Kate Lister
Did they share a bedroom?
- [22:05]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, they did. I was going to say the most interesting thing about the setup in the Freud household was that, again, not uncommon for people to be living together, extended family members, et cetera. What was a bit more uncommon was that if you visit the Freud Museum in Vienna now, which was the original house that Freud and Martha and their children and Minna all lived in, you can see Freud's original bedroom. And it's only by going through Freud and Martha's bedroom that you can access Minna's bedroom. So her bedroom is like an annexed room off of the back of Freud and Martha's bedroom, meaning every time she needed to go to her own bedroom, she had to pass through Freud in Martha's bedroom. I don't know what that means.
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Kate Lister
It wouldn't stand up in a court a lot, would it? But that's an odd setup.
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Carolyn Law Bender
It's unusual for sure. Yeah. And Freud never commented on it, but he did once sign himself and Minna into a hotel in Switzerland as Mr. And Mrs. Freud.
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Kate Lister
Oh, did he?
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Carolyn Law Bender
He did.
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Kate Lister
I'll be back with Carolyn and Freud after this short break.
- [23:19]
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Carolyn Law Bender
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- [24:29]
Kate Lister
Is there anything on record as to what Martha thought about him? Because, like, I'm just like, trying to put myself in a position of like, okay, it's your husband. You're having sex with your husband until they're not. But he might write about it like, you're gonna have sex with somebody who's gonna put it in a book and then use this as a determining feature for the future of psychosexual analysis. That's a lot of pressure on Martha.
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Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah. You know, Martha's an interesting figure in the history of psychoanalysis because, you know, insofar as I, in a lot of my work, I adopt a feminist approach to thinking about kind of historiography. It was only because of Martha that Freud was able to be who he was able to be. Right. It's Martha's invisible labor of women. Indeed. Her unseen, unrecognized, constant, and by all accounts, very fastidious, prompt. She's a little bit frugal, but she's very organized as a background carer of the household. She makes sure that Fred gets his lunches. She makes sure that the cigars that he smokes. Smokes like 20 a day of are constantly replenished. She's the invisible force behind Freud's intellectual thought powerhouses. The way that he's able to work, which for Freud was incredible, he was an incredible workhorse. He would get up at 7 every morning. He would see patients from 8 in the morning until noon. He would take a break for lunch from 1 to 2pm, have a walk from 2 to 3pm, see patients from 3 to 9pm and then only then start writing his correspondence and all of his many papers from 9pm to 1 in the morning. Then he would go to bed, sleep until seven, press repeat. He did this six days a week for the entirety of his life. He never took a break except summer holidays when he went walking in Vienna. He was a formidable worker and he oftentimes said that the two main attributes of health were the ability to love and the ability to work. And he certainly had a huge capacity for the latter. But it was to return to Martha. How was he able to do this? How was he able to be so focused on his work? How was he able to raise six children while keeping up this work schedule? It was because of Martha. It was because of the kind of the environment of care that she provided the family with. And that's, you know, been very ill recognized in a lot of psychoanalytic history. It's the hero. And then Martha disappears into the background.
- [26:56]
Kate Lister
How do you go about starting to see. Because now, like, rightly, there is rigorous training and qualifications that you have to have to be able to start treating somebody in a therapeutic way. Did he have any of that, like the confidence of this man to kind of go one? Well, I'm supposed to be studying fish spines, but I'm gonna do a slight detour and I'm gonna start researching psychosexuality and I'm gonna take on patience as well. Like that takes some chutzpah, doesn't it?
- [27:28]
Carolyn Law Bender
Absolutely. Freud did not lack for confidence either. You know, thinking back to his upbringing and the way his. Yeah, the way his parents treated him. He was always exceptionalized. He always expected great things from himself. And he certainly was not one to question himself. Let's say sometimes it would have benefited him more to question himself. But yeah, especially in conflicts with some of his followers, his disciples. He was very committed to the validity of his own belief. Beliefs. But how he starts kind of thinking about psychoanalysis as distinct from like, you know, neuroanatomy, which is what he was doing at the time. Like the idea that our traumas. Right. That at the time he was working on hysteria, that this idea of hysteria comes from brain trauma. This was the dominant view at the time. Either that it was hereditary, you know, you passed it down through your body to your children, or that it was like a kind of anatomical lesion, it was a trauma, it was a physiological thing. So he's working on this idea of hysteria in the 19th century, right before he begins to develop psychoanalysis. And what he comes to increasingly think about is that it's not physical, it's purely mental. And, you know, that sounds like a very familiar idea to us now, but Freud really invents this idea that there is a purity of mental suffering disconnected from the mind or from the brain, as like a physical entity, right? So he's starting to think about trauma in a purely mental way, as about experience hysteria as a kind of suffering that's entirely unrelated to like a bang on the head or something they used to call railway spine, or like all these different kinds of physiological lesions. And he starts thinking about it as something to do purely with, with the way that we process things psychologically. He comes to this very modern.
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Kate Lister
To me, that sounds very modern and very familiar.
- [29:18]
Carolyn Law Bender
Hugely, hugely. So this is how he gets the idea of the quote unquote talking cure, which was actually not a phrase he used, it was a phrase of one of his colleague's patients. Her pseudonym and the case study that was written about her is Anna O. Her real name is Bertha Poppenheim and she was a patient of his, mentor, of Freud's mentor, Josef Breuer. And it's this idea of the talking cure that becomes characteristic of psychoanalysis and now has, you know, was the basis of all the talking therapies we have now all talking therapies. And there are many, many, many, many of them that are different from psychoanalysis, but they owe an original debt back to this one patient. Not just it's not Freud, it's not even Freud's colleague, it's a patient who becomes herself a quite vocal philanthropist and activist after she goes through some traumatic experiences with Josef Breuer. But Freud develops these ideas that he's working on in part through seeing these hysterical patients and starting to think, wow, maybe the trauma isn't physical, but he also develops it through his own self analysis, which is a process he carries out from like 1896 to 1900 or so. He publishes it as a book called the Interpretation of Dreams. In that book you have a bunch of Freud's own dreams. And basically what he's doing in this is he's dreaming at night. He comes up with psychoanalysis by dreaming. There's no other way to put it. He's dreaming, dreaming at night, and he's writing his dreams down and what he calls free associating to them. At the beginning of this, we kind of. I mentioned that free association was one of the key characteristics of psychoanalysis. What he means by this is like, he's thinking about the dream as like, little parts and all of the associations that those little parts can call up. And he will go on for sometimes 19, 20 pages for a dream that took up no more than a paragraph. Right. He's following this chain of associations anywhere and everywhere it'll take him. But it's through his own process of self analysis as a form of writing, interestingly, that he begins to come up with what becomes psychoanalysis as a form of talking cure. And it's Bertha Pappenheim or Anna O. That names it this.
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Kate Lister
Well, thank you, Anna. Oh, now you've mentioned a couple of times now that he has a history of falling out with his mates. And I'm very curious. What do you have to do to fall out with Freud? Like, where are the boundaries? Who was he falling out with and what was it about?
- [31:44]
Carolyn Law Bender
So sometimes with Freud you didn't have to do very much to fall out with him. Sometimes you had to do a lot, but sometimes you didn't have to do very much. In his autobiography, Freud once wrote that he, throughout his life, he always found the great need for a friend and an enemy. And what was true throughout his life was that the distance between a friend and an enemy sometimes was just a matter of time. Right. Like he would turn some of his closest friends into his enemy, sometimes quickly, sometimes after 10 years. But it was a common trajectory that they took.
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Kate Lister
So it's coming, basically.
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Carolyn Law Bender
It's coming.
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Kate Lister
It's coming.
- [32:21]
Carolyn Law Bender
It was hard for him to have long loyalty to friends. Most of these fallings out were over intellectual differences. Some of them were personal, but most of them were over intellectual disagreements and differences. Some of the people that he fell out with was his original mentor named Josef Brewer, who I just mentioned. Freud got very petty with him. One of the things that feature into their eventual fallout was that brewer was like 20 years older than Freud when he was like a struggling med student. And Brewer lent Freud some money. So he like did a good deed. And then Freud got pretty surly that Brewer wouldn't let him pay back the money. And this was one of the features of their, of their falling out, but they disagreed about the role of sexuality in what they called neurosis or. Or kind of human suffering, let's say. Then there was Wilhelm Fleiss, who was like one of Freud's closest collaborators when he was coming up with the ideas of psychoanalysis, the unconscious in particular. Freud would write impassioned letters to Fleiss that began with things like, my beloved Fleiss, you have such. Had such a great impact on me, right? Really effusive, almost romantic language. And he and Fleiss were kind of in daily correspondence. He would tell Fleiss how much he missed him, how much he relied on his correspondence, how much he was his only true intellectual companion, right? Like this kind of very, again, romantic language around their friendship.
- [33:45]
Kate Lister
Imagine waking up to that as a voice note of just like, you know, someone you were working with. That would. It would be terrifying. Was it reciprocated, though? Did he get letters back going, God, yeah, you're brilliant, too?
- [33:56]
Carolyn Law Bender
Very much so. Very much so. I mean, by all accounts, you know, Fleiss and Freud were kind of. They had an intellectual love affair. Freud was again, he was heterosexual, consciously, but he would be the first to acknowledge that these relationships with men, these passionate relationships with men, drew on a deep reserve of homosexual unconscious homosexual energy, right? That this was pulling from something in the unconscious for him. Because the way that he would fall out with these men was not just like, you know, we disagree and that's okay. It was like, you know, you're dead to me and I'm not ever gonna. I'm not gonna correspond with you ever again. So you have Wilhelm Fleiss, and then you have some people who become significant figures in the history of psychology in their own right. So Alfred Adler and Freud disagreed about the role of aggression in human life. And Freud expels Adler on that basis. And Adler goes off and founds his own kind of individual psychology. He, Freud and Carl Jung disagree about kind of what Freud calls the libido, again, about sexuality and whether there's just one sexual libido in the mind. And then Jung breaks off and founds his own kind of analytic psychology school. So throughout his life, he's got many of these kind of breakdowns that are about psychoanalysis, but they're also about something more personal for Freud, right? He needs a friend and an enemy, even if that means sometimes that he has to invent his own enemy.
- [35:19]
Kate Lister
God, wow. I mean, he sounds intense, doesn't he? One of the areas where a lot of people start to go, all right, Freud, why don't you just Take a few seats over there and we'll just rethink. This one is his theories about women in particular. He seems to. It's like we're with him up to like, oh, it's very clever. There's a subconscious. That's very good. Oh, talking cure. That's very good too. Trauma as being not something physical. That's very good. And then penis envy.
- [35:46]
Carolyn Law Bender
Freud.
- [35:47]
Kate Lister
Pardon? What was that? Like what, what are some of the things he says about. About women and why are they so controversial even today?
- [35:55]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, I mean, I'm willing to agree that they're more than just controversial. Freuds has some outright misogynistic ideas. They're a little bit more complicated than oftentimes, like what's painted in popular culture and stuff. But he was a creature of his time in some ways and many of his ideas did bear the mark of that, you know, that sexism, that misogyny. But the way that I like to kind of explain Freud's theory of femininity, which is problematic, but his whole kind of understanding of psychosexual development, if you will, is through by talking about the Oedipus complex, which is again, one of these big terms that you oftentimes hear, like the ego, which is associated with Freud and, you know, gets a lot of traffic in popular culture, even in TV and movies and stuff. So in the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is Freud's way of describing sort of how we become socialized as sexual beings. Right? Like, how does our sexuality go from this like instinctual thing in our bodies, which for Freud, he would describe it in children as polymorphously perverse, meaning that it was like freewheeling, right? It was like, like sexuality for children was. Is like. Children are fascinated by their bodies. They're fascinated by, you know, excrement, they're bad smells. They're very licentious creatures in some ways. So it's disorganized. Their sexuality is very disorganized. And Freud is like, I don't know.
- [37:16]
Kate Lister
What it is, but they are. They're very physical little things, but they don't, they don't have an adult understanding of it.
- [37:22]
Carolyn Law Bender
An absolutely non. Adult, non genital understanding of their bodies and pleasure. Right. Entirely disorganized. Their understanding of sexuality is like nothing near our own. So Freud begins to ask himself the question of, like, well, how does sexuality get organized into this like genital adult reproductive form that we recognize it in now? How is sexual orientation even produced? And it's produced by this mechanism called the Oedipus complex, which when I describe it, I like to tell it as a little story. So the story goes a little something like this. Mommy has had a child, and we can call him Johnny. And for the first few years of Johnny's life, Johnny is being cared for primarily by Mommy. And Johnny's like, this is great. Johnny and Mommy are going around like bank gangbusters. Johnny's having a fantastic time with Mommy. He becomes increasingly attached to Mommy as a result of all of the care that she provides him with. And it's like things are going real smooth between Johnny and Mommy. Johnny even starts to feel like, hey, this Mommy lady, she's a good one. Maybe I make her my wife, right? And you see, you hear little children, they don't know what it means, but they'll say, you know, like, I want to marry Mommy. You'll hear little. Little kids say things like this all the time. So. And this is, like, this is a mark of the attachment between the mother or any primary caregiver and the child. And so Freud says that this happens for the first few years of the child's life, right? It's Johnny and Mommy. And Johnny's having a great time and things are all going very well for him. And then all of a sudden, this motherfucker called Daddy comes on the scene. And Daddy is no good news for Johnny. Daddy's been in the background for a while. And again, let's remember that this is the 19th century. We've got clear gender divisions of labor. This is all very heterosexual, right? But, like, right, so Daddy's been sort of in the background. He's been doing his work, he's been providing for the family, but he's not really been featuring very much in Johnny's life. He's like, you know, he's a background character. He's supporting. He's a supporting act. But all of a sudden, when the child is between, like, 3 to 5 years old, daddy becomes a more forceful presence in Johnny's life. Daddy starts to intercede into the union of Johnny and Mommy. Daddy starts to say things like, no, you can't keep sleeping with Mommy all the time. Mommy's mine. Or, no, don't touch yourself. This is the most kind of, like, crass version. No, you can't touch yourself in front of Mommy. That's not okay. If you touch yourself, I'm going to cut it off. I'm going to cut your penis off. Because in the story that Freud tells, the child is always male. So Daddy becomes This threatening and even violent figure. I don't mean that he's hitting the child. I mean that it's a psychic violence, right? The threat. The threat of castration. But the symbolic takeaway here is just that the father interrupts this happy union between Johnny and Mommy. The father sort of issues an ultimatum to Johnny. He says, emotionally, even. He says something like, you have to give up Mommy as your primary love or I'm gonna castrate you. But symbolically, it'd be like, I'm gonna harm you in some way, right? There's a threat here. You have to do this. You have to give up Mommy. Otherwise there's some bad thing that's gonna happen to you. A spanking, let's say something like this. This produces a real anxious situation for little Johnny, who's like, he loves Mommy. Mommy's his, right? Like, he's grown up his whole little life thinking he and Mommy are the teens. And now this guy, Daddy's like, no, you can't be with Mommy anymore. This is a big moment for the child because he's never really had to lose anything before, right? His possession of Mommy is pretty exclusive. So this is the Oedipus complex for Freud, right? And this is a moment where the child enters a deep crisis because he's got two alternatives. Either he can hang on to Mommy and he risks this violence from Daddy, or he can give up Mommy, the great love of his life, and cede to his father's law, what Jacques Lacan calls the law of the father, cede to authority in a social. Like, the prohibition against incest is like a founding mandate of civil society. He can accept this mandate, which Levi Strauss, the anthropologist, talks about, and move out into society, but he's gotta leave Mommy behind. This is a situation that children find themselves in kind of emotionally, they're never really conscious of it, but it's about loss, and it's about having to accept social regulations on what you can and can't do in public, on who you can and can't love. This sort of thing. And move into a kind of wider social contract the child experiences. This is a really, really deep crisis for it. It's like, you know, Johnny's like, I can't do either one. I've got a lot of anxiety. I'm really. I love Daddy, but at the same time, I'm afraid of him. And I love Mommy and I can't let her go. And this becomes a crisis for the child, that the child lingers in for a while. Freud says, and this is where we get back to femininity and some of his more problematic claims about women. But Freud says that the child lingers in this oedipal dilemma until eventually he catches sight of the female genitals. So he catches sight of a little girl's vagina, maybe even his mother's vagina, the female genitalia in general. And suddenly, and this is again, this is Freud's story, not mine. I will debate it with him. But suddenly the little boy recognizes that castration is real. He sees the little girl's genitals, and he suddenly recognizes that there are creatures in the world without a penis. Freud thinks that this essentially accounts to the child going, oh, my God, Daddy can do it. Daddy's done it to other people, right? Like, look, you. You can be castrated.
- [43:02]
Kate Lister
I'm still with you until this. Now it's kind of now we're off, aren't we?
- [43:06]
Carolyn Law Bender
We?
- [43:09]
Kate Lister
Okay, all right. So castration's featuring very heavily.
- [43:12]
Carolyn Law Bender
Continue. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're off in the Woo. Woo. I agree entirely. This view that castration is possible suddenly settles the matter for Johnny. Johnny's like, fuck it. It's not worth the risk, right? Like, if daddy's got this kind of power, I will let. I will accept daddy's law. I will let daddy have mommy. I will find my own way. So the child represses the love for the mother or the love for any primary caregiver represses it. It becomes unconscious, indeed. This is sort of how the unconscious is formed in Freud's early understandings of it. And then he moves his desire out into the world in search of a new object when eventually puberty kind of takes over, and this becomes a purely sexual desire. This is how sexuality kind of gets organized for Freud in the body. This is how sexuality gets organized, certainly into sexual identity, but as you, like, rightly picked up on right away. And as you know, when I'm teaching this stuff, my students are like, wait. It really hinges on the idea that female sexuality is like castration, to use some of Freud's other famous language about it. It's loss, it's mutilation, it's lack, it's inferiority. These are all direct quotes from Freud's actual writings about female sexuality. So it casts female sexuality both in bioanatomy, but also in a psychic way, as inferiority, plain and simple, as loss, as lack. He describes it at some point as a dark continent, which, you know, is interestingly racialized as well. So he's got a view. He kind of continues A view of women and female sexuality that really participates in a long standing sexist logic discourse where whatever. That's well established in the west at the time.
- [45:02]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Carolyn and Freud after this short break.
- [45:13]
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- [45:41]
Carolyn Law Bender
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- [46:19]
Kate Lister
He plays into a narrative that he didn't invent this. This goes right back to when we were first scrolling on walls, I'm sure, is that the vagina isn't a sex organ in its own right, with its own instructions and its own pleasures. What he sees it as is an absence of a penis. That seems to underpin quite a lot of his theories, which is that lack thing that you want. Is that where his penis envy theory comes from is that we're all thinking, God, I wish I had one of them.
- [46:51]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yes. I mean, I think that you pretty accurately captured some of. Yeah, some of the way Freud thinks about it, which is as lack as loss. So in this account that Freud is giving, he begins, and most of his writings continue to talk about the little boy. He doesn't talk about Johnny. That's just my personification, if you will. He always speaks from the position of the male child. And everything is, as feminist philosopher Helene Cessou describes it, phallocentric. Right? It's all focused on the penis. Everything is about, do you have a penis? Don't you have a penis? The penis is, you know, your access to social power. It's the only genital organ that's visible, that's recognizable, et cetera, et cetera. All of this very overtly sexist and misogynistic language. And so where the idea of penis envy comes from, and this is a Freudian idea, unlike Some of the ideas that. That get misattributed to him, like the Electra complex, that is not a Freudian idea. Penis envy is. He says that women have penis envy. And what he means by this is that little girls also recognize the power and the importance of the penis, and they recognize that they do not have it. And he believes that this causes a kind of physical, if you will, envy. If you want to give Freud the benefit of the doubt, or if you want to think about how this theory is useful beyond its sort of, of sexist reduction of women's sexuality to just a penis or not a penis or whatever, the way to do it is to think about the penis as a symbol. It's not really about whether or not you have this material organ attached to your body. And this is an argument that will be made by one of his French interpreters, Jacques Lacan. It's not really about the flesh, right? What it's about is how the flesh connects to social power. So Lacan reinterprets Freud's work, thinking about not the penis, but the fowl. And the phallus is a symbolic representation of masculine power in patriarchy. So what this means is like, you know, little girls and little boys pick up on the fact that little boys get treated very differently than little girls do in a patriarchal society. Even the way that we describe children's, like, activity levels and accomplishments, all of this is very gendered language. And children are astute observers, astute little anthropologists of power and who gets special privileges and what sorts of privileges they get, et cetera. So the phallus becomes a representation for the child of the ability to access patriarchal masculine power. And so if you think about penis, mad, yeah, indeed, there's a way to understand it less anatomically that's about the unequal distribution of power in patriarchy. And this is the way that a lot of his feminist reinterpreters, and Freud does have stalwart defenders who are feminists. A scholar named Juliet Mitchell will describe Freud as providing one of the best, not recommendations for a patriarchy, but one of the best descriptions of it. What she means by that is that Freud gives us a really comprehensive account of what happens to women who are raised within a patriarchy. The kinds of psychic manipulations and torsions that people who are raised as CIS women go through in a patriarchal society. So what she says, her interpretations, interpretation is Freud isn't recommending this, right? This is Juliet Mitchell's argument. This isn't Freud's recommending it. He's not prescribing this. He's not saying that this is the way that women should feel. He's saying that this is what happens to women who are not, for instance, granted social recognition and social power. And really importantly, one of the things that Juliet Mitchell's picking up on here is the fact that Freud's patients, many of whom he was seeing in the 1890s into the 1920s, were described as, quote, unquote, hysterics. Many of them were women, and many of them were women who were themselves really disempowered and dispossessed of any kind of social role. So they were young women who were kind of promised a better life, but who somehow ended up as nursemaids, as carers, as providers of emotional care for their family, especially ailing members of their family. And then they too, started to get sick. So if you kind of think about it as a social equation, what it tells us is that, you know, there's this envied item, if you will. You can call it the phallus if you want, but it's a representation of patriarchal power, which in a patriarchy, many people want access to. And it's not. It doesn't have to as much to do with the bioanatomy of the organs. Freud. Freud was about the anatomy of the organs. It's just, you know, this is a way of understanding it that takes the value of his ideas without some of the more sexist attributes of them.
- [51:36]
Kate Lister
The one point, though, that I think that. That people are gonna struggle to try and reclaim from that and to say that. No, no, no, that's not what he meant. It's actually feminist. Was his ideas about clitoral and vaginal orgasms. If I had him in a room, I'd hit him with a chair, quite frankly, for that one, because I don't even think that was like the main thrust, for want of a better word of his research. It was just like a little thing.
- [51:59]
Carolyn Law Bender
What a good pun.
- [52:00]
Kate Lister
That he did. But his ideas about how clitoral orgasms were psychologically immature and vaginal orgasms are the way to. To go, that set in motion a whole load of wank that we're still unpicking to this. To this very day. And I just. Freud. Oh, my God.
- [52:16]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Freud, you know, in these psychosexual stages, oral, anal, phallic, genital, which are some of the few things that make their way into psychology textbooks, they're not the most interesting part of Freud, if you ask me. But this is one of the things that you could find in a psychology textbook, perhaps, in Freud's understanding of this like, progression, if you will, of sexuality through the human body. Oral, anal, phallic, genital. He thinks about phallic sexuality as something that children of both sexes, that they both share. So phallic sexuality is located with the penis and then in girls with the clitoris. And as you're rightly pointing out, he thinks that when girls mature into women and kind of adopt a true feminine attitude, this sexuality changes into what he calls genital or vaginal. And this is his kind of belief that women's sexual pleasure becomes eventually vaginal rather than clitoral. I think you're right. There's no real reclaiming that. It's a legacy of its time. I don't find it particularly useful or necessary.
- [53:19]
Kate Lister
He wasn't the only one saying that stuff at the time. There was other people. It was sort of in the mix. Definitely.
- [53:26]
Carolyn Law Bender
Yeah, absolutely. With Freud, there's a couple ways to think about him. One is that there are many different frameworks. Frederick Freud's many different versions of him. He wrote copiously throughout his life, thousands and thousands of pages, sometimes thousands per year. So in this excess of writing, you have lots of different of his ideas, some of which contradict each other. So you've got lots of different versions of Freud. Do you want to go with the Freud who's a queer liberator, or the Freud who's kind of a normative developmentalist? Do you want to go with the Freud who's a racist or the Freud who's a kind of great defender of racial difference? Do you want to go with the Freud who's a sexist or the Freud who's kind of describing a patriarchy? There are different ways of interpreting him. Be that as it may, I don't think all of Freud's ideas need to be recuperated. Right. We don't need to hang on to this idea of like, clitoral versus vaginal orgasms. And so there are elements of his work that are just products of his own thinking or products of the time. And, yeah, there's no reason that I guess they need to be carried forward.
- [54:26]
Kate Lister
Carolyn, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for telling us about this fascinating and very complex human being. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
- [54:39]
Carolyn Law Bender
I'm currently working on a book on Freud, actually. It'll be out in the next year or so with Oxford University. Fabulous.
- [54:45]
Kate Lister
Well, Done.
- [54:46]
Carolyn Law Bender
Oh yeah. Thank you. It was never something I intended to do because as we've been talking about Freud's work and is it's so expansive and there's already so much written about Freud. But I was very fortunate to be commissioned by them to write this kind of really slender little introduction to his theories which as you could probably tell from this interview, I tend to like his theories better than biography. So that'll be out in the coming year. My first book is actually on psychoanalysis in a post Freudian way. So I'm looking at the people, many of whom are women, that come after Freud and the kind of legacy of their clinical work. And that's the book title is the Political Clinic Psychoanalysis and Social change in the 20th century.
- [55:25]
Kate Lister
Well, thank you so much for dropping by the betwixt couch. You have been spectacular.
- [55:30]
Carolyn Law Bender
Thank you so much, Kate, for the time. I appreciate it. This was a lot of fun.
- [55:36]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Carolyn for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. We've got a lot coming up in the new year from who was filthier, the Romans or the medieval people to the worst breakups of all time. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtory hit.com this podcast was edited by Tim Arstell and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music, music from Epidemic Sound.
- [56:17]
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Carolyn Law Bender
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