Freud's Women - Softcover

Appignanesi, Lisa; Forrester, John

3.74

43 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892746948 ISBN 13: 9781892746948

Publisher: Other Press LLC, 2001

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Sigmund Freud's ideas permeate our everyday thinking about life, love, gender, the family, and the relation between the sexes. These ideas took on their shape and substance in the same period that "the woman question" became a burning issue. Sometimes championed as a liberator of women, Freud has also been virulently attacked for his theories of the feminine and for elevating his personal prejudices to the height of universal pronouncement.

Freud's Women examines biography, case history, dreams, correspondence, journals, and theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many stories of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salomete Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysis--all these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy.

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Review:

First published in 1992, Freud's Women quickly established itself as an invaluable study of the women who peopled Freud's world--women who, as relatives and friends, patients and disciples, helped him to found the new discipline of psychoanalysis. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester tell a fascinating and complicated story with great flair: Freud's Women is as scholarly as it is readable, moving between biography and theory to chart the intellectual history of psychoanalysis.

As the authors point out at the beginning of this study, when it comes to the "woman question", history has often taken the form of a trial (of Freud, of psychoanalysis). This revised edition of the book stays with the four key themes used to organise the authors' discussion ("The Freud Family Romance", "Inventing Psychoanalysis", "A Woman's Profession", "The Question of Femininity"), concluding with a new "Summing Up" which takes up the recent "assaults" on Freud launched by, amongst others, Frederick Crews and Peter Swales. In the wake of the so-called "Memory Wars"--wars which reopened discussion about the origins of psychoanalysis at the same time as questioning Freud's views on the "reality" of child sexual abuse--the culture of psychoanalysis, its claims to individuality and privacy, have been increasingly under attack.

Against the commonplace that psychoanalysis--as both theory of mind and therapeutic practice--is "in crisis", Appignanesi and Forrester offer a balanced and intelligent account of the vicissitudes of Freud's theory of femininity and the different ways in which "his women"--from 'Dora' to Joan Riviere, from Lou Andreas-Salome to Helene Deutsch--have worked with, and against, that theory to support the insights of a remarkable discipline.--Vicky Lebeau

Book Description:

A groundbreaking book which explores the impact of women on the development of Freud's ideas.

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