A feminist in the shadow of Freud: who would’ve believed that?
It can not be said that the founder of Psychoanalysis was concerned with feminism. Neither in the life, nor in the practice, nor in the work of this intrepid pioneer, is there any sympathy for this movement which nevertheless agitated the spirits of its time. On the contrary, he appears as a resolute macho, even going as far as to base his libidinal theory on the non-existence of the female sex.
Her correspondence with her sweet fiancée Martha shows what he expects of her and all “normal” women: “It is truly a stillborn idea to want to launch women in the struggle for life in the manner of men. For example, if I had to consider my little darling as a competitor, I would end up telling her […] that I love her and that I beg her to withdraw from the competition to take refuge in the calm activity […]. ] from my house […] Perhaps a new education will succeed in removing all the attributes of women … I believe that all legislative and educational reforms would fail because […] Nature decides the destiny of a woman by giving her beauty, charm, and sweetness.” Her five younger sisters benefit from the same injunction. Deprived of artistic and intellectual occupations, they must not be sensitive to the worldly successes and compliments of men. Yet it is they who, by their subaltern work, has allowed the family to survive the famine, while the eldest prolonged pleasure of endless studies. Later Freud complains that his daughter Matilda, reasoning, does not behave like a girl. Three notable exceptions: Lou Andrea Salome, Marie Bonaparte and her daughter Anna Freud, because of their total allegiance, were admitted by Freud to transcend the humble condition of their sex.
We can better understand why, in addition to many other reasons, Freud harbored a particular aversion to his dissident disciple Alfred Adler. The latter, fourteen years his junior, had joined his circle in 1902 and was very active until 1911 when Freud appointed him President of the Society of Psychoanalysis in Vienna. After the breakup, in 1912, Adler writes: “After having begun in life and science by attributing too much value to the abstract male principle, I ended up repelling with serenity taking into account the teachings of real-life all the arguments that have been formulated to prove the inferiority of the woman.”
While Freud had finally married Martha with whom he led bourgeois life in keeping with his conservative ideal, Adler, at the end of the century, married a Russian student close to revolutionary circles; Trotzki was familiar with their home. However, while remaining socialist sensitivity, he soon dropped politics for psychology, especially psychopathology and psychotherapy since he was, above all, a doctor.
His feminist conversion took on a preponderant importance in the development of his innovative doctrine around the central concept of “feeling of inferiority” since he could write in a 1912 work: “One of the facts that my conception of psychology allowed me to underline is the existence of a sense of inferiority more or less conscious in all women because they are women.”
What did he mean by “abstract male principle”?==>“When the curiosity of an individual leads him to seek the difference that exists between the sexes he does not hesitate to give a decisive preference to the male role […] He identifies the feeling of inferiority and its consequences with the feeling Femininity, whence the compensatory tendency which pushes him to introduce in his psychic superstructure elements capable of assuring him of a lasting manhood. It is from this effort that the lush picture of what I call the “virile protest” is born.”
We would like to return this speech to the oblivion of History. Alas, it must be noted that it is always appropriate, at least in a large part of the world, especially for a thousand-year-old civilization from the desert, again in extension and singularly proselyte. And to look more closely, it happens again in our society of egalitarian mixing that a man is called “chick” by another man who wants to stigmatize his cowardice. Just as a courageous woman can be awarded the qualifier (very trivial) of “ballsy”.
In 1933 Adler still made this pessimistic statement: “In the present state of our civilization, women are almost completely excluded from immediate works and only count as parturients, admirers or helpers. They do not participate in the power of philistines of knowledge.”
He makes some surprisingly realistic solutions on this subject, which must have irritated the thinkers of triumphant Nazism! (Fortunately, as a Jew, he had emigrated to America.):
“The extraordinary development of the technology makes superfluous the hands too numerous. The social situation does not encourage continued rapid reproduction. Barriers that limited the ability of women to cultivate their intelligence and exercise their creative power are partially lifted. Technological progress gives men and women more time to learn, to rest, to distract themselves and to take care of the education of their children. With regard to the number of births, the decision will be left to the woman after careful consultation. As for the question of the artificial interruption of a pregnancy, the interests of the mother and the child will be best safeguarded if, apart from a medical decision, a competent psychological counselor is consulted to refute the futile causes invoked in favor of the interruption. On the other hand, a favorable opinion will be granted for valid reasons. In these serious cases, the interruption will be carried out free of charge in a hospital.”
Who would have said that almost a century later such remarks would have resonance as accurate about our modern times!
It is in his work of 1926: Knowledge of Man, that he devotes the most pages to his feminist passion. Cries of the heart and reason of a courageous, lucid man, ahead of his time, and whose audience has unfortunately suffered from the great shadow of Freud, to the point that we forget little by little to his name which was nevertheless known worldwide: “All our institutions, our traditional rules, our laws, our customs, and our usages,” he writes, “testify to the privileged position of man. Legends and tales of all times stigmatize the moral inferiority of the woman: perversity, malice, falsity, inconstancy, are constantly imputed to him.” (He recalls the myth of Eve, the Iliad, the Thousand and One Nights, as well as certain rites and formulas of the three monotheistic religions, not to mention the scientists of the Middle Ages who doubted that woman had a soul). “In all peoples, strong turns of language, anecdotes, proverbs, and good words are overflowing with criticisms belittling the woman by reproaching her for her aggression, her vagueness, her pettiness, her foolishness. The same underestimation is reflected in the lower wages paid to women’s work, whether or not they are of equal value and return equal to that of men.”
Without extending much to the origin of this so-called inferiority of the woman, Adler refers to historical periods where necessarily “the male privilege was not so firm.” He also thinks that “it is in the power of the woman and the fear that she inspires that we must seek the source of the prodigiously magical action that so many myths exert on us.”
“To the prejudice of the natural inferiority of women,” he writes, “the considerable number of women who, in the most varied fields, have given eminent work will be opposed. Conversely, the number of incapable men is so great that the theory of male inferiority could be supported as well. It is from outside that the girl receives the belief in her own inferiority. Such a preconceived error produces as a general effect the training of the two sexes, yet united, in the whirlwind of prestige politics in the presence of which all prospect of happiness disappears.”
“In fact, the whole history of civilization shows us that the subjugation of women and the restrictions they still undergo today are unbearable to a human being and push him to revolt. We must, therefore, keep in mind the difficulties inherent in the psychic development of girls to convince themselves that it would be illusory to wait for a full reconciliation of women with life, with the realities of our civilization and the forms of our culture. life together, as long as it will not guarantee equality with the other sex.”
There is nothing to challenge the goals of the feminist movement to date in the quest for emancipation and equality. On the contrary, we must support it energetically because the happiness and the joy of living for the human race are subordinated to the obtaining of the conditions which allow the woman to be reconciled with her role and to the man the possibility to solve the question of his relationship with the woman. Married life must be a fellowship, a community of work, without superior or inferior. If tentatively, it is still only an ideal, at least it provides us with a standard for measuring our mistakes and our progress.
