Lesbianism

The argument

The case against Freud here is drawn from his own theory rather than from a standard applied to him in retrospect. Freud's own theory states that lesbianism is always the fault of the father and is curable by psychoanalysis. He also held that analysis is an erotic relationship. Taken together, those two beliefs describe a situation in which no father could properly analyse a lesbian daughter: he would be treating a condition he had himself caused, through a relationship he had himself characterised as erotic. His own beliefs that analysis is an erotic relationship and the reasons for lesbianism should therefore have precluded him from analysing Anna — his daughter, his closest intellectual and emotional companion, and a lesbian. It didn't. What followed is the substance of the objection. For six nights a week over several years, he and Anna analyzed and dissected her masturbation fantasies, and he spoke publicly about her fantasies at a conference while Anna sat beside him on stage. The duration matters because it rules out a lapse of judgement in a single instance; the public disclosure matters because it carried the breach out of the consulting room to an audience, with the person concerned present and in no position to withdraw. The course of Anna's life is then offered as a verdict on the theory that had licensed all of this. In her personal life, Anna enjoyed 54 years of happy monogamy with Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune — an outcome that the theory can neither explain as the consequence of a father's failure nor claim as a cure effected by the years of analysis it prescribed. The theory failed on both of its claims at once, in the one case its author knew best and documented most closely, which is what the argument means in calling Freud's beliefs problematic.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders of Freud's legacy respond that the argument judges a historical figure by present-day norms and rests on a single, contested episode. His analysis of his daughter Anna is widely acknowledged as an ethical lapse by his own later standards, but critics of this line argue that one flawed case does not establish that his broader theories were "problematic" as a body of work; and Anna Freud herself became a major psychoanalyst who defended and extended her father's ideas. They add that Freud's views on homosexuality were, for his era, comparatively non-condemnatory — he described it as nothing to be ashamed of — complicating the portrait of his theory as simply prejudiced.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That Freud's own rules should have barred him from analysing Anna concerns his personal conduct in one case, not the soundness of his theoretical work as a whole. [Rejecting P2] A single ethically compromised analysis, however troubling, does not by itself show that Freud's beliefs across psychoanalysis were problematic. [Rejecting P3] Anna's later life contradicts one specific claim about the origins and "curability" of lesbianism, but refuting one hypothesis is not the same as discrediting Freud's beliefs generally.