Was anna freud gay
You may know Rebecca Coffey’s science journalism from magazines like Scientific American and Discover, whereshehas proven herself as a teller of real-life tales that pop with quirky humor. Now she’s done herself one better in her debut novel, Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story.It’s the fact-based, fictional autobiography of Sigmund Freud’s purportedly lesbian daughter, and it’s as funny and occasionally frightening as the title hints. These days, as states follow New Jersey and California in moving to ban gay conversion therapy (a/k/a reparative therapy) on minors, Hysterical is particularly timely.
In Hysterical, young Anna Freud receives an intensive gay conversion therapy from her legendary father. According to Coffey, the analysis actually happened. At the time, Sigmund was universally acknowledged as the leading expert on sexuality, and he considered lesbianism to be a highway to mental illness that, fortunately, was curable by psychoanalysis.
But the assessment never should have happened, and not just because conversion therapy is pointless and cruel. As Sigmund defined p
Freud slips into France’s row over gay marriage ; Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna, now claimed to be homosexual - The Sunday Times, Full lenght article
Freud slips into France’s row over gay marriage Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna, now claimed to be homosexual - The Sunday Times In a territory obsessed with psychoanalysis, it was only a matter of time before Sigmund Freud, its inventor, was dragged into France's sour debate about whether to allow gay marriage and adoption by same-sex parents. Some believe the father of psychoanalysis would frown on gay marriage, but the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco has caused a stir among Freud's disciples by claiming his daughter Anna was in a partnership with an American heiress for decades, helping her to raise her four children. Roudinesco says Freud came to accept them as a "family prefer any other". Far from frowning on his daughter's homosexuality, Freud, she said, was "totally tolerant" and "supportive" of her existence with Dorothy Burlingham, an heiress to Tiffany's, the jeweller. "It
Source: Copyright Rebecca Coffey
Anna Freud was born in and lived until Unlike her two sisters and three brothers, she never married. Instead, beginning in her mid teens, she became her father's pupil of sorts. By her preliminary adulthood she was his constant companion and, eventually, his closest collaborator. As Freud’s cigar behavior led to cancer, and as cancer surgeries increasingly debilitated him, Anna began tending to her father day and night. This arrangement continued until Freud’s death, when Anna assumed the mantle of the chief of the psychoanalytic movement and continued to spread her father's doctrine. Ultimately, Anna became a pioneer in the field of kid psychoanalysis, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of childhood development.
Anna was inarguably her father’s favorite daughter. Freud’s intellectual descendants readily concede that point. What most Freudians don’t concede is that there was anything inappropriate in Anna’s partnership with her father. For the longest time, most didn’t have cause to.
It wasn’t until the late s that Paul Roazen, a political s
Sigmund Freud,
Source: Ferdinand Schmutzer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
December 3 is the th anniversary of Anna Freud's birth. She was a profoundly influential child psychoanalyst. Still, her main claim to fame was as Sigmund Freud's daughter. What most people don't know about Anna Freud is that it may have been particularly difficult for her to be Sigmund's favorite child. How and why was that the case?
- Sigmund believed that homosexuality in men is neurotic but not particularly problematic. Lesbianism, however, he considered a gateway to mental illness.
- This (according to Sigmund) is because only men have moral sense. We all evolve from apes, so no human is born with it. But boys acquire morality through the castration complex—the fear that their fathers will emasculate them for their misbehavior.
- Having nothing obvious to neuter, girls and women are essentially amoral, lying and conniving to get what they want. Girls must be guided through civilized life by a father, and a woman by a husband. And because they choose not to marry, lesbians remain loose can