here I am a rabbit-hearted girl

Oh my god, you guys, I just finished reading through Freud's "Dora" case history in full, and I don't think I'll ever feel clean again. I knew there was some bad shit behind this one - I read about it when I was researching psychoanalytic perspectives on father-daughter incest for a paper on the Donkeyskin fairy tales - but I wasn't prepared for just how horribly obvious it would be that Freud was denying this girl's experience of rape and using her to flatter his own egotism, as well as to bolster his psychiatric career.

She's eighteen, she says she was propositioned, touched, kissed, by a friend of her father's. She's close to her daddy; he denies her rape, says she's making it all up. He brings her to Freud; Freud determines that she wanted to fuck the friend, that she wants to fuck her daddy, that she wants to fuck Freud himself, and that she masturbates. Also, he decides that she's abnormal for reacting to a man's advance with repulsion, even though she didn't ask for it, didn't consent to it, didn't want it. It's sickening. Utterly utterly sick. I want to scream and yell and punch something and rend him limb from limb and just. Can I kill them all, please.

I ... kind of don't know what to do with the mass of my own anger and repulsion. I've also got "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" on my list, and I've read a lot of that one and know I like it better, know it's one of the ones where Freud is more smart than stupid, but I don't think I can keep reading him right now. If I hadn't been reading on my computer, if I'd had a book, I think I might have torn it down the middle.

I kind of actually want to go buy a copy so I can do just that. Instead I'm going to go read Toril Moi's critique of the case history for some second-hand cleansing and catharsis.