here I am a rabbit-hearted girl

[lotesse]

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.

Comments

[wrabbit]

Freud is horrible and disgusting.

[lotesse]

YES. IT IS SO BAD. MY GOD.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

WHAT THE HELL.

[lotesse]

I KNOW RIGHT.

[zulu]

Ugh, I know, right? It's like, sure, I understand Freud/Lacan/Klein/whoever, I can parrot what you want me to, but this is brain space that could have theories of actual scientific value in it!

[lotesse]

What I don't get is why we're all still trying to work with, to ~correct~, Freudian ideas. So much of his work is wrong on fundamentals, can't we just let it go and start over? without so much stupid this time?

Why don't we historicize Freud the same way we would, oh, the scientists who worked from the assumption that the universe was geocentric? Recognize what he knew, what he didn't, and move the hell on.

[zulu]

Exactly. Just because we've put in so much work, we should keep putting in more work even though more leaks are springing up all the time. But I suspect we'll still be teaching this stuff because it's always been done that way!

[wordweaverlynn]

Because Freud was the Father of Psychoanalysis, and he gave the profession some serious Daddy issues.

As to what I think about him, see my icon.

[ithiliana]

Yep, reading the case history is what turned me totally off Freud, and any related stuff. I don't use any psychoanalytical theory, and tend to be sceptical of its usefullness in literary studies (i'm more in the socio-cultural end of the theory pool).

There's more and more debunking of Freud's cases out there, thank heavens:

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/06/science/as-a-therapist-freud-fell-short-scholars-find.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

[lotesse]

I think at one time I thought I liked Freud? because psychoanalytic methodology does cool stuff with sff/fairy tales, I liked that essay on the uncanny, all that jazz. And now I still find him interesting as a historical datapoint in the construction of sexuality, but increasingly find his actual content/ideas bogus, bankrupt, or actively bad. But "Dora" was so much worse than I expected.

[wordweaverlynn]

You could consider all of Freudian theory a defense against any criticism of the Father. He bases it on the Oedipus myth without including the essential beginning to that story: that the father not only wanted to kill his son, but that he did his best to do so. With Dora and others, he twists their lived experience into victim-blaming because he cannot bear to admit that fathers or father figures are inappropriately selfish, sexual, and hostile. No, it's the children's fault! It's the women's fault!

[havocthecat]

Yeah, but the sff/fairy tales is far more Jungian than Freudian, and while Jung had his own issues, I far prefer reading about Jung's theories than about Freud's. (Though I do admit to being interested in defense mechanisms, which I believe are primarily Freudian.)

Freud is basically a tool and a misogynist shithead, YES THANK YOU I AGREE.