Overthinking Sigmund Freud: Justice for Ida.

I am aware of the title of this post being paradoxical.

How can I be ‘overthinking’ Sigmund Freud, the ‘father’ of over-thinking?

When I first came across Freud, it was in high school English literature class. We were studying a set collection of texts, and one of those texts was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I was happy with my analytical skill of the English language: a red door could mean danger lies behind it, or alternatively, a clear sunny sky and rolling fields might suggest a bright path ahead for our character’s hopeful journey.

Up to this point we had been taught to analyse the connotations of words: what is being suggested or hinted to us, as the reader, through semiotics. It felt like cracking the code on a secret language - I now had the skill to really understand what the writer wanted me to, and sometimes more than my classmates. It made me feel special, and in particular, intelligent.

Then, several sessions into our analysis of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, my teacher said we would need to make our analysis more critical.

Isn’t all analysis critical? I remember thinking. But then, when I stopped to consider it, I thought of the red door and how many other things it could mean. Suppose that the red could also mean a door to love. Or a door to apples, or fire - red meant how ever many things to how ever many people depending on what? My confidence turned from uber-intelligent code-breaking analyser to the sudden questioning if I had just been accepting the information and cues I was being given by the writer, rather than analysing it like a sheep to a flock. Had I been reading the code wrong this whole time? Was I in fact, reading the wrong message into the door, or too much of a message - or was there any message at all?

Then came Freud.

In the same lesson, My teacher introduced to the class Freud’s Das Ich und das Es, or, The Id and the Ego. Dr.Jekyll represents man’s Ego - the ‘rationale’ of the human consciousness that will willingly conform to societal standards to please its demands and slot into place amongst others in society. Dr.Hyde is the repressed state within Dr.Jekyll - the primal and ‘foundational’ man, taking pleasure in violence, sexual pleasure, all the things improper to Victorian society, in which the novel is set. This man, Freud, had single-handedly broken all the codes imaginably possible. He had read the human mind to filth. The character now made sense. He represented Freud’s theory about human suppression and desire perfectly. I thought I was perceptive, insightful - such embarrassing feelings to have held knowing this Freud man had already torn apart, re-assembled and re-moulded everything we know about the human brain since 1885 for 45 years.

Before I knew it I was falling down a rabbit hole of psycho-analysis faster and harder than any English teacher could dream of. In fact, becoming their worst nightmare. Once I looked upon things with the ignorance of naivety, but now my eyes were open to the endlessly inherent complexities of human psychology. Within us we could be not two, or three, but a plethora of egos, ids and identities formed by the oppressions, repressions, suppressions, whatever society and our parents could inflict upon us. The more I read of Freud’s work, everything I thought I knew about myself and those around me was changing. Hours spent googling, writing, reading, watching - drowning myself in psychoanalytic theories lead me to more psychoanalysis and the domino fell to feminism, racial, environmental, economic contexts - every critical lens and context possessed endless bookshelves full of pages upon pages of psychoanalysis I would never be able to finish, even if gifted all the time in the world.

I lived pretty much my whole young adult life as what I would consider a philosophical thinker. Comparing and contrasting, looking for the roots of choices, or why we may act a certain way. I felt it had coincidentally made me an empathetic person (I would like to think).

However.

I had never stopped to think critically about the source of these psychological and psychoanalytical findings. Until yesterday, that is.

This, I know, in itself is very contradictory. The whole ‘point’ of philosophical thinking (if we can even assign a point to it, as it is the study of so) and psychoanalysis is to ponder. To ruminate and consider the whys. So why had I never ‘why’d’ where these theories came from. I just took them as absolute truth. Just as the moon rotates around earth to release the sun of its duty and bring us night, the words of Freud and his buddies were fact. He was a doctor. Doctors are qualified. But qualified by who? If I was to start questioning the very people who ‘founded’ these ideas I would end up with civil war in my prefrontal cortex, and how would I know if anything means anything if the foundation of meaning was to be interrogated?

But Yesterday I attended a short film screening, and at this event, there was a documentary that caught my attention, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

For the first time in what I thought was a pretty thorough and detailed relationship with Freud, I was introduced to Dora.

Dora was Freud’s pseudonym for Ida Bauer: the only female case study of his published works: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

Now, I knew this word hysteria. In fact, it was due to my keen interest from English literature I would investigate meanings and etymology of words I didn’t fully understand. I knew The word hysteria came from the Greek word hystera, which meant ‘the womb’. I had read that Egyptian priest physicians would attribute physical and emotional symptoms of their female patients to the ‘wandering’ of their womb from its correct place and would apply potions and natural medicines to coerce the uterus back in place. The likes of Hippocrates and Galen were fans of this practice, and so was born the idea that women manifested dramatic physical and psychological ailments because of their hystera.

Since learning this information I stopped using the word (not that I used it much prior) because it felt like a disservice to myself and other women, and I would always challenge men who would use it against me.

So, upon seeing it in the title of Freud’s work, my head had already begun to wobble.

Dora was heavily depressed and had written a suicide note. She came under Freud’s care after a letter was sent by her family to the neurologist, pleading for his aid.

Dora’s mental health deteriorated after experiencing sexual harassment and attempted assault from her father’s mistresses husband, Hans, beginning at the age of thirteen. Freud notes how “This was just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement. But instead Dora had a violent feeling of disgust”. (I’ll let that sink in.)

Dora continued to outline incidents that had happened between her and Hans. Freud would note down how ‘her behaviour was completely hysterical’ when she described how on one night Hans entered her room, approached the end of her bed and stood there and stared at her, and she exclaimed ‘what the fuck do you want’. She described how her family turned on her, disbelieved and dismissed her. Freud noted down how the request of her father was to ‘bring her to reason’. Dora was not being listened to, or treated. How could the ‘founder of psychoanalysis’ genuinely expect a thirteen year old girl to feel sexual excitement and enthusiasm for the attempted assault from a family friend? How could he think she was hysterical for shouting at him after he had made advance after advance and threatened her feeling of safety in her own room? I knew the answer but I just didn’t want to admit it because this was the author of so many texts I had taken for gospel. It was because he was a man. And I can’t believe I hadn’t considered it before.

Freud diagnosed Dora with hysteria, and the conclusion was that this was a manifestation of her jealousy and resentment toward the relationship between her father’s and his mistress, because she had repressed sexual feelings towards him.

She also had deep sexual desires and feelings for Hans but was plagued by her temptations. He stated: ‘Her ‘no’ was only a sign of the severity of the repression’. (I will also let Freud’s wise words on consent here, sink in)

If I, a twenty-three year old non-founder of psychoanalysis can see how that is clearly a misogynistic and disturbingly damaging account of victim-blaming a young girl being abused and sourcing her refusal to interact sexually with her predator as ‘hysteria’, then I want a job title change. Freud was progressive. Freud was breaking boundaries and making discoveries about human nature that continue to underpin many sociological theories today. But how and why do we respect a man with such sexist and regressive views on women?

Do I need to go back and unlearn everything and re-learn it from an untainted lens? Unfortunately I can’t, because my brain has already sponged all of it up, and everything I was taught in school was chosen for me, by men. And now I sit and worry - what else that I know or have learnt has come from the mind of a man who knows nothing of what it is like to be a woman, taught me about being a woman. I fear, probably much more than I would like to know or admit. There is no denying Freud has made great contributions to the knowledge of the human psyche as we know it today. But there is also no denying he was also wrong about things. I want to take this forward as a lesson to myself in encouragement to not tear myself apart for taking a historical man’s word as singular truth at times, because it is hard, nay extremely hard, when women in fields such as Freud’s are not as widely spoken of, praised, published, accredited… the list goes on, and when we are taught that these men are the bearers of knowledge and validity. But I want to pledge to myself to seek out these voices and female founders of thought, because I’m sure she won’t be mistaking my fear of rape for my repressed feelings of intimacy, and she definitely won’t be calling me hysterical.