Lisa Appignanesi on ‘Women & Freud’
The following is an extract from the catalogue to accompany the exhibition Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists held at the Freud Museum London from 30 October 2024 – 5 May 2025.
Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists Exhibition Catalogue – edited by Lisa Appignanesi is available on our online shop here.
Back in May 2023 Giuseppe Albano asked me if I might be interested in co-curating an exhibition sparked by Freud’s Women with the Museum. Ideas immediately began to race through my mind. The book, written with John Forrester some decades ago, had had several updated editions over the years and travelled Europe in translation as well as the US and the Americas. But it had never given birth to an exhibition. The possibilities were enticing.
Artists and images cascaded before my eyes. First in line were the great Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego, artists who, in their unique ways, prod and play with the Freudian family romance and those metamorphosing Oedipal relations that are ever striated by conflicts of power; Cornelia Parker with her bold material puns, her art itself sphinx-like and alive to riddles; Tracey Emin and her dips into narrative memory and the tease of self-disclosure; Sarah Lucas and her provocations about gender and stereotype…
A dream in which artists mingled with Freud and the history of the women patients and pioneers of psychoanalysis shimmered and was gradually translated into the geography of the Museum.
Back in 1940 soon after Freud’s death at 20 Maresfield Gardens, the great poet W.H. Auden elegized Freud as ‘a whole climate of opinion/under whom we conduct our different lives’. That climate of opinion has sometimes been icy, sometimes turbulent, sometimes warm and generative. It has given birth to many different inflections of psychoanalysis. But whatever the weather, the conversation with Freud has gone on.
Of late, that conversation has become particularly lively, not least amongst those young who are alert to the uncanny and the whole tangled business of sex and gender, language, jokes and desire. Freud’s challenge is strong in a culture dominated by a digital social sphere that occludes living bodies and seems able to replace them only with augmented rage. Algorithms are hardly sufficient to an inner life. On top of that, our hyper individualist vaunting of free ‘rational’ choice forgets that choice is not altogether free, certainly not of vagrant wishes, unwitting slips or ambivalences – all the murky matter of our unconscious. Knowing in advance exactly what we want is hardly a full proof recipe for satisfaction.
What has also become evident over the years since Freud’s death is that the profession Freud and the early analysts invented in the first decades of the 20th century has increasingly become a women’s profession. Whether Freud sniffed the possibility of this or not in the early days of the Vienna Wednesday group meetings of the nascent psychoanalytic society, it’s clear that he stood against many of its members to insist that women be allowed into the circle. At a discussion in April 1910, he declared that he would ‘see it as a serious inconsistency if we were to exclude women on principle.’
Though he occasionally had conventional Victorian views about wives and daughters, when it came to the radical adventure of psychoanalysis, Freud was an early equal opportunities employer.
For the Women & Freud exhibition, the grand stairwell of the Museum wears the names of some of the many women who have been in one way or another part of this story – whether as patients, pioneers, artists or writers.
Many of Freud’s early women patients may not have come into the historical canon without having been the subjects of his Studies on Hysteria or other writings. But they certainly had lives, loves, ideas, and sometimes work of their own outside their treatment. What was revolutionary about their ‘talking therapy’ with Freud, was that unlike the French Napoleon of the Neuroses, Jean-Martin Charcot for whom the clinical gaze was everything, Freud gave primacy not to the eye but to the ear. He listened carefully to his patients, their narratives, their memories, the way all this played out in their bodies. He repeatedly acknowledged their status as ‘my teachers’. He also ‘listened’ to himself, had after all also called himself a ‘hysteric’, was aware, if perhaps not always and not instantly, of his own responses, and he acknowledged his mistakes. Importantly, Freud was kind and attentive to his patients – not regularly a feature of the mind doctors of his time or their treatments.
What Freud learned from the early patients was effectively everything that came to make up the basis of the new field of psychoanalysis, dubbed by the iconic first patient Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O) ‘the talking cure’: that sexuality, the driving search and wish for pleasure, is a shaping (and since it meets opposition both from without and within, a distorting) force; that its early presence in human make-up is repressed; that there are oedipal patterns in family life; that patients are conflicted, resist treatment and are attached to their symptoms; that hypnosis is of little use and free associative talk is a better way to navigate the paths of the unconscious, of memory and desire in order to discover the repressed origins of a patient’s ills – locate the traumatic nexus of relations and events, and through language and recognition to begin to shift their attachment to their symptoms. Important, too, was the fact that patients often enough fell in love (or in hate and resistance) with their doctors: what came to be called ‘transference’ or the reenactment in therapy of a new edition of familial (and later) loves.
After his own self-analysis, had shown him that the interpretation of dreams was a path to unconscious desires and conflicts, Freud also recognized – through Ida Bauer or the patient known as Dora, a talented dreamer and as Freud says, very intelligent – how the transference worked in two directions and therapists had to pay heed to their own counter-transference.
Listening carefully to his patients, alert to everyday life within the family, to the quick succession of six children in his own home – his wife’s pleasures or pain in nursing and mothering, the relations between his own children, their satisfactions, anxieties, and inordinate wishes – to the dreams all this plus rivalries at work, failures and sometime successes with patients provoked, Freud created through his writing, the beginnings of a new profession. It was one which raised women’s everyday concerns, the ordinary matter of gossip, the secret fears and desires of the ‘hysterics’, into a professional and public discourse. Like feminism and intriguingly intertwined with it, all the while pointing to sexuality and its discontents rather than to puritanical temperance, the profession of psychoanalysis was a response to women’s malaise and their untenable place in the late 19th century.
In Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists, we have woven together the various kinds of conversation women have had with Freud from roughly the 1890s.
One of these strands lies in remarkable art and writing. Freud had always considered that writers and artists had been the first to probe the terrain he was interested in; and that one had to go to them for insight. He did. In our exhibition the artists engage with (or rebel against) aspects of his thinking to create work that speaks through sound, shape, materials, concept, language.
The other strand of the exhibition is more directly historical and makes liberal use of archival letters, writings, books and images – from far afield and within the Museum’s own collection – to conjure individuals and a little of the arguments within analysis. It’s worth remembering that all analysts are first of all patients on the couch. The debates range across sexual ills and over what makes girls into women. How is their trajectory different from the males? Is penis envy a desire for male power, a male hope, or a marker of difference? Do women have easier access to the earliest pre-oedipal realm, that realm of breast and babble, before language binds us into order?
We begin with the great Paula Rego, her telling evocations of mothers and daughters, her fairy tales, dollies, dressing up materials and the light they shine on women and family life. These are juxtaposed with the story of the Freud family through the generations. Freud, the son and his filial relations with his long-lived and exuberant mother, Amelia, and the other women who bestride his life – his wife Martha, his daughter Anna whom he called his Antigone. It is the women who take him from cradle to grave, drawing him on to explore desire and the riddle of femininity.
The correspondence between Freud and Martha Bernays, the so-called Brautbriefe, conjures the years of their early love and long engagement. This was often difficult to navigate as Freud tried to put together funds and a professorship that would allow for a ‘conventional’ family. Emily Berry has written a wonderful poem based on this correspondence and its terms of endearment – as well as tuning into Freud’s later grief on the death of a grandchild.
Visible through the windows of the family room, and out in Freud’s beloved garden, Alice Anderson has created one of her extraordinary Data Dances using the doors and windows of the Freud Museum especially for the exhibition.
Freud linked the Pompeian figure of the walking girl, Gradiva, in his essay on Jensen’s novel of that name, with his own version of the ‘Cure through Love’. This ‘love’, that in the therapy highlighted attentiveness, was ever, as he warned Jung and other analysts, a re-imagined edition of earlier loves and provided material for analysis not for physical engagement. Excavation – that digging in the ruins of the past so popular in Freud’s time – is key both to the novel and to analysis, with its psychological excavation. The figure of Gradiva hangs in the very centre of psychoanalysis: Freud’s consulting room. Just before we enter, Tracey Emin’s neon blazes the centrality of memory. Once across the threshold amidst the ranked excavated figurines of Freud’s collection of antiquities, his very own gods of story – a metaphorical talking therapy is in progress.
The Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) wrote a Tribute to Freud, whom she evoked as the ‘blameless physician’. Read in extract here by the brilliant Juliet Stevenson, it conjures the atmosphere and something of the process of Freud’s talking cure. H.D. lay on the carpeted couch gifted to Freud by a certain Madame Benvenisti. It’s the very one that is still in the room today. On it H.D. took what she dubbed her and Freud’s ‘journeys’. Early in her analysis, Freud had said to H.D.: ‘The trouble is – I am an old man – you do not think it worth your while to love me.
The cure through love was on its way.
In London, the self-same ‘gods and goods’ of Freud’s collection looked on, as when the two had talked on Berggasse of love, of fathers and mothers, of ancient deities and hallucinations. When H.D. visited him, once he was settled in London, she was surprised to see all the deities in place. They had travelled, Freud told her, courtesy of Princess Marie Bonaparte, the writer/analyst whose formidable energy, talents and status had saved the Freuds from the Nazis.
In the library, Rachel Kneebone’s ever-metamorphosing sculptures and Sarah Lucas’ Bombshell converse with Freud’s books while Yvette Guilbert, the star ‘diseuse’ of the café–concert whom Freud had admired as a student in Paris, sings. She became a family friend. They wrote to one another, and although the theory she proposed to Freud about why and how she inhabited the various characters of her songs was one he politely rejected, as their correspondence attests, they remained friends.
Upstairs, just past the twirling mechanical doll, the hysteric as everywoman, of Deborah Levy and Jane Thorburn’s evocative ‘Freud’s Lost Lecture’, is the Mezzanine. This was Martha Freud’s favourite reading and resting nook. For Women and Freud, it hosts a diverse range of books by women. Graphic novelist, Alison Bechdel’s drawing from her analytic memoir, Are You My Mother? overlooks the scene. The book puts Freud’s consulting room on the page of her strip, which uses analysis to interrogate Bechdel’s relationship with her mother and the older woman’s relationship to her daughter’s homosexuality.
Homosexuality was a subject that came early to Freud’s consulting room and his thinking. For Freud the masculine and feminine inhabit all genders – as we would now say – to greater and lesser degrees: everyone for him is psychically bi-sexual. This is not tied, however, in any deterministic way to the choice of a love object. Unlike the post- World War 2 psychoanalysts in America and elsewhere, Freud had no normative position on homosexuality and certainly no thought of conversion therapy. In the exhibition room, the problematic arises in the treatment of two of his patients, Ida Bauer (Dora) and Margarethe Csonka both at the time in their teens and attracted to other women. Both women cut treatment abruptly short. Freud tried to learn from his mistakes. When his own daughter Anna was having difficulties with her ‘libido’, he asked the writer-analyst Lou Andreas Salome to become the ‘mother’ or woman analyst to Anna, recognizing his own limitations in this particular instance. Anna went on to become one of the key figures in the development of analysis with children.
The haunting portrait of an analyst by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, a painter well known to the German speaking post war émigré circle in Britain around the writer Elias Canetti, gazes down on the wall of women. He is Ernst Kris, both art historian and a psychoanalyst close to Freud. Von Motesiczky is herself a granddaughter to Baroness Anna von Lieben, one of Freud’s earliest patients known in the Studies on Hysteria as Cecilie M. Past Helen Chadwick’s surreal Monkfish with Artist’s Hand, Cornelia Parker’s haunting Ghost Notes and Poison and Antidote drawing, the Exhibition Room takes us first into the world of the early hysterics, the founders with Freud of what became psychoanalysis.
Louise Bourgeois’ powerful Breasts and Blade dominates the space, next to it her work on paper, presenting an insight into her never less than acerbic view of analysis, which nonetheless she went to for much of her adult life.
Under the aegis of Jean-Martin Charcot and the Salpétrière doctors, hysteria – with its florid symptoms which could include paralyses, anaesthesia, tics, seizures, and hallucinations, all with no physiological base – was rigorously documented and observed as a set of theatrical attitudes and expressive contortions, in part mimicking the ‘passion’ of the saints. Charcot’s clinical gaze was a formidable diagnostic tool as was hypnosis. Being susceptible to it meant for the Charcot school that hysteria was present alongside inherited degeneration. Freud moved away from hypnosis and eradicated any notion of inherited degeneration as part of either his treatment or speculative armoury. With the women of the Studies on Hysteria, and the later Ida Bauer (Dora) and Margarethe Csonka (Case of the Homosexual Woman), beautifully reimagined in Hugh Brody’s film 1919, the ‘talking cure’ took on the dimensions of psychoanalysis.
The Exhibition Room and the Video Room next to it are buoyant with the images, voices, letters, texts, and art of the many women who took part in the making of psychoanalysis: from Sabine Spielrein, a patient and lover of Jung’s, who came to Freud and was thanked by him for her important paper on creation and destruction; to the great writer Lou Andreas Salome, the indomitable envoy to France, Princess Marie Bonaparte, the talented American medic, Ruth Mack Brunswick and more. All of them began as analysands and became analysts. These pioneers queried and contested Freud’s views and carved out fuller ideas of women’s psychic trajectory. Importantly, too, like Hug- Hellmuth, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, they made child analysis into its own field. Subsequent generations carried on the task. We could only pick out a handful for note in these rooms – for example Marion Milner, and Marie Battle Singer. It also seemed crucial to signal just a little of the controversy over Freud during the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement, with its frontal attacks on the patriarchal Freud. Analysts in the U.S., England and Latin America during the 1950’s and into the seventies or later, had reinforced conventional views of women as if they were carved in stone in good health manuals. The notions they attributed to Freud were far more restrictive than Freud’s own ideas. Feminist analysts, such as Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, and Susie Orbach, or artists like Sharon Kivland pointed this out, emphasizing the role of unconscious processes, and Freud’s position as an early decipherer of patriarchy.
Because Anna Freud – who has her own room with Dorothy Burlingham in the Museum – was a great lover of weaving, knitting and the hand made, Women & Freud highlights the long tradition of women’s ‘making’ with work by the extraordinary potter Abigail Schama and textile artist Carolina Mazzolari, one of whose tapestries transforms Anna Freud’s couch into a more dramatic space for dreams. A live-relay film brings Schama’s practice into the space of analysis, just as Anna would often bring her knitting needles.
Finally to Bloomsbury Freud. 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s decision to publish Freud’s Collected Papers at the Hogarth Press which had just moved to Tavistock Square. The proposal was made by James Strachey, who later also became the editor of the Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Though the suggestion had come from James, it could as easily have come from Alix his wife. Both, like the redoubtable and talented Joan Riviere, had had analysis with Freud and had been asked by Freud to help translate his work. The results of their combined labours and that of others is more than worthy of celebration, as is that of the Bloomsbury women, all of whom have parts in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, though these don’t include their work in the consulting room.
Kristina Chimeze, a contemporary artist who depicts the inner life of women engaged in everyday activities, seemed a perfect accompaniment to the Bloomsbury Freud moment.
My heartfelt thanks go to all the generous artists, galleries, private lenders, and patrons who have made this exhibition possible, but first of all to the splendid Freud Museum team: Director Giuseppe Albano who had the idea, managed to source the funds and who has helped at every step; to Bryony Davies, my invaluable Co-Curator; to the hugely talented young Designer Sarah Isherwood; to our indefatigable Assistant Exhibitions Curator Josie Sommer; and not least to Daniel Bento and Francisco Da Silva, whose technical wizardry and installation expertise make everything work. I would also like to thank the artists and writers, all of them pioneering thinkers, analysts and makers – Marina Warner, Siri Hustvedt, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell, Deborah Levy, Hannah Zieven – who agreed to contribute their illuminating ideas and words to this catalogue. Darian Leader has been as generous and resourceful as only he can be.
My thanks are also due to the great Freud scholar, a past Director of the Museum, Michael Molnar – who understands Freud’s gothic script and dare I say Freud, better than anyone I know – for his translation help and conversation.
There could have been and will need to be many other exhibitions of women and the field of psychoanalysis, but my sense is that this one in Freud’s last home, is a wonderful place to start.
Lisa Appignanesi OBE, guest curator of Women & Freud, is an award -winning writer and former Chair of the Royal Society of Literature as well as of the Freud Museum London. Her many books include the now classic Freud’s Women (with John Forrester), Mad Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, as well as the memoirs Everyday Madness and Losing the Dead.
Exhibition
Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists
A dazzling new exhibition that highlights the women who helped Freud invent psychoanalysis and their legacy in its practice – as well as in the arts and literature through to our own time.
30 October 2024 – 5 May 2024
