In 1935, Sigmund Freud wrote to a distraught mother that her son’s suspected homosexuality was no cause for lament, “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as an illness.” If her son was unhappy and neurotic, analysis might release him from his distress and help him live a more creative life, but it would not, nor should it aim, to make him “straight”. No “conversion therapy” as we might say today. On another occasion, Freud insisted that homosexuality should not be grounds for anyone to be summoned to a court of law.
Shocking for their time, these statements point to an aspect of Freud’s writing that is little known. Both appear for the first time in English in the just published Revised Standard Edition of Freud’s complete psychological works – a much-anticipated publishing venture and a feat of scholarship that, under the editorship of Mark Solms, has been in preparation for three decades. Readers can now access a full bibliography of Freud’s writings, which has expanded from 368 items in the previous Standard Edition of Freud’s works, overseen by James Strachey, to 1,730 today. What this edition also establishes, at a time when questions of sexuality and war have never been more fraught, is just how much Freud still has to say to us today.
As Solms puts it, psychoanalysis is in itself an act, or art, of translation as it tries to bring the unconscious out of the dark, to hear the unconscious stories that petrify the soul and help them move into a less disturbing shape. In fact, translation is pertinent not just in terms of the challenge presented by revising previous translations of Freud, but as part of Freud’s own thought and writing it appears pretty much everywhere.
Take the issue of sexual difference. For Freud, the infant starts from a state of blissful ignorance that the world is expected to divide without ambiguity into girls and boys. How, asked Freud, do woman and man emerge as distinct identities, translating themselves from an infant state that seeks pleasure in all directions, which Freud described as “polymorphous perversity”. One answer, after Freud, must surely be another question. Do they? “We do not know,” Freud admits, “the biological basis of these peculiarities in women” - by which he meant the complexity of women’s sexual path - “and still less are we able to assign them any teleological significance.” And again, “Pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructs of uncertain content.” So yes, there are natal males and females, but that only gives us, gives them, scant information of the life ahead. Or to put it another way, on the question of what anyone will become as a sexual being, nothing conclusive can be said.
No less crucial, and rarely commented on, is Freud’s insistence on the cost of the girl’s transition into the norm, which he describes as nothing short of “ruinous” and “catastrophic”, terms whose scandalous intensity I was pleased to see have not been reduced a jot in the revised edition. This transition can be seen as a forced deflection. A shift from an earlier free-wheeling, libidinous, ambiguous sexual life and identity into the straitjacket of sexual difference. A translation and shock to the system.
As I have watched the recent debates on “what is a woman?” intensify, it has occurred to me that Freud had something to say, not only about the instability of sexual difference but also on violence against women, even though, after his early studies on hysteria, it was rarely his explicit theme. One of Freud’s first cases was that of Katharina, whom he met on a mountainside, probably the only open space, Freud suggests, where they would have been free enough to have their conversation in which she revealed her abuse by her father.
What happens if you put the case of Katharina alongside the evolution of Freud’s thoughts on sexuality, and try to hold them together? Then, there might be a link to the vital #MeToo movement, which exposes the abuse of women and young girls by men. This abuse could be seen as a way of coercing into place the sexual “truth” that a woman is a woman, leaving the woman with no sexual options other than a stultifying and oppressive norm, a norm that everything else I have been describing in Freud’s work leaves open to question.
So, there are people who hold that women are women biologically, whatever else may happen, till kingdom come. And there are those, mostly men, whose violence against women is increasingly visible, and whose acts can be seen as a repudiation, even if not consciously, of Freud’s more expansive and generous uncertainties around what a woman, or any other person, could be. Think of the drugged and comatose Gisèle Pelicot, her husband Dominique Pelicot and his more than 50 male accomplices; her violation bears all the signs of a desperate effort to make a woman a woman in her most degraded state. No knowledge or consciousness of what was happening, no consciousness at all.
To take another issue with deep resonance for our time: how to think of the enemy in times of war? Today we are a world at war and a world whose future is threatened by war, whether in the wars across Africa, the nuclear threat from Russia, or Israel’s continuing massacre of the people of Gaza, after the Hamas onslaught of 7 October. Why, Freud asks in something close on despair in 1914 and again in the 1930s, do nations so unfailingly, at the risk of extinguishing the human species, never stop going to war?
In his 1914 essay Our Attitude Towards Death, Freud describes the so-called “primitive” cultures in which the returning warrior grieves his slain enemy outside the city gates before being readmitted to his community, thereby revealing “a vein of ethical sensitiveness that has been lost by us civilised men”. The earliest ethical commandments, notably “‘Thou shalt not kill’ come into being in the process of mourning the dead, who were loved but also hated, and was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies”. But, Freud continues, “this final extension of the commandment is no longer experienced by civilised man”. In flight from his own hatreds, civilised man fails to include the enemy inside his moral compass and inner world.
In the struggle over decolonisation, including the important critique of Freud’s moments of ethnocentrism, these lines stand out. As a link back to sexual difference, we could say that a line or barrier in the oppressive ordering of the world – between men and women, between enemies and loved ones, between civilised and primitive – is being blurred. One issue being fought over in relation to the disaster taking place in the Middle East is about the ethics of war in exactly the way Freud describes. Who has the right to grieve and be grieved?
In the general introduction to the new edition, Solms describes the unspeakable difficulty of bringing the unconscious to light. We are talking about “unknowable” things. What is this “something of which we are unable to form a conception”? I personally would have liked much more of this intangible, almost poetic dimension to have made its way into the revised translation of Freud. Meanwhile, in relation to sexual difference, and what often feels like interminable states of war, it seems more urgent than ever to keep these matters open as questions that Freud is still putting to us all today.
Jacqueline Rose is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Her latest book, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, was published last year
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