Freud was one of the worst things that ever happened to women. I truly believe he set female liberation back hundreds of years.
The most frustrating part is that he didn’t start off as what he eventually became. His early work zeroed in on sexual abuse of girls and women by men, specifically their fathers, as his female patients recounted the abuse and rapes they faced as children.
He started working on theories to explain how this sexual abuse caused all kinds of psychological problems for women, and his writing from this time often reveals sympathy for his patients.
It wasn’t long, however, before the difference in who is the PATIENT and who is the CLIENT came into play and completely destroyed the actual work that Freud was doing. See, his patients weren’t the ones paying the bills. Their wealthy fathers and husbands were. So in the end, it wasn’t about helping his patients… It became all about pleasing his clients. The clients who actually paid the bill.
And let me tell you… Rich dudes do NOT like being told that they are rapists and child abusers. They do NOT like being told that their father-in-law raped their wife as a child. They do NOT like hearing ANYTHING about the evils that men perpetrate, and they ESPECIALLY do not like to hear about the consequences of a culture that prioritizes the desires of adult male rapists over the needs of helpless female children.
Freud renounced all this work, all his patient cases where he had previously believed that a woman had been raped as a child, and took a different tact. A tact more pleasing to the average wealthy white man.
He decided that little girls were so jealous of their fathers penis that they fantasized about getting raped.
And despite the fact that any sane and literate person could easily know just these few facts about Freud and write him off as a sociopathic abuser who should have disappeared into the ether of time…
You’re still learning about him today.
Freud literally said Karen Horney is “mean and malicious” because shed dared to question his obsession with biology and non-existent psychological sex differences. She emphasized culture and believed masochism is not inherent to women, but an UNHEALTHY learned behavior as a result of culture. Dudes hated her and Freud also literally said she was the way she was because she refused to “Accept her own penis envy”. OMFG ALL THESE OLD WHITE DUDES. FUCK THEM
This is true. Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.
He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.
And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.
And they have Freud’s cultural legacy to help them.
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Thoughtfulfangirling 