Vol. 18 No. 1 · 4 January 1996
pages 6-8 | 4528 words
Women: what are they for?
Adam Phillips
- Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels edited by Edward Timms
Yale, 188 pp, £19.95, October 1995, ISBN 0 300 06485 3
For anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis, or indeed, in how people start having new kinds of conversation, The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society are an inexhaustible source of amusement and instruction. From 1906 to 1915, in his role as official secretary to the Society, Freud’s keen and earnest young student, Otto Rank, recorded the first formal psychoanalytic discussions by the first men who thought of themselves as psychoanalysts. A surprisingly wide range of topics is covered in the three hefty volumes published in America in the early Sixties: from, as perhaps one might expect, masturbation and female assassins – ‘Federn comments that to slips of the tongue and the hand, we must now add slips of shooting’ – to works of philosophy, psychology and literature. There are early moments of what would become an influential new genre, psychoanalytic seriousness – ‘According to Bölsche, clothes are the cause of nudity’ – and glimpses of esoteric romance: ‘the genitalia are said to be the first gods, and religious feeling is derived from the ecstasies of intercourse.’ It is clear, despite the almost palpable presence of Freud in these pages – ‘our great father in Vienna’, as Wittels calls him in his memoirs, ‘the greatest psychological genius of all time’ – that a lot of these people were relishing the demand that they speak their minds, and on such diverse topics. A profession that encouraged people to say whatever occurred to them is bound to be interesting to observe when it wants to keep to the point.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 3 · 8 February 1996
From Sarah LeFanu
‘Women: what are they for?’ I assumed the provocation in the title was ironical, as Adam Phillips discusses in his article the beliefs of a man whose misogyny made Freud himself distinctly uneasy (LRB, 4 January). Then we find Adam Phillips telling us that before we condemn Fritz Wittels for his resentment at women having lives of their own, and at their being sexually unavailable, ‘we should consider whether we have never had this thought ourselves; and what we do with it once we have had it.’ We? Oddly enough, no, we have never had this thought ourselves. But perhaps we are not included in Adam Phillips’s ‘we’? In which case, I guess, we must be ‘they’. And to ask what women are for is obviously not, for some men, an ironical question.
Sarah LeFanu
Claverham, Bristol
Vol. 18 No. 4 · 22 February 1996
From Adam Phillips
In my review of Fritz Wittels’s memoir (LRB, 4 January) I suggested that before we condemn Wittels too eagerly for his resentment at women having lives of their own, ‘we should consider whether we have never had this thought ourselves; and what we do with it once we have had it.’ It seems to some readers that by ‘we’ I was merely referring to men, and that I was implying some admiration for Wittels’s misogyny. But from a psychoanalytic point of view it is more or less generally agreed that children of both sexes have a mother. When I wrote that everyone might once have grudged a woman her independence I was referring to thoughts from childhood. In my experience both sexes have these thoughts about their mothers; and so both sexes are – among many other things – ambivalent about women having lives of their own.
Adam Phillips
London W11
Vol. 18 No. 6 · 21 March 1996
From Sarah LeFanu
Adam Phillips (Letters, 22 February) has now put right those readers who mistakenly read his ‘we’ as referring to men only, with his explanation that when he wrote about ‘everyone’ grudging a woman her independence he was referring to our ‘thoughts from childhood’. Of course children of both sexes have a mother. Do we need to have that corroborated ‘from a psychoanalytic point of view’? Some people, however, think that there is a difference – or multiple differences – between the relations that the two sexes have with their mothers; and that if both women and men are ambivalent about women having lives of their own, then they are ambivalent in different ways.
Sarah LeFanu
Bristol
From Linda Edmondson
From a psychoanalytic point of view (as from any other) it is undeniable that ‘children of both sexes have a mother’ and that women, in infancy and childhood, are as prone to feel frustrated by their mother’s intermittent ‘unavailability’ as men are at that age. If Adam Phillips really intended us to read his misunderstood passage in this way, perhaps he should have rephrased it. He asked us to consider whether we had never thought, as Wittels did, that ‘if women weren’t people we would all be free.’ A woman who is other than a person would be useless, in a psychological and emotional sense, to a child of either sex. More to the point of the current argument, it is ‘more or less generally agreed’ that adult men’s responses to women’s real or imagined unavailability are of quite a different order from women’s equally complex responses to other women’s autonomy. Phillips was discussing a man whom he accurately described as ‘crass’ and ‘misogynist’ in his writings about relations between the sexes. The article was titled, no doubt provocatively, ‘Women: what are they for?’ The author of it might do well to consider whether he as a man has not sometimes had the thought that ‘if women weren’t people we’ (men, that is) ‘would all be free.’ As the denial of women’s personhood is the focal point of misogyny, I don’t think he can cite observations of his male and female patients’ thoughts about their mothers without reflecting that men’s perceptions and fantasies about women can never be free from the misogynist baggage that our culture has been carrying around for the past few millennia and that has infused much psychoanalytic thinking since Freud’s time. If women do ever consider that if we ‘weren’t people we would all be free’, this thought cannot possibly be the same one that Adam Phillips attributes to all of us, but actually addresses to his fellow men.
Linda Edmondson
Birmingham
