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fail on every future occasion to make use once more of her liability
to ill-health. Yet if her father refused to give way to her, I was quite
sure she would not let herself be deprived of her illness so easily.
This is pretty strong stuff, considering both the age and her age. I think,
moreover, that we are justified in reading an overdetermination out of
this utterance of Freud's and in suggesting that he had motives additional
to strictly therapeutic ones in saying what he did.
In a related sense Freud goes out of his way to affirm his entitle–
ment to speak freely and openly about sex -- he is, one keeps for–
getting, the great liberator and therapist of speech. The passage is worth
quoting at some length.
It
is possible for a man to talk to girls and women upon sexual
matters of every kind without doing them harm and without
bringing suspicion upon himself, so long as, in the first place, he
adopts a particular way of doing it, and, in the second place, can
make them feel convinced that it is unavoidable... . The best way
of speaking about such things is to be dry and direct; and that is at
the same time the method furthest removed from the prurience
with which the same subjects are handled in "society," and to
which girls and women alike are so thoroughly accustomed. I call
bodily organs and processes by their technical names. ...
J'app elle
un chat un chat.
I have certainly heard of some people -- doctors
and laymen -- who are scandalized by a therapeutic method in
which conversations of this sort occur, and who appear to envy
either me or my patients the titillation which, according to their
notions, such a method must afford. But I am too well acquainted
with the respectability of these gentry to excite myself over
them.... The right attitude is:
"pour fair une omelette il faut
casser des oeufs ."
I believe that Freud would have been the first to be amused by the
observation that in this splendid extended declaration about plain speech
(at this point he takes his place in a tradition coming directly down from
Luther), he feels it necessary to disappear not once but twice into
French. I think he would have said that such slips -- and the revelation
of their meanings -- are the smallest price one has to pay for the
courage to go on. And he goes on with a vengeance, immediately
following this passage with another in which he aggressively refuses to
moralize in any condemnatory sense about sexuality. As for the attitude
that regards the perverse nature of his patient's fantasies as horrible:
I should like to say emphatically that a medical man has no business
to indulge in such passionate condemnation.... We are faced by a
fact; and it is to be hoped that we shall grow accustomed to it,
when we have learned to put our own tastes on one side. We must
