EDITH KURZWEIL
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fainting, and so on. In fact, what these women told him made Freud real–
ize that they had become sick because they were unable to give voice to
what offended their families, mostly their fathers; that they had to suppress
obvious truths in order to get along; and that in their milieu, for the sake
of family loyalty and conventions, they had to fool themselves into believ–
ing that what they knew were lies.
Still, many middle-class Viennese women did not fool themselves.
Instead of malingering, they started feminist movements, such as the
Women's Employment Association, the Vienna Women's Club, and the
Athenaum, to combat the taken-for-granted chauvinism. Of course, their
feminism was not our feminism: they were idealists and were envisioning
a new social order. Thus they had to face entrenched conservative pressures
that blamed women for every ill of society-for degenerate sexuali ty and
loose morals, for being bad mothers, bad childbearers, and dissatisfied hys–
terical hermaphrodites. It was assumed that women's rights movements
were no more than "organized social envy," and a boon to prostitution
parading as high-minded sexual politics.
Most of the women who ended up on Freud's couch did not join any
of these feminist crusades. They suffered from what we might call the
worst-case scenarios-living in typical Viennese families that took for
granted that women were able
to
deal only with
Kinder, Kirche,
and
Kiiche.
No matter what their ambitions or daydreams, they were excluded from
intellectual and professional activities. The middle- or upper-middle-class
women who came to rally around Freud-whatever their theoretical dis–
agreements with him eventually would be-were among those who refused
to accept this role. For them, psychoanalysis offered a means to explore their
situation in order to change it. They were aware of the push for liberation
by artists and writers, and wanted to help build a democratic society.
Because they belonged to this liberal climate, they wanted to find out why
women were being kept down, and looked for the unconscious, emotional
clues that might help them find the courage to fight first for their own
emancipation, and then for that of all women. Thus they were in sympathy
with the feminist leaders who addressed the inequalities around them head
on-inequalities between the rich and the poor, and between the sexes.
Freud's original insight-that his first patient's, Anna O's, symptoms to
a large extent were manifestations of societal problems and norms-is at
the root of today's misunderstandings of his ideas as well as of his contin–
uing fame. Indeed, all of his early cases were women, because they were
the ones who bore the psychological burdens of the existing-and lop–
sided---social order. lnevi tably, Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) was only one
among many who chafed under the irrational yoke imposed on her. We
know that according to her, her analysis was not successfuL Nevertheless,
