Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Truth About Sigmund Freud

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

It's the one we've all been waiting for!The Oedipus Complex; the oral, anal and phallic stages; penis envy; psychoanalysis - we've all heard of Sigmund Freud's work. But who was he?What did Freud really think about sex and sexuality? What was his own sex life like? And finally, why do we owe so much of today's understandings of psychology to a woman called Anna O?Kate is joined by Carolyn Laubender, Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. Her previous book is 'The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century'.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwicks the Sheeds. And as you probably know, we do like to get a little bit smutty around here. But for some reason,

that isn't really clear to anybody, apart from the lawyers, I have to tell you that it's going to get a bit saucy around here. So here we go. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering arranged adult subjects,

and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning because, well, fair do's, we did tell you. it was going to get rude. Right, on with the show. Dreams of flying, dreams of falling, dreams of climbing, dreams where all your teeth are falling out. Have you ever had that one? That's a weird one. Slips of the tongue, jokes, painting, writing, inventing hysteria,

obsession, anxiety phobias, and what is sucking your thumb all about? All of these things, maybe not the teeth thing, but the rest of those things, Sigmund Freud linked to sex. Of course he did. He linked just about everything to sex. And I guess that is all something to do with the subconsciousness. Or it's something to do with Freud, but probably something to do with the subconsciousness. Shall we find out more about it? I think so. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Sigmund Freud is a man known as the father of psychoanalysis. Although with the work he would later do

on fathers and sons and what they wanted to do to their wives and mothers, I'm not sure he'd want that particular title, but father of psychology it is. And Freud liked to link things to sex. That was a big deal for him. But for a man who spent so much of his life, professionally analyzing the sex lives of other people, how is his own? What skeletons did Freud have rattling around in his closet? Today I'm joined by Carolyn Lawbender from the University of Essex to explore Freud's life and his theories on sex. And to ask the question, was he as kinky as you might expect him to be? Hmm. No pads at the ready, but Twixters, we're going in. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the sheets. It's only Carolyn Lawbender. How are you doing?

I'm wonderful. It's nice to be speaking with you. It's fabulous to be speaking with you. Do you know, I think this episode is actually long overdue. Mr. Freud, Professor Freud, Sigmund Freud. How have we been going for this long with a podcast about the history of sexuality and he hasn't had his own episode yet? Because love him or loathe him? He is incredibly important. He's so important, isn't he? They call him the father of psychology. Is that fair, do you think? The father of psychology is interesting because I think if you were like a 101 psychology student taking an introduction to psychology class, you'd maybe hear Sigmund Freud's name once in passing as a joke, maybe attached to kind of stage development, and then they'd very quickly move on.

He's certainly the father of psychoanalysis, but I think especially in like the Anglophone context, he's not as popular anymore in psychology. And there's a big distinction between psychoanalysis and psychology. Oh, is there? Can you explain what that difference is? That's probably really in depth, isn't it? That's probably very technical, but could you do it really quickly in simplified terms? Yeah, totally. I mean, psychoanalysis is super complicated and I'll do my best to like keep it in as slim in terms as we can. But like psychoanalysis for Freud was defined by like two key characteristics. One of them was a belief in the unconscious. And then the other was the idea of free association as a clinical technique. So these were like two key ideas that he came up with at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century that really distinguished him from his colleagues who were who were much more kind of focused on the brain, let's say, like neuroanatomy. Did he invent, discover the subconscious? Was he the first person to come up with this idea that there is something going on below the surface? No, he didn't.

He didn't at all. Even the word unconscious, and that's an important little distinction that Freud will insist on throughout his career, unconscious, not subconscious. But even the unconscious as a word had been in existence for at least 100 years. There's like, yeah, there's great writing on the romantics belief in the unconscious, philosophers use of, the unconscious, but they meant it in like a very different way than he meant it. So like what Freud did was sort of systematized the unconscious. And when I say like subconscious versus unconscious, the reason that we make that distinction is like a sub gives the idea of a space, like it's below something like it's hiding underneath the surface. And Freud thought of the unconscious is like a

process, not like a space so much. So he always was really active and insisting that it was something like unconscious rather than subconscious. It's all a bit nuanced. But he didn't invent the idea. Like a lot of his great ideas, he sort of picked them up from his collaborators, his colleagues, the literature around him. But what he always did was he sort of redescribe them or sort of reinvented them in a way that became utterly unique to him. Like him or loathe them, and many people feel strongly both ways, that is a big deal to come up. When you think about how we understand the psyche today and all the work that's been done in psychoanalysis and therapy and all. all this stuff, to someone to actually come along and go, there is an unconscious. That's huge.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, with Freud, I'm both a like him and a loatham. I'm sort of a love him and a loatham creature. Oh, very much. So I don't think that there's a way you can be like a feminist and a queer theorist and not have a really ambivalent relationship with Freud. I've spent a lot of my career kind of teasing out exactly what that relationship is. But yeah, he's for all of his faults and flaws of which there were many, he was an incredible thinker. an incredible thinker of his generation, for sure. And that, you know, that's like Carl Marx, for instance, you can say what you will about his ideas, but they were both incredible, you know, intellectuals of the 19th century. So before we get on to his, well, some of his theories and the work that he did, we should do a bit of a background on him because I don't know very much about him at all. Where did he even come from? Yeah, so Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th, 1856. So he was very much, he sort of transitioned from the end of the, 19th century into the 20th century. He lived until 1939, and he lived almost all of his life in the city that he both loved and hated Vienna. So he was Austrian. He was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. He came from a kind of complicated family background himself. His mother was his father's third wife, and she ended up being closer in age to some of his siblings than to his

own father. So there's all kinds of complexity in his own family background. But he grew up pretty middle class, he grew up as the academic star of his family for sure. He always had his own bedroom, despite the fact that he had six other siblings in the house. They all had to share one of the best stories that kind of shows how, how like prioritized Sigmund was within his family house growing up was that he had his own bedroom. And as a teenager who's like studying for exams, studying for exams. And all of a sudden, his sister Anna downstairs is playing the piano. And Freud hates music. He never comes around to it in his life. He hates it. So he gets really bothered by the sound of Anna playing the piano and he complains to his parents. It's like a 14 year old, you know, kid.

And all of a sudden, the piano is vanished from the household within a week. It just disappears from the household. So you can tell like how much his parents valued his academic future, his academic career. He became proficient in like eight languages by the time he'd finished university. He was really a star of classics. And he thought he was going to go into law when he was a university student. But he ended up becoming a medical researcher who worked on like the spinal cords of fishes and eels and then found his way from that into what would become psychoanalysis. So he was always very gifted, but he never really saw himself becoming a doctor, let alone a kind of, you know, a founder of an intellectual movement. That all came later. And when he's working, when he's

writing, this is such an interesting time when it comes to the study of sexology, but also the study of what would go on to become psychoanalysis because there's some crazy ideas going round at this point in the late 19th into the early 20th centuries. People are saying stuff that it's not that no one said it before, but like it's so radical. People saying maybe gay people aren't evil, things like that, like for the first time. And he's kind of fitting right into that. Yeah, sexology was one of the most important context for some of Freud's most interesting ideas, in my opinion, which are around sexuality. My view, you about Freud is that he was a theorist of sexuality and of sex and the libido. And these were some of

his major and most kind of stalwart contributions to psychology was insisting on the centrality of sex in the mind in our lives, all of that. And sexology was a really important intellectual and political context for him. So just to give some background in the 19th century, because I'm sure you know, many people don't spend their free time reading through the sexology of that period. sexuality, homosexuality in particular, but many forms of what they would at the time called perversion were criminalized throughout the 19th century. So it was a criminal offense, for instance, to commit an act of what was described as sodomy. Sodomy was a pretty capacious category at that time, and it could have been used to describe lots of different acts, sexual acts, let's say.

Yeah, it was a criminal offense. And so sexologists who were really varied about their own backgrounds. Some of them were anthropologists. Some of them were activists and social reformers. Some were scientists. Some were legal scholars. What they were doing was they were rethinking the idea of sexuality and the quote-unquote perversions. One of the most important terms for Freud and for sexologists working on what we now call homosexuality at the time was a concept they called inversion, which is again, it's what we now mean when we say homosexuality. But we actually didn't start using that word as a culture into the 1910s, something like that. Lots of early, even gay rights activists didn't like the word homosexuality. Hilariously, not for any reasons you might assume, but because it

as a word blended Latin and Greek together and they thought it was monstrous for, because if it's lexical, you know, it's lexical combinations. They were against as a word. They preferred the word inversion. But at the time, they were starting to think what they were doing was like, making essentially a legal argument for the right of homosexuals to not be imprisoned, like Oscar Wilde was during Freud's own lifetime, right? Like to not be imprisoned for criminal offenses for acts of sodomy. On the basis that homosexuality was a medical category, right, inversion. It was this inversion of the sexual instinct, as they were describing it at the time.

And so it's very pathologizing discourse in some ways to think of homosexuality in our contemporaries. way as like a medical pathology, everybody would be like, oh, you know, that's an incredibly homophobic and pathologizing way of thinking about sexuality. But at their own time, it was their attempt to not have it be a jailable offense, right? Like if it's a medical category, it's not something you can control. It's not something that you've chosen volitionally. It's not a sin even. It's a disease, right? These were the debates that were happening around the year, you know, 1890 into about 1900 when Freud was developing some of his most significant ideas around sexuality. And he starts writing this book called three essays on a theory of sexuality, which is actually on my shelf right

behind me. But he begins developing these ideas in around 1900. And then they culminate in the publication of three essays on a theory of sexuality in 1905. And essentially what this book does is it takes existing sexological theory at the time, this idea of inversion, this idea that homosexuality is a medical category, and it turns it all on its head. So Freud begins by thinking that the sexual instinct itself is entirely untethered from any objects in the world, meaning any other bodies. At the time, people thought that the sexual instinct was definitionally heterosexual. Like you're born with the sexual instinct, like a kind of, you know, like an animal instinct,

definitionally heterosexual. It's tied to members of the other sex. And so the idea of inversion is it's like if you're attracted to members of the same sex as you, then it's an inverted instinct. For it's like all instincts are the same. You know, it's simply the different, we attach to different objects in the world, meaning that everybody's equal in their sexuality. It sounds like a small idea at the time, but this was an abroarious suggestion, one that totally redefined the way we think about sexuality because it means that sexuality comes from internally. And it's just only kind of tangentially attached to the external world. There's nothing natural or innate about being attracted to one gender or the other gender.

And at various points Freud even says that a problem that we as a culture need to attend to is the exclusivity of heterosexual people's fixation on the opposite sex. Because the idea is if this entity, this instinct, is sort of like, and this is what he calls the libido, if this could attach to anything, then thinking about it kind of rationally, as he would say, right? It's just as much as of a problem that heterosexuals are so exclusively focused on the opposite sex as homosexuals being exclusively focused on the same sex. So he was decades, if not centuries ahead of his time in this suggestion about sexuality. And this is where you get, you know, Freud gets a really bad reputation around femininity, which is well earned. and we'll talk about that, I'm sure. But when it comes to his views on sexuality and the libido and homosexuality,

he never once said that gays and lesbians were pathological. He never once said that they should be certainly incarcerated or that it was a medical disease. All throughout the end of his career, he insisted that homosexuality was no disease, no sin, no vice, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. He pointed out that great artists and intellectuals, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, you know, arguably Shakespeare had homosexual inclinations. And he even said that if we think about the unconscious and its links to sexuality, it was the case that

we had, this is a direct quote from him in three essays, we have all made a homosexual object choice in our unconscious, meaning that, I mean, to use the parlance of today, everybody's a little bit gay, right? Like, we've all been homosexual. How early he was there. Absolutely. He was an early kind of queer theorist, if you want to think about it that way. He didn't fully understand sometimes the implications of what he was saying, but he absolutely said, we have all made a homosexual object choice in our unconscious.

We've all transgressed in our minds. See, that's light years ahead. But can I ask a question that I shouldn't really ask because as someone who studies sex, I get asked this question a lot and it kind of always irritates me. It's the question about your own sex life of like what? what is going on in your own sex life to make you want to research this? But with Freud in particular, I don't know anything about his personal life. Was he married? Was he a gay person himself? Was he swinging from the rafters in a fireman's helmet and a wetsuit all in the name of research? What was,

what was he doing that kind of led him to where he was? So Sigmund Freud led an incredibly conventional life according to every biography that's ever been written about him. So after he finishes his kind of medical studies or during his medical studies, he falls in love with a woman and has only ever been in love with a woman, one woman that we know of named Martha Bernays, who is living in Hamburg at the time. He falls very head over heels in love with her, but he's too poor to get married. So he's got to like bide its time for four or five years as he's establishing his career so that he has enough money to get married. And then he and Martha get married in 1896. And they pretty swiftly have six kids in eight years. Oh, Martha. Wow. Okay.

A true champion, Martha. A real champ, Martha. Way to power through. Yeah. After that, they have no more children. And what Freud writes about that is that it's because they stop having sex. So from about 1895, which is when his last child is born, Anna Freud, from about 1895 on, for it is more or less celibate and for it doesn't die till 1939. So you can do the math on exactly how long that is. But it's a good span of his adult life. And he kind of alludes to maybe little interludes with Martha, but really more or less celibate throughout his life.

And he lives in Vienna in his one house, 19 Burgasse, for until 1938. He lives with, you know, he raises his six children. He lives with Martha. The only kind of mar, if you will, on this kind of perfect middle-class, bourgeois, heterosexual life is rumors about his relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who moves in with the family fairly soon after he and Martha get married. Now, my kind of preface to this is that it wasn't super uncommon at the time for extended families to live together for years, decades. It's only a post-war invention, really, that we, it's like a nuclear family. set up in a single house. Minna never gets married herself. By all accounts, she's like the more

intellectual sister of the two Martha and Minna Bernays. And she moves in with the Freud's, yeah, in 1896, I believe it is. And she lives with the Freud's for the rest of their life, for the rest of her life. This becomes interesting and a little kind of gossipy because while Martha, for its wife, is raising these children, tending to the home, making lunch, or, ordering Freud his cigars, doing all of this domestic labor in the background, unpaid domestic labor, that's the condition of possibility for Freud's great, adventurous, intellectual life. She's not really talking to Freud about his ideas. She sometimes thinks that his ideas are, quote-unquote, pornographic.

So she doesn't really concern herself with Freud's theories, but her sister, Minna, does. So Minna becomes, for its intellectual companion, if you will, through the early 1900s all the way through to the end. Freud and her have long conversations. They take holidays together, sometimes unaccompanied holidays together. See, that's slightly more convincing that one. That would have raised an eyebrow at the time, I think. And I think actually that would today raise an eyebrow. If your mate was like, I'm going on holiday, you're going, all right, with the missis.

No, no, with the Mrs. Sister. Yeah. Yeah, it would, wouldn't it? It's a weird one. It's, yes. What do you think? Do you think they were? Oh, gosh, personally, I don't know. I sort of don't think so. And more than that, I think I'm a little suspicious of the rumor because it was first circulated by one of Freud's, I always think of them as his former boyfriends, but it was one of his disciples named Carl Jung, who's the

founder of analytic psychology, who Freud had a big falling out with from like 1912 to 1914. He and Young stopped speaking. It was bitter fracture. And Jung, they never forgave each other, right? And Freud has a bunch of these fallouts with his male disciples, breakups, if you will. Freud was heterosexual consciously throughout his life, but he had these attachments to men that ended disastrously. And, I mean, I'm talking about, you know, tens to dozens of them. And Carl Jung was one of the bitterest of them. And so Jung was the one that popularized this idea in the 1950s. So there's some element of like, you know, how much can you trust the gossip coming from your ex-mate, you know, who you've had a bit of a falling out with? But the most, I think the most interesting.

Yeah, they did. I was going to say the most interesting thing about the setup in the Freud household was that, again, not uncommon for people to be living together, extended family members, etc. What was a bit more uncommon was that if you visit the Freud Museum in Vienna now, which was the original house that Freud and Martha and their children and Minnell, lived in, you can see Freud's original bedroom. And it's only by going through Freud and Martha's bedroom that you can access Minna's bedroom. So her bedroom is like an, it's like an annexed room off of the back of Freud and Martha's bedroom, meaning every time she needed to go to her own bedroom, she had to pass through Freud and Martha's bedroom. I don't know what that means. It wouldn't stand up in a court a lot, would it? But that's an odd setup. It's unusual for sure. Yeah. And for

never commented on it, but he did once sign himself and Minna into a hotel in Switzerland as Mr and Mrs Freud. Oh, did he? You did. I'll be back with Carolyn and Freud after this short break. On record as to what Martha thought about him, because I'm just like trying to put myself in a position of like, like, you're, okay, it's your husband, you have sex with your husband until they're not.

But like he might write about it. Like, you're going to have sex with somebody he's going to put it in a book and then use this is a determining feature for the future of psychosexual analysis. That's a lot of pressure on Martha. Yeah. You know, Martha's an interesting figure in the history of psychoanalysis because, you know, insofar as I, in a lot of my work, I adopt a feminist approach to thinking about kind of historiography.

It was only because of Martha that Freud was able to be who he was able to be, right? It's Martha's unseen. Invisible labor of women. Indeed. Her unseen, unrecognized, constant. And by all accounts, very fastidious, prompt. She's a little bit frugal, but she's very organized as a background carer of the household. She makes sure that Fred gets his lunches.

She makes sure that the cigars that he smokes like 20 a day of are constantly replenished. She's the invisible force behind Freud's intellectual thought powerhouse is the way that he's able to work, which for Freud was incredible. He was an incredible workhorse. He would get up at seven every morning. He would see patients from eight in the morning until noon. He would take a break for lunch from 1 to 2 p.m. have a walk from 2 to 3 p.m. See patients from 3 to 9 p.m. And then only then start writing his correspondence and all of his many papers from 9 p.m. to 1 in the morning. Then he would go to bed, sleep until 7, press repeat. He did this six days a week for the entirety of his life. He never took. took a break except summer holidays when he went walking. Wow. He was a formidable worker, and he oftentimes said that the two main attributes of health were the ability to love and the ability to work. And he certainly had a huge capacity for the latter.

But it was to return to Martha, how was he able to do this? How was he able to be so focused on his work? How was he able to raise six children while keeping up this work schedule? It was because of Martha. It was because of the kind of the environment of care that she provided the family with. And that's been very ill-recognized in a lot of psychoanalytic history. It's the hero. And then Martha disappears into the background.

How do you go about starting to see? Because now, like, rightly, there is rigorous training and qualifications that you have to have to be able to start treating somebody in a therapeutic way. Did he have any of that? Like the confidence of this man to kind of go, one, well, I'm supposed to be studying fish spines, but I'm going to do a slight detour and I'm going to start researching psychosexuality. And I'm going to take on patience as well. Like that, that takes some hutspur, doesn't it? Absolutely. Freud did not lack for confidence either. You know, thinking back to his upbringing in the way his, yeah, the way his parents treated him. He was always exceptionalized. He always expected great things from himself. And he certainly was not one to question him. let's say. Sometimes it would have benefited him more to question himself. But yeah, especially in conflicts with some of his followers, his disciples, he was very committed to the validity of his own beliefs.

But how he starts kind of thinking about psychoanalysis is distinct from like, you know, neuroanatomy, which is what he was doing at the time, like the idea that are traumas, right? At the time he was working on hysteria, that this idea of hysteria comes from brain trauma. This was the dominant view at the time. Either that it was hereditary, you know, you passed it down through your body to your children or that it was like a kind of anatomical lesion. It was a trauma. It was a physiological thing. So he's working on this idea of hysteria in the 19th century right before he begins to develop psychoanalysis. And what he comes to increasingly think about is that it's not physical, it's purely mental. And I, you know, that sounds like a very familiar idea to us now. But Freud really

invents this idea that there is a purity of mental suffering disconnected from the mind or from the brain as like a physical entity, right? So he's starting to think about trauma in a purely mental way as about experience. Hysteria as a kind of suffering that's entirely unrelated to like a bang on the head or something they used to call railway spine or like all these different kinds of physiological lesions. And he starts thinking about it as something to do purely with with the way that we process things psychologically. He comes to this. That's very modern to me. That sounds very modern and very familiar. Hugely, hugely so. This is how he gets the idea of the quote unquote talking cure, which was actually not a phrase he used. It was a phrase of one of his colleagues' patients, her pseudonym in the case study

that was written about her is Anna O. Her real name is Bertha Popenheim. And she was a patient of his mentor, for its mentor, Yosef Brewer. And it's this idea of the talking cure that becomes characteristic of psychoanalysis. And now has, you know, it was the basis of all the talking therapies we have now, all talking therapies. And there are many, many, many, many of them that are different from psychoanalysis. But they owe an original debt back to this one patient, not just, it's not Freud's not even Freud's colleague, it's a patient who becomes herself a quite vocal philanthropists and activist after she goes through some traumatic experiences with Yosef Brewer. But Freud develops these ideas that he's working on in part through seeing these hysterical

patients and starting to think, wow, maybe the trauma isn't physical. But he also develops it through his own self-analysis, which is a process he carries out from like 1896 to 1900 or so. He publishes it as a book called The Interpretation of Dreams. In that book, you have a bunch for its own dreams. And basically what he's doing in this is he's dreaming at night. He comes up with psychoanalysis by dreaming. There's no other way to put it. He's dreaming at night. And he's writing his dreams down and what he calls free associating to them. At the beginning of this, we kind of, I mentioned that free association was one of the key characteristics of psychoanalysis. What he means by this is like he's thinking about the dream as like little parts and all of the

associations that those little parts can call up. And he's, will go on for sometimes 19, 20 pages for a dream that took up no more than a paragraph, right? He's following this chain of associations. Anywhere and everywhere, it'll take him. But it's through his own process of self-analysis as a form of writing, interestingly, that he begins to come up with what becomes psychoanalysis as a form of talking cure. And it's Bertha Popenheim or Anna O. That names it this.

Well, thank you, Anna O. Now, you've mentioned a couple of times now that he has a history of false. falling out with his mates. And I'm very curious, what do you have to do to fall out with Freud? Like, where are the boundaries? Who was he falling out with and what was it about? So sometimes with Freud, you didn't have to do very much to fall out with him. Sometimes you had to do a lot, but sometimes you didn't have to do very much. In his autobiography, Freud once wrote that he throughout his life, he always found the great need for a friend and an enemy. And what was true throughout his life was that the distance between a friend and an enemy sometimes was just a matter

of time, right? Like, he would turn some of his closest friends into his enemies, sometimes quickly, sometimes after 10 years, but it was a common trajectory that they took. So from- It's coming, basically. It's coming, yeah. It was hard for him to have long loyalty to friends. Most of these fallings out were over-intellectual differences. Some of them were personal, but most of them were over intellectual disagreements and differences. Some of the people that he fell out with was his original mentor named Joseph Brewer, who I just mentioned. Freud got very petty with him.

One of the things that featured into their eventual fallout was that Brewer was like 20 years older than Freud when he was like a struggling med student. And Brewer lent Freud some money. So he like did a good deed. And then Freud got pretty surly that Brewer wouldn't let him pay back the money. And this was one of the features of their falling out. But they disagreed about. the role of sexuality in what they called neurosis or kind of human suffering, let's say.

Then there was Wilhelm Fleiss, who was like one of Freud's closest collaborators when he was coming up with the ideas of psychoanalysis, the unconscious in particular. Freud would write impassioned letters to Fleiss that began with things like my beloved Fleiss, you have such had such a great impact on me, right? The really effusive, almost romantic language. he and Fleiss were kind of in daily correspondence. He would tell Fleiss how much he missed him, how much he relied on his correspondence, how much he was his only true intellectual companion, right?

Like this kind of very, again, romantic language around their friendship. Imagine waking up to that as a voice note of just like someone you were working with. That would be terrifying. Was it reciprocated though? Did he get letters back going, God, yeah, you're brilliant too? Very much so, very much so. I mean, by all accounts, you know, Fleiss and Freud were. were kind of, they had an intellectual love affair. Freud was, again, he was heterosexual

consciously, but he would be the first to acknowledge that these relationships with men, these passionate relationships with men, drew on a deep reserve of homosexual, unconscious homosexual energy, right? That this was pulling from something in the unconscious for him, because the way that he would fall out with these men was not just like, you know, we disagree and that's okay. It was like, you know, you're dead to me and I'm not ever going to, hey, I'm not going to correspond with you ever again. So you have Wuhan Flaise and then you have some people who become significant figures in the history of psychology in their own right. So Alfred Adler and Freud disagreed about the role of aggression in human life. And Freud expels Adler on that basis. And Adler goes off and founds his own kind of individual psychology. He, Freud and Carl Jung disagree about kind of what Freud calls the libido, again about sexuality and whether there's just one sexual libido in the mind. And then, you know, Young breaks off and founts his own kind of analytic psychology school. So throughout his life, he's got many of these kind of breakdowns that are about psychoanalysis,

but they're also about something more personal for Freud, right? He needs a friend and an enemy, even if that means sometimes that he has to invent his own enemy. God, wow. I mean, he sounds intense, doesn't he? One of the areas where a lot of people start to go, all right, Freud, why don't you just take a few, seats over there and we'll just rethink this one. Is his theories about women in particular? He seems to, it's like, we're with him up to like, oh, it's very clever.

There's a subconscious. That's very good. Oh, talking cure. That's very good. Trauma as being not something physical. That's very good. And then penis envy? Freud?

Pardon? What was that? Like, what are some of the things he says about women? And why are they so controversial even today? Yeah. I mean, I'm willing to agree that they're more than just controversial. Fritz has some outright misogynistic ideas. They're a little bit more complicated than oftentimes like what's painted in popular culture and stuff. But he was a creature of his time in some ways.

And many of his ideas did bear the mark of that, you know, that sexism, that misogyny. But the way that I like to kind of explain Frid's theory of femininity, which is problematic, but his whole kind of understanding of psychosexual development, if you will, is through, by talking about the Oedipus complex, which is, again, one of these big terms that you oftentimes hear, like the ego, which is associated with Freud, and, you know, gets a lot of traffic in popular culture, even in TV and movies and stuff. So in the Oedipus complex, this Eidepid's way of describing sort of how we become socialized as sexual beings, right? Like, how does our sexuality go from this, like, instinctual thing in our bodies, which for Freud, he would describe it in children as, as polymorphously perverse, meaning that it was like freewheeling, right?

It was like sexuality for children is like, children are fascinated by their bodies. They're fascinated by, you know, excrement. Their bad smells. They're very licentious creatures in some ways. So it's disorganized. Their sexuality is very disorganized. And Freud is like,

they don't know what it is, but they are very physical little things, but they don't have an adult understanding of it. Absolutely non-adult, non-ducedure. genital understanding of their bodies and pleasure, right? Entirely disorganized, their understanding of sexuality is like nothing near our own. So Freud begins to ask himself the question of like, well, how does sexuality get organized into this like genital, adult, reproductive form that we recognize it in now?

How is sexual orientation even produced? And it's produced by this mechanism called the Oedipus Complex, which when I describe it, I like to tell it as a little story. So the story goes a little something like this. Mommy has had a child, and we can call him Johnny. And for the first few years of Johnny's life, Johnny is being cared for primarily by Mommy. And Johnny's like, this is great. Johnny and Mommy are going around like bang, gangbusters. Johnny's having a fantastic time with Mommy. He becomes increasingly attached to Mommy as a result of all of the care that she provides him with. And it's like,

things are going real smooth between Johnny and Mommy. Johnny even starts to feel like, hey, this mommy lady, she's a good one. Maybe I make her mom. my wife, right? And you see, you hear little children, they don't know what it means, but they'll say, you know, like, I want to marry mommy. You'll hear little kids say things like this all the time. So, and this is like, this is a mark of the attachment between the mother or any primary caregiver and the child. And so Freud says that this happens for the first few years of the child's life, right? It's Johnny and Mommy and Johnny's having a great time and things are all going very well for him. And then all of a sudden, this motherfucker called daddy comes on the scene. And dad, and dad,

is no good news for Johnny. Daddy's been in the background for a while. And again, let's remember that this is the 19th century. We've got clear gendered divisions of labor. This is all very heterosexual, right? But like, right, so daddy's been sort of in the background. He's been doing his work. He's been providing for the family. But he's not really been featuring very much in Johnny's life. He's like, you know, he's a background character. He's a supporting act. But all of a sudden, when the child is between like three to five years old, daddy becomes a more forceful presence in Johnny's life. Daddy starts to intercede into the union of Johnny and Mommy. Daddy starts to say things like, no, you can't keep sleeping with Mommy all the time. Mommy's mine.

Or no, don't touch yourself. This is the most kind of like crass version. No, you can't touch yourself in front of Mommy. That's not okay. If you touch yourself, I'm going to cut it off. I'm going to cut your penis off. Because in the story that Freud tells, the child is always male. So daddy becomes this threatening and even violent figure. I don't mean that he's hitting the child. I mean that it's a psychic violence, right? The threat, the threat of castration. But the symbolic takeaway here is just that the father interrupts this happy union between Johnny and Mommy.

The father sort of issues an ultimatum to Johnny. He says emotionally even. He says something like, you have to give up mommy as your primary love or I'm going to castrate you, but symbolically it'd be like, I'm going to harm you in some way, right? There's a threat here. You have to do this. You have to give up mommy. Otherwise, there's some bad thing that's going to happen to you, a spanking, let's say, something like this. This produces a real anxious situation for little Johnny who's like, he loves mommy. Mommy's his, right? Like, he's grown up his whole little life thinking he and Mommy are the team. And now this guy, daddy's like, no,

you can't be with Mommy anymore. This is a big moment for the child because he's never really had to lose anything before, right? His possession of mommy is pretty exclusive. So this is the Oedipus complex for Freud, right? And this is a moment where the child enters a deep crisis because he's got two alternatives. Either he can hang on to mommy and he risks this violence from daddy or he can give up mommy the great love of his life and seed to his father's law, what Jacques LaCon calls the law of the father, seed to authority in a social Like the prohibition against incest is like a founding mandate of civil society. He can accept this mandate, which Levi Strauss, the anthropologist, talks about and move out into society, but he's got to leave Mommy behind.

This is a situation that children find themselves in kind of emotionally. They're never really conscious of it. But it's about loss and it's about having to accept social regulations on what you can and can't do in public, on who you can't love, this sort of thing, and move into a kind of. wider social contract. The child experiences this is a really, really deep crisis for it. It's like, you know, Johnny's like, I can't, I can't do either one. I've got a lot of anxiety. I'm really, I love daddy, but at the same time, I'm afraid of him, and I love mommy, and I can't let her go. And this becomes a crisis for the child that the child lingers in for a while. Freud says, and this is where we get back to femininity and some of his more problematic claims about women. But Freud says that

the child lingers in this etapole dilemma until eventually he quote unquote catches sight of the female genitals. So he catches sight of a little girl's vagina, maybe even his mother's vagina, the female genitalia in general. And suddenly, and this is, again, this is Freud's story, not mine. I will debate it with him, but suddenly the little boy recognizes that castration is real. He sees the little girl's genitals and he suddenly recognizes that there are creatures in the world without a penis. Freud thinks that this essentially accounts to the child going, oh my God, daddy can do it. Daddy's done it to other people, right? Like, look, you can be castrated.

I was kind of with you until this. Yeah. Now it's kind of, now we're off, aren't we? Yeah, now we are. Okay, all right, so castration is featuring very heavily. Continue. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're off in the woo-woo.

I agree entirely. This view that castration is possible. suddenly settles the matter for Johnny. Johnny's like, fuck it. It's not worth the risk, right? Like, I, if daddy's got this kind of power, I will let, I will accept daddy's law. I will let daddy have mommy. I will find my own wife. So the child represses the love for the mother or the love for any primary caregiver, represses it. It becomes unconscious. Indeed, this is sort of how the unconscious is formed in Freud's early understandings of it. And then he moves his desire out into the world in search of a new object when eventually puberty kind of takes over and this becomes a purely sexual desire.

This is how sexuality kind of gets organized for it in the body. This is how sexuality gets organized, certainly, into sexual identities. But as you like rightly picked up on right away, and as, you know, when I'm teaching this stuff, my students are like, wait. It really hinges on the idea that female sexuality is like castration to use some of Freud's other famous language about it. It's loss, it's mutilation, its lack, its inferiority. These are all direct quotes from Freud's actual writings about female sexuality. So it casts female sexuality both in bioanatomy but also in a psychic way as inferiority. Plain and simple, as loss, as lack. He describes it at some point as a dark continent, which, you know, is interestingly racialized as well.

So he's got a view, he kind of continues a view. of women and female sexuality that really participates in a longstanding sexist logic, discourse, whatever, that's well established in the West at the time. I'll be back with Carolyn and Freud after this short break. He plays into a narrative that he didn't invent this. This goes right back to when we were first scrolling on walls, I'm sure, is that the vagina isn't a sex organ in its own right with its own instructions and its own pleasures. What he sees it as is an absence of a penis.

That seems to underpin quite a lot of his theories, which is that lack thing that you were talking. Is that where his penis envy theory comes from? Yes. That we're all thinking, God, I wish I had one of them. Yes. I mean, I think that you pretty accurately captured some of, yeah, some of the way Freud thinks about it, which is as lack, as loss.

So in this account that Freud is giving, he begins, and most of his writings continue to talk about the little boy. He doesn't talk about Johnny. That's just my personification, if you will. He always speaks from the position of the male child. And everything is, as feminist philosopher Helen Sizu, describes it, phallocentric, right? It's all focused on the penis. Everything is about, do you have a penis? Don't you have a penis? The penis is, you know, your access to social power. It's your, it's the only genital organ that's visible, that's recognizable, et cetera, et cetera, all of this very overtly sexist and misogynistic language. And so where the idea of penis is, you know,

NB comes from. And this is a Freudian idea. Unlike some of the ideas that get misattributed to him, like the electrocomplex that is not a Freudian idea, penis envy is. He says that women have penis envy. And what he means by this is that little girls also recognize the power and the importance of the penis and they recognize that they do not have it. And he believes that this causes a kind of physical, if you will, envy. If you want to give Freud the benefit of the death, or if you want to think about how this theory is useful beyond its sort of sexist reduction of women's sexuality to just a penis or not a penis or whatever. The way they do it is to think about the penis as a symbol. It's not really about whether or not you have this material organ attached

to your body, and this is an argument that will be made by one of his French interpreters, Jacques Lacan. It's not really about the flesh, right? What it's about is how the flesh connects to social power. So Lacan reinterprets Freud's work thinking about not the penis but the phallus. And the phallus is a symbolic representation of masculine power in patriarchy. So what this means is like, you know, little girls and little boys pick up on the fact that little boys get treated very differently than little girls do in a patriarchical society. Even the way that we describe children's like activity levels and accomplishments, all of this is very gendered language. and children are astute observers, astute little anthropologists of power

and who get special privileges and what sorts of privileges they get, et cetera. So the phallus becomes a representation for the child of the ability to access patriarchal masculine power. And so if you think about penis envy... Yeah, it's, indeed, there's a way to understand it less anatomically that's about the unequal distribution of power in patriarchy.

And this is the way that a lot of, lot of his feminist reinterpreters, and Freud does have stalwart defenders who are feminists. The scholar named Juliet Mitchell will describe Freud as providing one of the best, not recommendations for a patriarchy, but one of the best descriptions of it. What she means by that is that Freud gives us a really comprehensive account of what happens to women who are raised within a patriarchy. the kinds of psychic manipulations and torsions that people who are raised as cis women go through in a patriarchical society. So what she says her interpretation is Freud isn't recommending this, right? This is Juliette Mitchell's argument.

This isn't Freud's recommending it. He's not prescribing this. He's not saying that this is the way that women should feel. He's saying that this is what happens to women who are not, for instance, granted social recognition and social power. And really importantly, one of the things that Julietette Mitchell's picking up on here is the fact that Freud's patients, many of whom he was seeing in the 1890s into the 1920s, were described as quote-unquote hysterics. Many of them were women. And many of them were women who were themselves really disempowered and dispossessed of any kind of social role. So they were young women who were kind of promised a better life, but who somehow ended up as nursemaids, as carers. as providers of emotional care for their family, especially ailing members of their family.

And then they, too, started to get sick. So if you kind of think about it as a social equation, what it tells us is that, you know, there's this envied item, if you will. You can call it the fallacy if you want, but it's a representation of patriarchical power, which in a patriarchy, many people want access to. And it doesn't have as much to do with the bioanatomy of the organs. Freud was about the anatomy of the organs. It's just, you know, this is a way of understanding it that takes the value of his ideas without some of the more sexist attributes of them.

The one point, though, that I think that people are going to struggle to try and reclaim from that and to say, no, no, no, that's not what he meant. It's actually feminist. Was his ideas about clitoral and vaginal orgasms? If I had him in a room, I'd hit him with a chair, quite frankly, for that one. Because I didn't even think that was like the main,

thrust, one of a better word, of his research. It was just like a little thing with a good pun. That he did. But his ideas about how clitoral orgasms were psychologically immature and vaginal orgasms are the way to go, that's set in motion a whole load of wank that was still unpicking to this very day. And Freud, oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. I, yeah. So Freud, you know, in these psychosexual stages, oral, anal, phallic genital, which are some of the, the few things, that make their way into psychology textbooks. They're not the most interesting part of Freud, if you ask me, but this is one of the things that you could find in a psychology textbook, perhaps. In Freud's understanding of this like progression, if you will, of sexuality through the human body, oral, anal, phallic genital,

he thinks about phallic sexuality is something that children of both sexes, that they both share. So phallic sexuality is located with the penis and then in girls with the clitoris. And as you're rightly pointing out, he thinks that when girls mature into women and a kind of adopt a true feminine attitude, this sexuality changes into what he calls genital or vaginal, right? And this is his kind of belief that women's sexual pleasure becomes eventually vaginal rather than clitoral. I think you're right, there's no real reclaiming that. It's a legacy of its time. I don't find it particularly useful or necessary. He wasn't the only one saying that stuff at the time. There was other people. It was sort of in the mix, definitely. Yeah, absolutely. With Freud,

there's a couple ways to think about him. One is that there are many different Freud's, many different versions of him. He wrote copiously throughout his life thousands and thousands of pages, sometimes thousands per year. So in this excess of writing, you have lots of different of his ideas, some of which contradict each other. So you've got lots of different versions of Freud. Do you want to go with the Freud who's a queer liberator or the Freud who's kind of a normative developmentalist. Do you want to go with the Freud who's a racist or the Freud who's kind of great defender of racial difference? Do you want to go with the Freud who's a sexist or the Freud who's kind of describing a patriarchy? There are different ways of interpreting him.

Be that as it may, I don't think all of Freud's ideas need to be recuperated, right? We don't need to hang on to this idea of like clitoral versus vaginal orgasms. And so there are elements of his work that are just products of his own thinking or products of the time. And yeah, there's no reason that I guess they need to be carried forward. Carolyn, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for telling us about this fascinating and very complex human being. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I'm currently working on a book on Freud. Actually, it'll be out in the next year or so with Oxford University Press. Oh, fabulous. Well done. Oh, yeah. Thank you. It was

never something I intended to do because, as we've been talking about Freud's work is It's so expansive, and there's already so much written about Freud, but I was very fortunate to be commissioned by them to write this kind of really slender little introduction to his theories, which, as you could probably tell from this interview, I tend to like his theories better than biography. So that'll be out in the coming year. My first book is actually on psychoanalysis in a post-Froidian way. So I'm looking at the people, many of whom are women, that come after Freud and the kind of legacy of their clinical work. And that's the book title is The Political Clinic, Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the 20th century. Well, thank you so much for dropping by the betwixt couch. You have been spectacular. Thank you so much, Kate, for the time. I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Carolyn for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is. You get your podcasts. We've got a lot coming up in the new year from Who Was Filthier, the Romans or the medieval people, to the worst breakups of all time. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The Senior Producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society,

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