Parker, I. (2003) ‘The psychogenesis of the ego: Notes on Freud’s “case of
homosexuality in a woman”’, Psychodynamic Practice, 9, (1), pp. 71-80.
The psychogenesis of the ego:
Notes on Freud’s ‘case of homosexuality in a woman’
IAN PARKER
ABSTRACT This paper examines Freud’s (1920) case study ‘The psychogenesis of
homosexuality in a woman’ in the light of the second topography that was being
elaborated in his theoretical writing at that time. The analysis of the ego and its defence
mechanisms, which was to become such an important part of clinical technique in
Anglo-American psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic
counselling, is not set out explicitly in any of Freud’s case studies. However, in this last
case study presented by Freud, it is possible to see how an attention to family dynamics,
Oedipal structures and patterns of identification set the stage for the new notion of the
ego to emerge. This ‘turning point’ in theory and clinical technique is also, in this case,
intimately related to theories of sexuality, and Freud’s own assumptions about
homosexuality and heterosexuality are considered here in relation to his account of the
ego.
KEYWORDS Freud, ego, homosexuality, lesbianism, feminism, Oedipus,
heterosexuality, identification
INTRODUCTION
It is commonly agreed that there was a ‘turning-point’ in Freud’s writing in 1920. It was
only then, in his ‘second topography’, that the concept of the ego took on a strict
‘technical and psycho-analytic sense’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p. 130). The
notion of the ego had been deployed in some of Freud’s first case studies, for example
in the case of Lucy R (Breuer and Freud, 1895). However, the ‘turning point’ was to
turn into a warrant for a form of psychoanalysis popular in US America after Freud’s
death, that of ego-psychology, and the ego would then become the centre of attention.
As Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) point out, an ‘essential modification’ was made in
1920, and the best-known characters in post-war psychoanalysis then make their
appearance: ‘It is the active parties in the conflict – the ego as a defensive agent, the
super-ego as a system of prohibitions, the id as the instinctual pole – which are now
elevated to the rank of agencies of the psychical apparatus’ (p. 138). This also means
that consciousness, the pre-conscious and the unconscious are now seen as properties of
the ego. The way is set for the aim of psychoanalysis to be the draining of the id so that
the ego’s grip might become more extensive and secure, an aim later formulated as
‘Where id was, there ego shall be. It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining of
the Zuider Zee’ (Freud, 1933, p. 112). Already, with the ‘turning-point’, all of the
operations of the mind are conceptually arrogated to the ego.
Some anticipation of the ways in which clinical technique in psychoanalysis
would follow on from this theoretical shift in Freud’s understanding of the ego are to be
found in his case study, also published in 1920, ‘The psychogenesis of a case of
homosexuality in a woman’ (Freud, 1920). Freud’s account also highlights some other
theoretical consequences of turning to the ego and its mechanisms of defence as a key
site of psychoanalytic interest. While Freud is often taken to task for daring to ask about
the ‘psychogenesis’ of homosexuality, as if heterosexuality was the normal sexual
orientation against which its deviations might be measured, and we will turn to this
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question in a moment, one of the key issues in this case is how the psychogenesis of the
ego is being developed by him as part of the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis.
Let us turn to the young woman.
THE WOMAN
She was a ‘beautiful and clever girl of eighteen’, Freud (1920) says, who had been sent
to him by her parents because they were concerned at the ‘devoted adoration’ she
showed to a “society lady” some ten years older than herself (p. 371). They were
especially worried after an incident in which the father encountered her out walking
with the lady, and she threw herself down a railway cutting, injuring herself badly
enough to be confined to bed for a while. This incident, understood by her parents to be
an attempt at suicide, prompted them to turn her over to Freud about six months later
‘with the task of bringing their daughter back to a normal state of mind’ (p. 373).
“How very interesting”
Freud suspected that this request meant that he should cure her of the ‘homosexuality’
that concerns them, that particularly enrages the father, and Freud makes it clear that he
was only prepared ‘to study the girl carefully for a few weeks or months’ before he
could make a judgement about how far the analysis could go (p. 376). The meetings
with the young woman, by some accounts, lasted 11 weeks, the same period of time that
Freud (1905) saw Dora many years before (Merck, 1993). Unlike Dora and most of
Freud’s other cases, this young woman was never given even given a pseudonym,
which serves, O’Connor and Ryan (1993) argue, all the more to distance and objectify
her as an instance of abnormal sexual orientation. Like Dora, the young woman is
unimpressed with Freud’s theoretical explanation of the ‘attitude of defiance and
revenge against her father which held her fast to her homosexuality’ and, to Freud’s
evident annoyance, she comments “How very interesting” (p. 390).
After meeting something akin to what he sees as an obsessional neurotic tactic
of maintaining a ‘protective barrier’ against the analyst, in which there is a secure
‘mental reservation of doubt’, Freud retreated: ‘As soon, therefore, as I recognised the
girl’s attitude to her father, I broke off the treatment and advised her parents that if they
set store by the therapeutic procedure it should be continued by a woman doctor’ (p.
391). There is, in Freud’s response, then, a series of assumptions about the nature of
identification, transference and therapeutic alliance.
Stage one
Freud takes pains in his account of the case to explain that this was not really a
psychoanalysis. It is worth noting that this is not because, as Freud puts it, ‘the girl was
not in any way ill’ (p. 375). She showed no neurotic symptoms, and did not complain
about her condition. It is the unwillingness on her part to recognise that there was a
problem and seek help for it, rather than the absence of a problem as such, that was the
key issue.
The young woman had been sent to Freud by her parents, and Freud anticipates
what was to become one of the key motifs of later US American psychoanalysis to
explain why it is necessary that those seeking ‘treatment’ should themselves look to an
analyst to deal with ‘an inner conflict’ that they are unable to resolve alone. It is only
when the patient wants to change that the analyst can work ‘hand in hand with one
portion of the pathologically divided personality, against the other party in the conflict’
(p. 374). Implicit though it may be in this case, it also seems that already for Freud here,
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there are underlying notions about how the identifications that structure the ego of the
patient make certain kinds of therapeutic alliance possible and certain kinds of alliance
impossible, certain kinds of alliance with certain kinds of analyst. Freud concludes that
because he is a man, and so standing in the place of her father in the transference, he
cannot make the right kind of alliance with the young woman.
It was only possible in this case, Freud argues, to go to the first stage of the
journey that is a full psychoanalysis. Where he has got up to is only to the completion of
the preparations for the journey proper, for getting a ticket for a seat on the train. This
might be a complicated process, and when Freud is writing in the aftermath of the First
World War it was indeed difficult to obtain train tickets to another country. But one has
not really got anywhere yet: ‘For this to happen one has to make the journey itself from
one station to the other, and this part of the performance may well be compared with the
second phase of the analysis’ (p. 377).
IDENTIFYING THE SITES OF CONFLICT
Freud does not explicitly organise his account around the notion of the ego, or
formations of the ego like the ideal-ego, ego-ideal or super-ego. However, the image of
the ego that will emerge after the 1920 ‘turning point’ in Freud’s work is quite clearly
visible in his account of family dynamics, Oedipal structure and then patterns of
identification in the course of the patient’s childhood development and later in the
clinic.
Family dynamics
Freud spends some time puzzling over the investments of the father and the mother in
the development of their daughter and her predicament when they brought her to Freud
to be sorted out. In the case of the father, ‘he had to some extent estranged his children
by the sternness he had adopted towards them. His treatment of his only daughter was
too much influenced by considerations for his wife. When he first came to know of his
daughter’s homosexual tendencies he flew into a rage and tried to suppress them by
threats’ (p. 373). The mother, on the other hand, ‘enjoyed her daughter’s confidence’ in
the first stages of her ‘infatuation’ with the older woman, but had then become worried
by the ‘harmful publicity with which the girl displayed her feelings’ (p. 374).
With the birth of a younger son, who is ‘overindulged’ by the mother, the
daughter reacts. The son appears when she is 16 years old, at a moment when she has, it
seems, herself harboured feelings of wanting a child. There is, then, something of a
picture of family pathology being conjured up in Freud’s account. Freud argues that part
of the defensive strategy that the young woman uses to deal with disappointment with
her father, and the competition with her mother for her father’s love, competition that
she realises that she is destined to lose, is that she then ‘“retired in favour of” her
mother’, that is ‘the girl became homosexual and left men to her mother’ (p. 385). It
was ‘remarkable’, Freud says, ‘that both parents behaved as if they understood their
daughter’s secret psychology. The mother was tolerant, as though she appreciated her
daughter’s “retirement” as a favour to her; the father was furious, as though he realized
the deliberate revenge directed against himself’ (p. 386). This is the setting, then, for a
certain configuration of identifications with each parent as the daughter grows up and is
then disappointed.
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Oedipal structure
Freud says that ‘the girl had passed through the normal attitude characteristic of the
feminine Oedipus complex’ (p. 380). In this case, her attachment to her father had been
replaced with an attachment to a brother slightly older than herself, but it was the birth
of the third, younger, brother, when she was about 16 that had structured how she
experienced and worked through the ‘revival of her infantile Oedipus complex at
puberty’. It was at this point that ‘she suffered her great disappointment’ (p. 383). It was
at this point, ‘that what she desired was her father’s child and an image of him’ (p. 383).
The disappointment of this wish led her to turn away from men, but to find then a ‘ladylove’ who was simultaneously a ‘substitute’ for her mother and a stand in for the
slightly older brother: ‘Her lady’s slender figure, severe beauty, and downright manner
reminded her of her brother’ (p. 382).
It is clear here that the replaying of the feminine Oedipal structure of
identification with the parent of the same sex and attachment to the parent of the other
sex was conditioned by the particular structure of this family. Freud argues that her
choice ‘corresponded, therefore, not only to her feminine but also to her masculine
ideal; it combined satisfaction of the homosexual tendency with that of the heterosexual
one’ (p. 382). The stage is set, then, for certain family dynamics operating in tandem
with Oedipal structure to arrange certain patterns of identification.
Pattern of identification
Once such identifications are in place, identifications that will structure the ego, certain
kinds of defence mechanisms will be employed to protect the ego. Freud here does not
explicitly identify different kinds of defence mechanisms that must be interpreted and
worked through in the process of analysis, but his description of the ways in which the
young woman resists his attempt to take the analysis from the first stage of buying the
ticket to the second stage of actually embarking on the journey of psychoanalysis does
employ various notions of defence. And the defences that she uses to resist Freud replay
those that she has used to survive her family. For example, when her desire to bear a
child is disappointed, and it is ‘her unconsciously hated rival, her mother’ who gives
birth to the youngest brother, she is ‘furiously resentful and embittered’, and ‘she turned
away from her father and from men altogether’ (p. 383). She then ‘changed into a man
and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love’. This is a process
that Freud likens in a footnote to ‘identification on the part of the lover with the loved
object, a process equivalent to a kind of regression to narcissism’ (p. 384).
This process is then played out in the transference. Freud says that ‘she
transferred onto me the sweeping repudiation of men which had dominated her ever
since the disappointment she had suffered from her father’ (p. 391). She then sees how
much this ‘displeased’ her father. ‘After she had been punished for her over-affectionate
attitude to a woman she realized how she could wound her father and take revenge on
him. Henceforth she remained homosexual out of defiance against her father’ (p. 386).
THE POSITION OF THE ANALYST
Freud is implicated, of course, in the family dynamics that he identifies. Right from the
first sentence of his report, when he comments that homosexuality in women is as
common as in men but ‘much less glaring’, he is drawn into an alliance with the father
who ‘cast a furious look’ at his daughter in the street. Her response is to throw herself
down a railway cutting in a way that could be interpreted as taking herself completely
out of the scene, out of any place where she displays herself for others.
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And Freud also writes himself into the case in the metaphors he employs to
describe the stages of analysis with the young woman. Merck (1993) points out that
Freud’s own childhood anxiety about travelling on trains, which he addressed but failed
to completely work through in his own self-analysis, is pertinent here: ‘a man with an
abiding fear of train travel undertakes the analysis of a woman brought to him because
of her suicidal leap on to a railway line’ (p. 31).
Identification and evasion
There are, Merck (1993) argues, three themes in Freud’s account: that of an
identification of the homosexual with the opposite sex; that of an evasion of competition
with others as a motive for homosexuality; and that of heterosexual origins for
homosexuality. These themes open up questions about Freud’s own assumptions about
what is normal and abnormal. That is, he does not stand outside the series of
identifications the young woman makes with others to construct her ego. He is drawn
into those identifications at the very same moment as he identifies himself in them.
As far as Oedipally-stuctured identification as an explanation for homosexuality
is concerned, there is a problem. As Merck (1993) points out, if the main conceptual
lever in understanding the psychogenesis of female homosexuality is to be ‘masculine
identification’ then there is the problem of accounting for the identifications of those
women who are otherwise identified: ‘the historical difficulty has been how to explain
those “feminine” women which the “masculine” kind are supposed to desire’ (p. 24).
As far as the motif of ‘evasion’ is concerned, there is a further problem, which
Freud gets drawn into in his own encounter with the young woman. Merck (1993) asks:
‘In insisting upon a woman analyst, isn’t Freud acting precisely as he accuses his
homosexual patient of doing? Retiring in favour of someone else when a rivalry for a
loved object becomes intolerable?’ (p. 30). That is, Freud’s part in the transference
relationship is at issue here, and although he has learnt something from his earlier
encounters with young women who do not only desire men, he is still subject to the
lures of the transference, as much so as the young woman.
Although Freud is fairly liberal about the choices that women and men might
make when they identify with the same or the opposite sex and thus take up a sexual
position in relation to other men and women, he still privileges heterosexuality as the
original point from which a departure into homosexuality takes place.
The heterosexual ego
Freud insists that we must ‘keep in mind the universal bisexuality of human beings’ (p.
382), and even sets out what the analytic process might be for someone ‘restricted to
homosexuality’ (p. 375). Referring generally to homosexuality and so, it seems now,
talking about treatment of homosexuality in a man or a woman, it might, he says, first of
all be a case of ‘restoring his full bisexual functions’. Then, he says, in such past cases
‘it lay with him to choose whether he wished to abandon the path that is banned by
society, and in some cases he has done so’ (p. 375).
O’Connor and Ryan (1993) are not impressed with the implicit pathologising of
lesbianism in Freud’s account. They point out that ‘The characteristic of homosexual
love so entirely in terms of repudiation gives it a rigid and defensive nature’ (p. 30).
And it is lesbianism that is particularly at issue here, not homosexuality as such. The
young woman, Freud says ‘had not only chosen a feminine love-object, but she had also
developed a masculine attitude towards that object’ (p. 380). And this ‘masculine
attitude’ cannot simply be reversed to account for homosexual choice among men
because ‘masculinity’ itself for Freud is freighted with the characteristics of
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‘comprehension’ and ‘lucid objectivity’ (p. 379). Characteristics, we might say, of the
ego, an ego when it is ‘not dominated by her passion’ (p. 379).
CONCLUSION
It is worth noting that Freud maintains a balance in his account of the case that is played
out not only in his fairly, for the time, reasonable views on homosexuality and
heterosexuality, but also in the image he constructs of his patient as not being balanced
enough. There is, for example, the devotion to the “society lady” that prevents her
engaging with, let alone delicately balancing, as Freud implies she should, ‘social
functions and girlish pleasures’. There is her failure to keep in balance disclosure and
secrecy, and Freud complains that there is in her conduct something of a too extreme
oscillation between the two in the way she ‘showed herself too open in one respect and
full of deceitfulness in the other’ (p. 372). The young woman is brought to Freud, of
course, after the ‘attempted suicide’ in which it seems as if she has been overwhelmed
by something that takes her out of that play of identifications with others, when she no
longer cares how others see her.
Although Freud refuses to play the parents’ game of making her ‘normal’, he
does through the case reveal something of the normal trajectory he thinks a person
should take as they develop an ego capable of balancing on thing against another, and
seeking an alliance with an analyst when things go out of balance. Freud’s account of
the kinds of identification that a young woman must make as they emerge from the
Oedipus complex and the kinds of defence that they use to maintain those
identifications includes not only a prescription for ‘normal’ sexual orientation but also a
description of the psychogenesis of the ego.
REFERENCES
Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1895) Studies on Hysteria. In A. Richards (ed.) (1974) Studies
on Hysteria, Pelican Freud Library Vol. 3. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Freud, S. (1905) Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’). In A. Richards
(ed.) (1977) Case Histories I: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’, Pelican Freud Library
Vol. 8. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Freud, S. (1920) The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. In A.
Richards (ed.) (1979) Case Histories II, Pelican Freud Library Vol. 9.
Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Freud, S. (1933) New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In A. Richards (ed.)
(1973) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library
Vol. 2. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J. B. ([1967]1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis.
London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Merck, M. (1993) Perversions: Deviant Readings. London: Virago.
O’Connor, N. and Ryan, J. (1993) Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism
and Psychoanalysis. London: Virago.
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