A Case of Female Homosexuality: Notes and Comments on a Case with no Name

Among the great Clinical Cases, published together in volume 8 of Gesammelte Schriften in 1924, Freud did not include the case of the young 18-year-old girl, the account of which we know as The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality. The reasons for this exclusion are not known.1 We can only hypothesize that they were influenced by the brevity and early interruption of the treatment. The title, which oddly is not a very happy one and is a little anonymous as well as classifying, gives the idea of a piece of work we would expect to find impersonal and detached, which it is not, and which would not attract one to reading it. ≪Psychogenesis≫ (Psychogenese) is not exactly an evocative word, and there is not even a subtitle containing a proper name, or any sort of interesting image, which instead there is in other of Freud's more engaging titles.2 We shall see later a hypothesis that may suggest the probable meaning of this absence and which links back to the contents of the work as well as to several aspects of the analytical relationship between Freud and the patient. Nevertheless — despite the title's lack of evocativeness, even in this case, Freud provides a vivid and complex image of the person and of his relationship with her. It has always struck me, over and above the undeniable artistic and literary quality of Freud's writing, how his clinical cases stand out as well-defined people who are ≪alive≫, unique and therefore unforgettable, and who have been described in all the complexity of their internal world against a backdrop of surroundings featuring their life and relationships. Such could be mistaken as a mere ≪stylistic≫ choice, but instead it implicitly reflects extremely precise theoretical decisions.

Moving beyond these seemingly formal aspects, this short piece of writing by Freud marks an important moment of reflection with regard to technique (especially