Dirty Talk: Response to that Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud's Female Homosexual Revisited

Kudos to Ronnie Lesser and Erica Schoenberg for shining a spotlight on this least known of Freud's cases (1920), and for illuminating it as a dialogue between psychoanalysts and academic scholars. Psychoanalysis, mired as we have been in our closeted traditions, needs the work and ideas of other disciplines, and it has only been in recent years that analytic theorists—primarily feminist and queer theorists—have led the way in importing nonpsychoanalytic renditions of Freud's work into our field. Thus, it seems fitting that “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” should come under the gaze of analysts and scholars in this volume.

As I approached this review essay, I settled down to reread Freud's case and found myself aroused as I often am by his case material, that is, by the erotics of it. (Recall Dora running her fingers in and out of her reticule as Freud imagines her [whose?] fingers in her vagina, as we, the readers, voyeuristically imagine watching the whole scene—or whatever scene our personal reveries allow us in the interstices of Freud's narration.) Before I moved on to the other essays in the volume I feverishly scripted and e-mailed a pornographic tome to the new woman in my life. It began with Freud's (1920) narration:

“A beautiful and clever girl of 18, belonging to a family of good standing, had aroused displeasure and concern in her

Dr. Stack is on the faculty and board of Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; she is in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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parents by the devoted adoration with which she pursued a certain lady “in society” who was about 10 years older than herself. The parents asserted that, in spite of her distinguished name, this lady was nothing but a cocotte. It was said to be well known that she lived with a married woman as her friend, having intimate relations with her, while at the same time she carried on promiscuous affairs with a number of men. The girl did not contradict these evil reports, b