I am so grateful to Rosemary for her full and interesting response and her view of the impact of feminism on psychoanalysis. What I value most about her response is that it recalled a memory of a crucial turn in my own life. As an adolescent I tried hard to maintain a link with my parents. Having been raised through my sixth year by my grandparents, I had a sense of them as parents rather than my own parents. So when it came time to differentiate or, as Erikson had it, to deidentify with my parents, I was simultaneously trying to get closer to them and to individuate as separate from them.
In this conflict, I chose to go to my father's business after school every day. I would go get coffee, do filing, sweep the floors. I loved the colors and textures of the fabrics lining the walls of his store and I loved sending out postcards with tiny samples to prospective buyers. I loved talking with the young designers who came in to buy small yardages for sample dresses, and with the custom shirt makers who needed the finest, silkiest, most expensive cottons.
One day, after several months of this, my father called me into his office to tell me that he had heard I loved the business but he wanted me to know that the best I could ever be in it was bookkeeper because this business was for his son. I never went there again. I went home crying. I told my mother. She said he would need to send me to college instead.
The result of this incident was that I became the first person in my family to go to college. And the corollary was that I was deeply touched by Freud's entrusting his family business to his daughter.
For me this made him a feminist hero. That he was willing to see her as a person with commitment, passion, and intellect was marvelous.
He never sent her to gymnasium. But in that time and place and in his financial condition that may have been unthinkable. He would have had to send her to gymnasium in 1909. At that time in Vienna there were very few gymnasia for girls, and there were no other pathways for higher education for children of the middle class (Friedenreich, 2002). Girls in aristocratic families could have tutors, but Freud was so poor then that he never even owned his house. He was supporting his six children, his parents, his wife, and his sister-in-law as well as a maid. His referrals were still few. He had alienated much of the medical community with his radical ideas.
What kept Freud from educating his daughters the way Rosemary and I would have liked him to was not his disrespect for their abilities; it was a result of his own inability to support his extended family in middle class comfort and of a society in which there was no provision for higher education for girls.
That Freud did not send Anna to a school that did not exist in that time and place cannot be used as evidence that he was not a feminist. In fact, his willingness to educate her through inviting her to his Wednesday evening seminars, in the face of a society that did not accept women's education, took courage and conviction.
As a feminist, he insisted that her mind was equal to that of his medical colleagues as well as the other university educated men in his circle. Psychoanalysis has been one of the few sciences open to and respectful of women ever since.
Freud's theories about female sexuality, on the other hand, have been objected to and corrected. He could not understand female sexuality, agreed that he did not understand it, tried to, and failed to, and finally left it up to the female psychoanalysts to finish that part of the work of understanding our women patients. It was that change in theory that was finally to reface his views that was accomplished by women empowered by second wave feminism.