Michal Shapira, Sigmund Freud and His Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna (London:  Routledge, 2024;  130 pp.)

As Michal Shapira points out in the opening of her little book, Freud's case histories are amongst his best-known writings. They have not only spawned an enormous professional psychoanalytic literature, but they are by and large recognized as significant literary and cultural products. Dora, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, Schreber: these are powerful characters whose lives and troubles are emblematic of a certain moment in European modernity, and whose stories are part of the narrative of its sexual life and, of course, of the emergence of psychoanalysis itself. They also position Freud as a biographer of a particular kind – much, as we know, to his own chagrin – and one of the inventors of the ‘case study’. The ‘case’, as John Forrester (2017) elaborated so powerfully, was not unique to psychoanalysis, but Freud certainly advanced it dramatically as a mode of knowledge expressive of the complexity of contemporary lives. Shapira agrees with Forrester on this (though she quotes a 1996 article by him rather than the 2017 book): one of Freud's achievements, she thinks, is to offer a nuanced, psychological framework focusing on the individual, in this way exposing the details of lives as lived, details too easily lost in the bringing together of quantitative material. From Freud's point of view, the price of this was to be read as a novelist, and a scandalous one at that; but for his readers, it is perhaps the case histories that keep him most alive.

The 1920 case study with which Shapira's book is concerned, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality’, is, however, not so well known and is often dismissed as an example of Freud's patriarchal normativeness

and misreading of feminine sexuality. It is also dism