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There are few moments in the history of psychoanalysis when the author's voice is so clear and so timeless that it hardly needs modification more than eighty years later. One of them is the appearance of Freud's (1920) paper on “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.”
“A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen,” as Freud introduces her, had become infatuated with an older woman of dubious reputation. The older woman was a coquette, living with another married woman, with whom, as Freud puts it, she had “intimate relations,” while at the same time she carried on “promiscuous affairs with a number of men” (p. 147). And as it happened, she scorned her young admirer.
Freud notes in passing that his young patient's upbringing was quite normal. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, she showed tender affection for a boy not quite three years old and developed a lasting friendship with his parents, showing her own tender, maternal side, but soon after, she began to take an interest in women. It turns out that at about this time, she had become conscious of the wish to have a child, especially a male one, and in fact, desired to have her father's child. But, at this very moment, her mother, who viewed her developing daughter as “an inconvenient competitor” (p. 157), herself delivered a son. In a deep sense of betrayal, the young adolescent repudiated her own wish for a child, her love of men, and the feminine role in general. She was finally brought to Freud's attention when, after being rejected by the woman with whom she was infatuated, she flung