Freud, Gisela, Silberstein, and the Repudiation of Femininity

The aim of this essay is to examine the teenage Freud through the letters he wrote as an adolescent. The letters suggest a possible explanation for his ideas about female psychology. I refer particularly to his “bedrock” statement of 1937 and his conviction that “The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex” (p. 252). The key word here, as I see it, is “repudiation.” I think the letters illustrate Freud's repudiation of an intense experience when he was 16 years old, his reaction to which was rooted in his own unresolved oedipal conflict. The source for this explanation is the recently published correspondence between Freud and his intimate friend Eduard Silberstein when they were both 16 years old, correspondence now available in English (Boehlich, 1990). The letters tell us that Freud had an experience so powerful that he had to repudiate its importance almost at once, that it took place in Freiberg, where Freud was born and lived for his first three years, that it had oedipal reverbations, that it had to be shared with Silberstein, and that it had to be denied. These letters, together with a few he wrote to another friend, Emil Fluss (see E. Freud, 1969) and other material, allow us to trace the experience as well as its aftermath. It seems to me that the more we know about what