The Lilith Neurosis*: Projection of the Female Component in Men

In 1907, I published my first investigations of a type which I called the “child-woman.” It is my purpose now to develop before you some of the changes I have made in my standpoint in the twenty-five years which have since elapsed. Permit: me to begin with an historical account of how I became interested in this particular type.

The last two decades of the last century were filled with the poetical delineations of two almost antithetical types of woman. The spokesman for one type was Ibsen who, beginning with his work, “The Doll's House,” which he published in 1879, in a long sequence of plays endeavored to depict the struggles of woman for emancipation, which at that time meant the equality of the sexes. The spokesman for the other type was Maeterlinck who elevated his type into the realm of fairy tales and mysticism. We might consider the recently deceased Arthur Schnitzler a reaction-formation against these types. Schnitzler, in the early nineties, and later, described a type of Viennese girl since then known in literature as “Das Süsse Mädel” (The Sweet Girl). This type, the creation of a bourgeois mind, was a type disposed to loving a man—usually of an arrogant, bourgeois superiority—with very little discrimination, secure in the knowledge that all she had to be was sweet and simple, present no problem for her lover, and in especial make it unnecessary for him to marry her in order to possess her. Around 1900, a new group of troubadours appeared, much wilder, much more radical, and as we understand it now, much more narcissistic. Schnitzler evidently was the intermediary between the Ibsen and Maeterlinck woman on the one