Freud's Sisters: A Fantasia on a Photograph

This psychoanalytically based imaginative inquiry into the role of Freud's sisters in shaping the meanings of femaleness and gender difference for Freud starts from the author's study of a photograph in the Library of Congress Freud exhibit, “Portrait of the Jakob Freud Family ca. 1876,” which shows Sigmund Freud, age 20, with his five then adolescent sisters. Freud's Dream of the Botanical monograph, especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu, is used as a window into Freud's early childhood relations with his sisters and the registration of gender difference in his psychic reality. A peculiarity in the photograph in the presentation of Freud's half-brother, Emmanuel, leads the author's reverie to another dream of Freud's, the “nonvixit dream,” especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu and by Max Schur. The non-vixit dream is thought to bear traces of Freud's experience of the death of his infant brother Julius. New suggestions are made with regard to Freud's difficulties with depressive-position anxieties in relation to his mother; it is suggested that these difficulties led to his concept of girls' genitals as “castrated” becoming dominant over another stratum of psychic experience in which girls' genitals, and femininity, were viewed with erotic wonder as intact in their own right. This idea is linked with Freud's difficulties in construing woman as subject.