Abstract
The phrase in my title, “Freud’s stepchild,” comes from Anna Freud’s 1957 article “Adolescence” in which she surveys the scanty psychoanalytic writings on adolescence since her father’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Anna Freud quotes Ernest Jones’s 1922 article “Some Problems in Adolescence,” which came to the uninspiring conclusion that “the precise way in which a given person will pass through the necessary stages of development in adolescence is to a very great extent determined by the form of his infantile development.”1 Freud uses Jones to argue that most psychoanalysts writing about adolescence have slavishly followed her father who asserted in his Three Essays that what happens in adolescence is almost entirely a repetition of the infantile Oedipus crisis. Adolescence, Anna Freud claims, remains a “stepchild” in psychoanalytic theory in 1957.2 Of course “stepchild” is a loaded term in the overwrought, familial context of psychoanalysis. If adolescence—which one might identify with Anna, who is interested in it, who sees adolescent patients—is a stepchild in psychoanalysis, what does that make her, the apparently dutiful daughter? Is there a complaint about a lack of status lodged in that word? Can you be both a stepchild and a rightful heir?3 Or are there ways, perhaps, in which adolescence might benefit from being a “stepchild,” within the complex institutional politics of early twentieth-century psychoanalysis? Does being a stepchild give one perhaps more room for maneuver, rebellion, disobedience? (Consider the fairy-tale world of evil stepparents who are eventually vanquished by a series of triumphant stepchildren.) Might a stepchild also dislodge expected teleologies of progress, reproduction, or inheritance?
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Notes
Anna Freud, “Adolescence” (1958), in The Writings of Anna Freud, Research at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and Other Papers 1956–65, vol. V (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1969), 136–166, 138.
As Jacqueline Rose says about the fraught dynamics of psychoanalysis, “There will be no transmission if the second generation refuses the legacy of the ancestors; a rebellious daughter will not obey or perpetuate her father’s law. But if that law is the law of the unconscious, then a subservient one paradoxically disobeys and undoes his heritage no less at the very point of surrender” (Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and The Return of Melanie Klein [Oxford: Blackwell, 1993], 193).
Sigmund Freud, Foreword to August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth (New York: Putnam, 1932) (1925), v.
See Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy (’Little Hans’)” (1909), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, James Strachey, ed., vol 10 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–149.
Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983); and Rose, Why War?
See Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (“Dora”) 1905 [1901], in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–122; “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 145–72.
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, “Studies on Hysteria” (1895), in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1955).
For more sustained readings of these two cases, see Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (London: Virago, 1985).
Ronnie C. Lesser and Thomas Domenici, eds., That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited (New York: Routledge, 1999).
The Child Study Movement was launched by Hall in 1891 in order to gather extensive scientific and observational evidence about children so as to make childhood education into the “science of human nature” (G. Stanley Hall, “Child Study: The Basis of Exact Education,” Forum 16 [1893], 429–441, 441). Hall’s Clark University became the center of the movement, which encouraged parents and teachers to gather large amounts of data about their children on everything from belief in Santa Claus through responses to tickling through questionnaires. The movement dissipated by 1910 and Hall’s large plans for Child Study were never fulfilled, but it left a lasting legacy of parental interest in children’s education. See G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923), 379, 393.
Ludy T. Benjamin, A Brief History of Modern Psychology (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 64–65.
For the best overview of Hall, see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
For Hall’s importance to twentieth-century perspectives on adolescence, see Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York and London: Routledge Falmer, 2001).
Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), among others.
For the most complete account of this trip, see Saul Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909) (St. Louis: Rana House, Hogrefe & Huber Publishers, 1992).
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. II (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 57–58 (Pfister, October 4, 1909).
Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of- the-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 16.
Haeckel’s theory was an embryological one, suggesting that the human embryo develops through the same stages of the forms of the major groups of adult animals forming a linear chain of being. This was adopted, by Hall and others, to become a theory of individual growth and development throughout the life cycle, and a theory of culture. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).
G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton, 1925), vol. I, vii.
For more on Freud’s fascination with phylogenetic history, see Sigmund Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, ed. with an essay by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, trans. Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1987).
Robert A. Paul, “Did the Primal Crime Take Place?” Ethos 4.3 (Autumn 1976): 311–352.
A fascinating short consideration of these and other aspects of Hall’s Adolescence in relation to modernism is Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), chapter 2, “Boys: Manufacturing Inefficiency,” 51–73.
See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 187–213.
Robert F. Grinder, “The Concept of Adolescence in the Genetic Psychology of G. Stanley Hall,” Child Development 4.2 (June 1969), 355–369, 359.
G. Stanley Hall, “A Medium in the Bud,” American Journal of Psychology 29 (April 1918), 144–158. Also see DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 71, on the common use of “budding” in relation to the adolescent girl.
G. Stanley Hall, “Spooks and Telepathy,” Appleton’s Magazine (December 1908), 677–683, 679.
A. E. Tanner, Studies in Spiritism (New York: Appleton, 1910), chapter XVII, “The Medium in Germ,” 275. It is interesting that the girl’s moods swings, which many mothers might have chalked up to menstruation, are here assigned to the spirits
Alex Owen has written extensively about the ways in which the Victorian séance room “became a battle ground across which the tensions implicit in the acquisition of gendered subjectivity” were played out (Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990], 11). Hall’s argument, perhaps surprisingly, follows a feminist line similar to Owen’s.
See Alex Owen and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Diane Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences (New York: New York University Press, 1992).
Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Amy Lehman, Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists in Performance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009).
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Thurschwell, P. (2012). Freud’s Stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_9
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