Female psychosexual drama of the classical kind is currently stalking the London stage to rave reviews in the form of Lesley Manville’s Jocasta, in Oedipus, and Antigone, played by House of Dragon star Emma D’Arcy in The Other Place.
These performances, in productions cleverly updated from ancient Greek, both push the boundaries of transgressive behaviour to shocking effect, courtesy of Sophocles. It is a good time then, for an exhibition in the same city to look anew at the limitations once set on female desire.
Women, still roughly half of humanity, have conventionally been both indulged and enslaved by men; the first approach really just a sugar-coating on the second. In western society they were seen as vulnerable, volatile, even unknowable, and ideally, also as available. Some of these dodgy attitudes began to melt away with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But what really seeded that change?
The curators of Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists make a strong case that Sigmund Freud did it almost by accident. Helped by some startling artwork by female artists, their new exhibition at the Freud Museum in north London puts forward the theory that it was his pioneering psychoanalytic practice that inadvertently opened the door. Freud himself was a patriarchal figure, the Victorian head of his household of six children. However, once he began to practise his theories, first in his native Vienna, then in London, the argument is that he unintentionally released the secrets of the female psyche on conventional European society.
“Feminism and Freudianism came out of the same moment really,” says Lisa Appignanesi, the guest curator of the exhibition and author of the 2007 study, Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. “They both emerge from the same terrain – in other words, from a growing understanding of women’s discomfort. The eventual recognition of bisexuality and homosexuality came out of this too.”
The artworks on show, including previously unseen and disturbing Paula Rego “dollies” and works by Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Louise Bourgeois, make a link between the “free association” talking therapy undergone by patients on Freud’s famous couch and the artistic expression now enjoyed by these female artists.
“Freud listened to women, which he was good at,” said Appignanesi. “They were the people who helped him develop his theories and methods. The artists in the show have been inspired by this, but do very different things with it. They let their unconscious speak, which is exactly what Freud said artists do so well.”
The exhibition, co-curated with the museum’s Bryony Davies, chronicles the way the women Freud analysed often went on to become analysts themselves. As a result, the high-status profession he founded continues to be unusually open to women.
Today, the scope for what it is possible for a woman to be can prove controversial. But most people can celebrate the falling away of the limitations once dinned into schoolgirls’ heads. Today a woman can choose to be “brat”, to use a term voted on Friday as “word of the year” by the dictionary publisher Collins, picking up on the trend inspired by Charli xcx and, subsequently, by Kamala Harris. Alternatively, they can be Cat Women, like Taylor Swift and er… Kamala Harris again.
Young women can also be challenging rebels, like Saoirse Ronan, who sat between a trio of famous men on Graham Norton’s chat show sofa last weekend and pierced through their jolly promotional banter with a pointed reminder about the way women have to think about their personal safety. Ronan’s jolting interruption has echoed across social media and the press.
The new Freud exhibition suggests that psychoanalysis paved the way for such liberation by giving weight to women’s private thoughts, especially on sexual taboos. The restrictions placed on intimate habits were held up in the light by Freud, but also by rival intellectual silver-back, Carl Jung, who developed several key archetypes. According to the theories of this Swiss psychiatrist these personality templates are the true predictors of human behaviour. Jung drew his term “archetype”, a mask-like guise, from classical Greek drama and, in so doing, helped to set up a cultural obsession in literature and theatre that persists today.
The applause being lavished on Oedipus at Wyndham’s theatre and on The Other Place at the National Theatre is testament to the enduring curiosity about incest and sexual taboos. Both productions examine the social rules that still patrol the borders of desire within the family.
These days, though, it is Freud, not Jung, who is most popularly associated with the character of Oedipus. Anyone who has heard of Freud will certainly have heard of the psychological complex that bears this Greek name. And the unsettling attraction between mother and son is showcased in the exhibition that opened last Wednesday inside Freud’s former Hampstead home.
Letters never displayed before document the transgressive content of Freud’s dialogue with Princess Marie Bonaparte, an heiress who, in June 1938, helped to organise the Freud family’s escape from Vienna, as the Nazis moved through Austria. Displayed alongside Bonaparte’s childhood dream journals is the correspondence in which she quizzed Freud about the impropriety of her son’s feelings towards her. “She is asking Freud if she should sleep with her son, although she knows it is taboo,” says Appignanesi. “He replies that it is socially prohibited and in any case perhaps would be unwise.”
For Michael Marder, author of an upcoming book on Freud for Bloomsbury, Eco-Freud, From A to Z, the connection between psychoanalysis and feminism is stretched a little by the new exhibition. He does agree, however, with its bold attack on the common idea that Freudian theory only denigrated women.
“Obviously, the exhibition debunks the pop-adaptation of psychoanalytic views on women as castrated men (from the standpoint of a boy relating to the mother within the confines of the Oedipal triangle), tormented by penis envy etc,” he says.
“But I’m not sure that the talking cure ‘gave a voice to women’, as the exhibition claims it did, because what speaks in a psychoanalytic session is the unconscious, and that is very different from our notions of self-representation, with its assumption that each of us is known by, or transparent to, her- or himself.”
What is most welcome, Marder says, is the way that the exhibition acknowledges the breadth of women’s contribution to psychoanalysis, instead of restricting it to child psychology and child development.
“This has been traditionally the area in which the achievements of women psychoanalysts, such as Melanie Klein or Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, have been recognised. Expanding the focus to the very tenets of psychoanalysis and the role of women in shaping them is admirable,” Marder says.
