“Not Unsympathetic”: Freud’s Overlooked 1920 Case on the Female Homosexuality of Margarethe Csonka (1900-1999)

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s case studies, dedicated to the analysis of the histories of individual patients, are among his most well-known and well-researched writings. The literature on Freud usually notes the cases of Dora (1905), Little Hans (1909), Rat Man (1909), Dr. Daniel Schreber (1911), and Wolf Man (1918). However, his sixth and last case, written in 1920 and dedicated to homosexuality in a young woman, has received much less attention among psychoanalytic scholars, and undoubtedly less among historians. This was despite the fact that this four-month-long treatment of Margarethe Csonka, a girl who fell in love with another woman ten years older, was the only explicit instance of female homosexuality that Freud analyzed.

Historians of sexuality repeatedly focus on Freud’s writings on male homosexuality, largely omitting the study of his views on female homosexuality. In what follows, I highlight why we should pay more attention to this paper and see it as part of the history of sexuality; and why, with revealed new details on the young woman in modern Vienna and its assimilated Jewish life, we can gain entirely new insights about the context of the paper and this patient’s world beyond the scientific discourse.

The first part of this article analyzes Freud’s text methodically and historically in order to examine what kind of Freud Margarethe Csonka met as a young female patient. I highlight the radicalism of the text, discussing female sexuality beyond reproduction in light of Freud’s other writings and in view of the work of other medical men during the interwar period. The second part of the article juxtaposes Freud’s narrative with that of Margarethe Csonka who rejected the language of scientia sexualis and experienced same-sex love outside the scientific-medical purview. I will suggest that beyond drawing on models of heterosexual romantic love, she effectively utilized other resources as she took advantage of new possibilities that opened up for women and assimilated Jews through emancipation and the modernization of urban life. Vienna and its dazzling, new, modern architecture and culture was an active agent in her affair. The city was very much part of the one-sided love story that was set against the background of Jewish life in the early twentieth century during a shift between increasing gender and ethnic equality and rising anti-Semitism.