The Witch and the Child: Women's Historical Writing and the Unconscious

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Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE), trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud, vol. V, (1900–1901), London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74, p. 613.

2. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putnum, Manchester University Press, 1954, p. 194.

3. Eli Zaretsky argues for the egalitarian impulse of psychoanalysis in ‘Melanie Klein and the emergence of modern personal life’, J. Phillips, L. Stonebridge (eds), Reading Melanie Klein, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 34, 43–5, and throughout.

4. See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. I, The Young Freud: 1856–1900, London: Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 33, for ‘petty complaints’. Freud cited the analysis of Anna O as the beginning of psychoanalysis, ‘Autobiographical Study’, cited in S. Alexander, ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminist History’ in Elizabeth Wright (ed.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, London: Blackwell, 1992, p. 109.

5. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, London: Dent, 1988, p. 129, gives a wonderful summary of western civilisation's examination of the ‘elemental passions’.

6. Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. II, Years of Maturity: 1901–1919, p. 436. Jones, a young socialist doctor in London in the early 1900s when he first came across Freud's ideas, later advocated psychoanalysis’ abstention from politics. Brenda Maddox, Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones, John Murray, 2006, p. 221. E. Jones, Free Associations: memories of a psycho-analyst, London: Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 138, for Jones's sympathy with Fabianism. For Freud's integration with the social democracy of ‘Red Vienna’, see Elizabeth Danto, Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Danto opens with Freud's appeal to the Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis held in Budapest in 1918, that out-patient clinics should be free: ‘The poor man should have just as much right for assistance to his mind as he has now to the life-saving help offered by surgery’, pp. 1–2. S. Freud, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, SE, vol. XXI (1927–1931), pp. 112–13.

7. Freud, ‘Why War’, SE, vol. XXII (1932–1936), pp. 214–15.

8. See Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 137, for the Medico-psychological Clinic's access to ‘people of small means’. See also, S. Alexander, ‘A Note on Psychoanalysis’, History Workshop Journal, issue 45, Spring, 1998, pp. 135–44.

9. Danto, Freud's Free Clinics, pp. 4, 6.

10. Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, Anna Freud: A Biography, London: Macmillan, 1988, p. 169.

11. Freud, Lecture XXXIV, ‘Explanations, applications and orientations’, SE, vol. XX11 (1932–36), p. 138, for symbolism as the problem.

12. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, chapter 4, University of Chicago Press, 2004. See also, Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914, London: Penguin, 1993, p. 172. In 1914 Freud defined hysterical symptoms as founded upon ‘scenes in their past lives which have made a great impression on them but have been forgotten (traumas)’; ‘On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement’, SE, vol. XIV (1914–1916), p. 8.

13. Winifred Holtby, Women, London: Bodley Head, 1934, p. 107.

14. Holtby, Women, pp. 130–32, 158–9, 161.

15. Freud, ‘On the History of the Pyscho-analytic Movement’, SE, vol. XIV, pp. 13–15. Holtby wrote of the slump complex and the turk complex, feminist terms with Jungian overtones. She also used Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, who argued that sexual difference was founded in institutions not ‘an accident of the body’; Lisa Regan, ‘“Men who are men and women who are women”: Fascism, Psychology and Feminist Resistance in the Work of Winifred Holtby’, PhD, University of Warwick, 2005. Catherine Hall reminded me that in Holtby's novels, sexuality and unconscious feeling run away with her heroine's desires.

16. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 62, 162.

17. Danto, Freud's Free Clinics, ‘Termination’, Part 3, 1933–38, gives a succinct account of the nazification of psychoanalysis in Berlin and Vienna.

18. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, p. 249.

19. Adam Phillips, ‘Bombs Away’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 45, Spring, 1998, pp. 183–98; Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, chapter 10; Young Breuhl, Anna Freud, pp. 266–274. Melanie Klein's idea of the inner world of unconscious fantasy met with strong resistance among British psychoanalysts culminating in the Controversial Discussions in 1942/3. Issues raised by Klein's theories included the status of knowledge itself. Paula Heimann, a Kleinian, in an exchange with Marjorie Brierley, pointed out that what concerned psychoanalysis was not the truth of a particular belief, but how the mind worked: how does belief arise, how does knowledge develop in the mind? Jacqueline Rose, ‘Negativity in the work of Melanie Klein’, J. Phillips, L. Stonebridge (eds.), Reading Melanie Klein, 1998, p. 133. See also Denise Riley, War in the Nursery, Theories of the Child and Mother, London: Virago, 1983.

20. The twentieth century was the ‘age of the child’ according to Holtby, Women, p. 117. See Eli Zaretsky's wry summary of Nancy Chodorow's interviews with women analysts in the early 1980s, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, pp. 196–7.

21. D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, Madeleine Davis (eds), London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 117; and ‘Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word Democracy’, pp. 239–59.

22. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. x. Barbara Taylor, ‘Introduction: How Far, How Near: Distance and Proximity in the Historical Imagination’, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2004, pp. 117–22. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, p. 216.

23. See, especially, ‘The space of memory: in an archive’, Carolyn Steedman's Dust, Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 66–88.

24. Lyndal Roper, ‘ “Evil Imaginings and Fantasies”: child witches and the end of the witch craze’, Past and Present 167, May 2000, pp. 107–39. Augsburg never had a witch craze, only 17 executions in 70 years.

25. Roper, ‘Child-witches’, p. 124.

26. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, 1994; and Witch Craze, Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Witch Craze examines cases from four different towns, with different religious denominations.

27. Roper, Witch Craze, pp. 16–17.

28. Roper, Witch Craze, pp.102–3.

29. Mary Jacobus, First Things, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 83–93, for the fear of women's bodies, women's more visible suffering and underlying fantasies of woman in Malthus and de Sade, two sides of the same coin. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From, p. 252 for fear of woman.

30. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 217.

31. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, chapter 7; Witch Craze, pp. 102, 138.

32. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, chapter 9.

33. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 214. Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences Present Issues, Oxford University Press, 2000, confirms the picture of old women integrated into communities which scarcity and poverty nevertheless rendered insecure, pp. 97, 117–19.

34. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 74, for tenderness; Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 201–2, 208.

35. Roper, Witch Craze, chapter 3, pp. 73–4, for host imagery.

36. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 209; Witch Craze, p. 229, for instance.

37. Roper, ‘Child-witches’, p. 126.

38. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 93, quoting the demonologist, Peter Binsfield, in an astonishingly vivid chapter about sex with the devil.

39. Roper, Witch Craze, pp. 88–9.

40. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 181.

41. Roper, Witch Craze, pp. 70–71.

42. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 100; she continues: ‘As often happens in Remy's writing … a forthright rejection of a vile possibility … ends up invoking in vivid detail the very horror he is ruling out of court’. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History, London: Virago, 2005, pp. 84–5 for continuity of belief in powers of a mother's mental impressions on the child in her womb.

43. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 81.

44. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 34, 234–5 for a stringent version of maternal tenderness. Taylor's Introduction includes a useful discussion of historians’ constrained use of psychoanalysis, especially n. 89.

45. Luisa Passerini's visions of Europe in the late twentieth century: the old woman appears as the keeper of memory in cinema's explorations of Europe's decaying civilisation, ‘Cinema and Europe's Late 20^th Century Subjectivities’, unpub. paper presented at Kwi and Essens's conference on ‘Europe, Emotions, Identities, Politics’, March 2005; ‘La Prospettiva della storia cutlurale e l'approccio autobiografico’, Storia delle donne 2, 2006, pp. 11–26.

46. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Interiority, 1780–1930, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. xi.

47. For ‘twilight zone’ see E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, 1994, p. 3.

48. Carolyn Steedman, The Tidy House, London: Virago, 1982; Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain, Margaret Macmillan, 1860–1931, London: Virago, 1990; Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History, London: Rivers Oram, 1992; Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930, 1995; Dust, Manchester University Press, 2001.

49. Bloch, The Historian's Craft opens with the question a child asks his father: ‘What is the use of history?’ p. 3.

50. The idea of interiority, not the self, was new at the end of the nineteenth century, Steedman maintains, p. 12.

51. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, p. x.

52. Judith Schklar, The Faces of Injustice, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. See Chapter 2 for liberal empathy.

53. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, p. 34.

54. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, p. 41.

55. The rescued children of Dr Barnado's would come into this category, Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton University Press, 2004, chapter 2.

56. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, p. 96.

57. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, SE, vol. XVIII (1920–1922), pp. 7–66.

58. Tracey Loughran, ‘War Shock’, PhD, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2006.

59. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, chapter 5, gives a riveting account of ‘the littlest’. See also, ‘What a rag rug means’, chapter 6, Dust, Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 123–8.

60. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life and Work, vol. 3, pp. 293–302. J. Rose, Why War, Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, especially chapter 3; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, London: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 161–173, 322–3 for differences with Klein over the death drive/aggression; see note 9 above.

61. For Winnicott's account of his and Klein's emphasis on the pre-oedipal child, Adam Phillips, Winnicott, London: Fontana Press, 1988, pp. 44–5.

62. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 239, quoting D. W. Winnicott, ‘The Manic Defence’, in Collected Papers through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis, London, 1958. Tickner is describing the affect of Walter Sickert's paintings of the Camden Town murder (1906/7) which reinforce ‘the sadistic mastery of the controlling gaze … We are the voyeurs. We take up what Degas and Sickert called the keyhole view’.

63. Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance, London: Verso, 2007, p. 33, for Freud's questioning of the explanatory power of his ideas at the end of his life.

64. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, chapter 10.

65. Danto, Freud's Clinics, p. 35, for one such child.

66. Freud, SE, vol. XV (1915–1916), p. 206, for instance.

67. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, Introduction.

68. Roper, Witch Craze, p.11. Roper's Prologue gives a succinct and poetic summary of her argument.

69. See also, Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty, A Historical Debate, Introduction, London: Profile Books, 2004, pp. 10–15.

70. John Forrester, ‘Evidence from the Psychoanalytic Case: Voyeurism, Ethics, and Epistemology in Robert Stoller's ‘Sexual Excitement’, paper presented at Institute of Psychoanalysis Think-tank, May, 2007.

71. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars, Introduction, London: I. B. Tauris, 1999, for discontinuous histories. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992, for changing histories. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–67, Introduction, London: Polity, 2002, for a re-imagined national history with a post-colonial subject.