Deconstruction of Freud on Incest

One of the earliest modem discourses on women’s sexuality can be found in Freud’s writings. In his early years, he encountered many patients beleaguered by physical disorders for which there was no apparent cause. Using free association, he found dramatic evidence of widespread incest in middle-class European society. However, he later declared (some argue in response to massive criticism from his colleagues) that in fact these women’s reports were fantasies rooted in intense sexual desire for their fathers, not recollections of genuine repressed experiences. He described this in the classic case of Dora. Critics of Freud suggest that his original acknowledgment of incest can be supported by large numbers of docu­mented cases of child rape in France and Britain at the time of Freud’s writings (Sulloway, 1979). “When we look at Freud’s classic case of Dora (Freud, 1905/1963) from a deconstructive perspective, we can see it as a therapist’s attempt to adjust the meaning a client attaches to her experi­ence to match the prevailing meanings of the patriarchal society in which she lives … we might surmise that the cultural belief in the primacy of men’s sexual needs prevented Freud from seeing Dora’s revulsion as genu­ine” (Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1988, p. 461). In a different approach to understanding Freud’s diagnosis of Dora, Slipp (1995) used psychoanalytic concepts and logic to examine Freud’s own gender identity. He suggests that Freud’s gender theories were strongly influenced by his mother’s emo­tional abandonment of him. By deconstructing Freud’s writings on incest, his entire theory of the psychosexual stages of development can be seen in new ways that were shaped by possible interactions between Freud’s per­sonal psychological make-up, social pressures, and cultural beliefs.