HYSTERICAL: Anna Freud's Story, by Rebecca CoffeyFormat: Paperback Pages: 360, ISBN: 978-1-938314-42-1
Imagine growing up gay in a household where your world-renowned father Sigmund Freud calls lesbianism a gateway to mental illness. And it is always, he said, caused by the father and curable by analysis. Then, having warned his colleagues that analysis is an erotic echo chamber, he analyzes you. That's the premise of HYSTERICAL: Anna Freud's Story ( She Writes Press, 2014 ), science journalist Rebecca Coffey's fact-based, fictional autobiography of Sigmund Freud's smartest daughter. And according to Coffey, homosexuality and in-family analysis are real-life skeletons that the Freud dynasty has kept in a leaky closet for at least 75 years. It is relevant today because of the legacy Sigmund left and because of the parallels that can be drawn between his analysis of Anna and modern reparative therapy.
Pulling back the curtain on Freud family secrets like that analysis was nerve-wracking for Coffey, a straight, married science journalist from Putney, Vermont, who is a card-carrying member of PFLAG ( though as it turns out no card is actually carried ), and who contributes to closely fact-checked magazines like Scientific American and Discover. As she explains it, although she spent nine years researching and writing HYSTERICAL, fact-checking the most inflammatory aspects of Anna Freud's life story was impossible."
"If fact-checking everything about Anna had been possible, I'd have written non-fiction biography, because I am fascinated by her analysis and by her predicament as Sigmund's daughter," Coffey says. "But the Sigmund Freud Archives holds the copyright on Anna's papers, and they release only those that are flattering to psychoanalysis and its heroes and heroines. The fact that Sigmund drew his own daughter into a dangerously erotic analysis hardly reflects well on him as a father. And the fact that his attempt to therapeutically convert her to heterosexuality was an abject failure speaks poorly about his abilities both as a theorist and analyst. It's not surprising, then, that the Archives has constructed a firewall of sorts behind which they seal many of Anna's personal papers and all of her correspondence with Dorothy Burlingham, the woman who was her life partner."
With her thirst for verifiable details blocked by that firewall, in writing HYSTERICAL Coffey was left to set out facts discovered by scholars and then to fancifully connect the dots. "Imagination is how a novelist creates whole characters and plots out of tracings in the historical dust. But it's definitely not the way a science journalist works," she said. "Giving myself permission to write dialogue and scenes that I hadn't actually witnessed and recorded, and to carry implications to their logical and occasionally outrageous conclusions, was as difficult as dragging a dog who'd been trained to stay in the kitchen into a white-carpeted living room. I'm the dog in that analogy. We dogs put up amazing resistance. With a well-trained real dog you have to pick it up and carry it where it's not supposed to go."
The result of all of this tugging and tussle is a novel that Booklist has called "avidly researched, shrewd, and unnerving" as well as "complexly entertaining, sexually dramatic, and acidly funny" and that O, the Oprah Magazine praised for its use of humor to humanize the story and to "delicately delineate the tension between Anna's devotion to her father and her enduring attachment to Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune." LAMBDA Literary said HYSTERICAL has "got a plot so rife with tension it'll make you squirm." HYSTERICAL dramatizes Anna's entire lifetime, including her more than five decades of happy monogamy with Dorothy, who was also the biological mother of the four children the couple raised. Both women were child psychoanalysts, though Dorothy never achieved the fame that Anna did. They were also humanitarians, establishing a war nursery in a London suburb during the London Blitz and caring for about 100 infants, children, and teenagers made homeless by the bombing. After the war, the nursery took in child survivors of Treblinka, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland.
HYSTERICAL begins, however, with Anna's childhood, a time when Sigmund was formulating some of his phallocentric theories of human sexuality. And most significantly, HYSTERICAL describes Sigmund's analysis of Anna, which began when she was 23 and included painfully detailed parsings of her masturbation fantasies; they were of a child being beaten by an enraged father figure over an inadvertent mistake.
"Anna and Sigmund both wrote papers about those fantasies," Coffey explains, "which is how we know that the two of them discussed them in her analysis. And partly from Anna's adult correspondence we know that she came to realize that she was the child in the fantasies. I hope for her sake that she also realized that the angry man was probably her father, beating her figuratively for the inadvertent and irremediable 'mistake' of her homosexuality and for defying the expectations that his misconceptions about women had set in place for her."
No doubt for Anna one of the most significant of those misconceptions was Sigmund's idea about hysterical women. During his early career, an epidemic of hysteria was sweeping Europe. "It caused huge numbers of middle-class and upper-class women to faint, twitch, become paralyzed, and talk in tongues," says Coffey. "And back then, both lesbianism and masturbation were considered symptoms of hysteria. Sigmund actually let a rhinologist friend convince him that the seat of sexual desire in women is the nose. Then he asked that friend to operate on the nose of one of his masturbating patients. She was an attractive young woman of marriageable age. The surgery was a disaster, and her face was ruined. Of course, paradoxically, this consigned her to a life of lonely masturbation."
Coffey's own speech is littered with paradoxes and sardonicism, and partly because she has given Anna a dry wit to match her own, HYSTERICAL is often . . . well, hysterical. And it doesn't hurt that, as portrayed in the novel, the Freud family ethic includes an appreciation for lowbrow humor. Great jokes are sprinkled throughout HYSTERICAL. Remembering them on the spot is one of the ways Coffey's Anna deals with crisis.
Coffey says she felt free to imagine Anna that way because Anna inherited her intellect from her father. ( Anna's mother has been portrayed by biographers as entirely uninterested either in lively conversation or deep thought. ) It seemed logical to Coffey that Anna may have inherited Sigmund's sense of humor, too. "Apparently he was capable of cracking good jokes," Coffey offers with a twinkle in her own eye. "For example, and this is real about the family: Sigmund's wife Martha was exhausted after giving birth to Anna, her sixth child in eight years, and she left the family shortly after that birth. She stayed away for a long while, and her sister Minna moved in to mother the children. When Martha returned, Minna stayed. At some point Sigmund and Minna became lovers. Which means that Minna and Martha were sister-wives for the rest of their lives.
"Well, we know that Sigmund collected jokes. His Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious works as ethnography, as theory, and as a gag book. But as far as I know the following joke is original with Sigmund: 'A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later you take a cab.' Pretty subtle and apt, if you ask me."
HYSTERICAL is born of Coffey's curiosity about Sigmund and Anna and of her emotional response to the story of a girl confined within her father's theoretical prison. What happened to Anna's sexuality and sense of self during Sigmund's analysis of her? What happened to her sibling relationships and her relationship with her mother, given that she was the only family member with whom Sigmund ever expressed an inclination to transgress? How did Anna ever dare to love another woman? And considering that Anna and Dorothy were a couple for 54 years, why did they never "come out?" Coffey wanted to know, and after nine years of research, writing and deep imaginative speculation, HYSTERICAL is her answer.
On September 25 at 7:30 pm Coffey will read from HYSTERICAL: Anna Freud's Story and talk about the fact and fiction of Anna's life at Women and Children First, which is at 5233 North Clark Street in Chicago.
Joan Lipkin is the Artistic Director of That Uppity Theatre Company. A playwright, director and social critic who divides her time between St Louis and New York City, she also produces the Briefs Festival of Short LGBTQ Plays and most recently appeared in her play, "Ready" at the Nuoyrican Cafe and the Wild Project in NYC as part of the Fresh Fruit Festival.
