as much during a therapeutic session: “The patient ended her description of a whole series of episodes by complaining that they had made the fact of her ‘standing alone’ painful to her.” Freud observed that, “I could not help thinking that the patient had done nothing more nor less than look for a symbolic expression of her painful thoughts and that she had found it in the intensification of her sufferings.67 He did not consider the fact that marriage itself offered little promise to Elisabeth, a woman who had watched her sister be destroyed by its fruits.68 Freudian diagnosis settled on a view of Elisabeth as frozen in time—her family ill and dying, her prospects for love obstructed by the most difficult circumstances, and her former self-assurance fading. It is no wonder that her body should freeze as well, her legs unable to take a step and no support to prop her up. How could she possibly stand alone?
Freud's assessment of this case foreshadowed his 1905 Fragment of a Case of Hysteria, the case history of Dora. The symbiotic relationship between Freud's female patients and the Freudian theory of hysteria has been described by literary scholar Evelyne Ender as a dynamic in which the patient “‘produces' in her hysteria that which needs to be brought to consciousness and which stands in the place of consciousness. The spoils will be his, just as this knowledge extracted from her will constitute the foundation of his science of the mind,” resulting in a “simultaneous valorization and negation of the woman's experience.”69 Elisabeth's marital status was central to Freud's diagnosis, yet any autonomy she may have had in choosing this path was nullified by the psychotherapist's account that left her entirely a passive victim to both her singleness and her sexual anxiety. Much like the later case of Dora, Freud's own personhood is omnipresent in the hysterical narrative.70 A modern psychoanalytical appraisal of the case of Elisabeth von R. has described the interaction of doctor and patient as “more like unfeeling interrogations or…efficient paternalistic forms of taking control.”71 The paternalistic formulation of Elisabeth's narrative manifests itself in the supererogatory role of the deceased father in the case history, while the living mother exists as only a pale presence.72 Father, first love, and brother-in-law acted upon Elisabeth's weak psyche (despite her sharp intellect) to form her hysteria. Only a male hero, equipped with the valiant weapons of science, could rescue Elisabeth and provide her with the strength to stand.
In a feminist analysis of Freud's case studies, Susan Katz has argued that when Freud “drew on traditional narrative forms, particularly the nineteenth-century novel, in shaping the lives and case histories of his women patients, Freud perpetuated the belief in marriage as a standard for mental health.” Central to the literary typologies Freud inherited was “an equation of marriage with health, and, conversely, spinsterhood with illness.”73 Such a narrative insisted that a spinster could only enjoy mental health if she “learn[ed] her place.”74 Mental instability emerged when a single woman struggled with her social status. The illness of Elisabeth von R., “Freud implies, is brought on by her grandiose ambition to master her situation single-handedly.”75 Indeed, Freud asserted that he was able to cure Elisabeth von R. by his revolutionary method of cathartic therapy;76 a few years later, “by her own inclination, she…married someone unknown to me.”77 These nuptials provided for Freud with both literary closure and therapeutic success, for “marriage indicates mental recovery.”78
But not all hysterics and neurasthenics would marry. And not all sexologists, doctors, and psychologists of the early twentieth century shared Freud's opinion of the giftedness exhibited by hysterics. But many, eventually most, did adopt his unshakeable conviction as to the centrality of sex to mental health. Freud wrote in 1905 that, “Anyone who knows how to interpret the language of hysteria will recognize that the neurosis is concerned only with the patient's repressed sexuality.”79 In the eyes of Freud and most other sexologists, single women became a scientifically problematic category due to the ravages of sexual repression and anxiety about ‘standing alone.’ Socially aberrant and sometimes hysterical, the repressed old maid remained a conspicuous character in imperial German society; Sexualwissenschaft added darker contours to the picture of her existence.
Sexual Hyperaesthesia
Imagine the options confronted by a middle-class, unmarried young woman at the dawn of the twentieth century. Science had revealed that she possessed an innate and scientifically validated sexual drive, the repression of which might lead to hysteria or at the very least an embittered fate. Erich Lilienthal, a turn-of-the-century novelist and one of the most scathing observers of Altjungfertum, offered this summary of the effects of life without sex: “The eternally barren…give away nothing of their worm-eaten treasures, their thin, wilted lips pointed at constant vigilance, fearful, petty weighing and haggling…They do not become old and gray and silent, they do not become benevolent and understanding, they…talk and agitate with their bitter sophisms and [they] accomplish nothing at all. They are completely useless.”80 Anticipating such a fate, replete with “thin, wilted lips,” a rational woman might elect other options. Free love was one of them.
Or at least this was the dread of many contemporary observers who feared the damage that could be wrought upon society by sexually active single women. The claims of sexology fueled this type of anxiety. August Forel observed that, “it is a real pity to see so many healthy, active and intelligent girls become old maids, simply because they have no money and do not wish to throw themselves at the first scamp who comes.” His solution? “A little free polygamy.” 81 Iwan Bloch and the BfM also proposed that the sexual and cultural landscape could be transformed by responsible and committed relationships outside of marriage.82 Bloch believed that the epoch of the old maid would only end when the contours of marriage were changed. He condemned:
The heartlessness…of modern European society, which simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. It is moral and good to contest it with all our energy…Let us make a clearance of this medieval bugbear of coercive marriage morality, which is a disgrace in respect of our state of civilization…Two million women in a condition of compulsory celibacy and coercive marriage morality. It is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display before our eyes the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.83
Bloch proposed instead that all adults should counter “putrescent morality” by finding and enjoying love, companionship, and sex. Wilhelm Stekel used the example of prostitution to make the case for active female sexuality: “Love, regular sexual intercourse…keep ‘immoral’ women fresh and healthy.”84 Stekel's argument did not facilitate unambiguously the cause of sexual reform. Based upon weak substantiation, Stekel's position that “compulsory abstinence is more injurious than immoderate indulgence”85 might justifiably have raised queries of just what types of indulgence, and at how immoderate a rate?
In fact, most sexual scientists placed the topic of active sexuality among the female unwed under the rubric of sexual dysfunction, centered on the notion of hyperaesthesia. The notion of the natural female sexual desire had problematic implications. As Michael Hau has argued in The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, “female desires…could be the basis for the independent articulation of female interests. Furthermore, if women were capable of experiencing lust, whose fault was it if they did not?”86 Would they seek fulfillment of that lust outside of the confines of marriage? Bourgeois morality held that the most frightening path an unmarried woman could elect was the pursuit of extramarital sexual fulfillment. Max Marcuse used the work of British sexologist Havelock Ellis to articulate the nature of the threat: “A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at times such a powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps only the slightest acquaintance.”87 The emphasis on good breeding
