A new biography of the founder of psychoanalysis reveals the unwitting role he played in the birth of ‘gender identity’. It’s a story of burglary, secret homosexual urges and a bizarre suicide.
It’s not just that Freud’s notion of ‘penis envy’ feels like an early outing for the lesbian penis, complete with its underlying misogyny. Nor that his insistence on infant sexuality has often been used to license the LGBTQ+ lobby’s refusal to treat child safeguarding seriously.
At the heart of the contradictory body of thought that Freud built up and adapted over the years was a conviction that people who felt unhappy might solve their problems if they were able to bring into the light their hidden and repressed feelings. It’s hardly a stretch to see those intellectual fingerprints imprinted all over the trans narrative of a hidden and repressed self bubbling up to the surface to have its day in the sun. High heels and wig at the ready.
Professor Robert Stoller used the core concepts of Freud to arrive at his theory of ‘gender identity’, a term he invented. His descriptions of everything to do with ‘gender identity’ from sissy culture to paedophilia are rooted in Freud. As are his most interesting works such as ‘Splitting’ about a woman who believed she had a penis. No surprise that ‘penis envy’ raises its ugly head here. So to speak.
Yeah, but Freud is neither here nor there these days. And yet … Lacan?
The antisemitism of his own cultural milieu distorted Freud’s thinking. For example, he deduces a preposterous “castration anxiety” out of a wilful blindness to biblical, archaeological, anthropological knowledge. And Lacan, subsequently, merely compounds the error. To his credit, Freud spared his children from circumcision.