• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2305 0

” “gorgeous” (ibid., 113), she attended a series of lectures given by the young neurologist Sigmund Freud. Only the year before, Freud had published Studies in Hysteria, beginning his inquiry into the composition of the unconscious mind that established the modern school of psychoanalysis. As Freud lectured, Goldman described a “feeling of being led out of a dark cellar into broad daylight. For the first time,” she continued in her autobiography, “I grasped the full significance of sex repression and its effect on human thought and action. He helped me to understand myself, my own needs” (ibid., 114). Later readings of the European sexologists Havelock Ellis, Richard Krafft-Ebing, and Edward Carpenter, whose works she encountered during travels in Europe in 1895, added to her understanding of the baleful effects of sexual repression. Years after first hearing Freud lecture, Goldman traveled up from New York to Worcester, Massachusetts, a city where she had once sold ice cream with Alexander Berkman, to hear the Viennese psychoanalyst deliver his American lectures at Clark University. In her autobiography, the reconstruction of her childhood memories bears the imprint of Freud’s teaching. She renders early childhood memory as idyllic and erotic scenes. She recalls feeling a guilty repression of sexual desire after her mother’s admonitions, and a violent first sexual encounter leaves her feeling both desire and revulsion. Just as candidly, she narrates her sexual response to adult love affairs. The expression of sexuality was important to her as a liberation of consciousness, a value in its own right, but also one that would nurture both political and aesthetic self-realization.

As she learned to distinguish repression in her personal history, Goldman no longer allowed herself to be chastened by what she regarded as the sexual puritanism of her comrades, a puritanism that she believed destroyed natural and healthy impulses. Years after hearing Freud lecture, in an illuminating encounter with Kropotkin—whose belief in the anarchist ideal of mutual assistance rose out of a conviction that cooperation was a Darwinian trait hewn for survival—Goldman challenged his dismissal of the free-love interests of some American anarchists. When Kropotkin complained that an anarchist publication shouldn’t “waste so much space discussing sex,” Goldman quarreled with him energetically, saying, “All right, dear comrade, when I have reached your age, the sex question may no longer be of importance to me. But it is now” (Living My Life, 152).

Goldman believed that sexuality, if unfettered by convention, prejudice, and repressive state institutions, was an agency that could produce the social harmony that Kropotkin argued was an adaptive strategy for human survival. “Love,” she wrote, “should be the impetus for the harmonious blending of two beings” (Traffic in Women, 149). “If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness ... love will be the parent” (ibid., 213). Anarchism, her “beautiful ideal” of autonomous individuals living in social networks of mutual respect, rested on a reading of human nature in which Goldman, inspired by Freud, considered sexual desire an ameliorative force. “Every stimulus which quickens the imagination and raises the spirits is as necessary to life as air. It invigorates the body and deepens our vision of human fellowship” (ibid., 157).

But until the unnatural constraints imposed on sexual desire by government, religion, and traditional conventions were lifted, this more profound vision of human fellowship would not be realized. Becoming a spokesperson for reforms in private life, Goldman recommended the radical reorganization of domestic life that became foundational in later feminist platforms in the 1960s and 1970s that assigned childcare to both parents, not simply the woman. While Kropotkin had argued that woman’s apparent inferiority could be remedied by making her man’s intellectual equal, Goldman insisted she must become as free as men sexually as well, unhampered by the Victorian convention