The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [69]
But, as Freud was painfully to discover, she was not at heart docile and she had a firmness of character that did not readily lend itself to being molded. Her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would well deserve the psychoanalyst’s highest compliment of being “normal.”12
One gets a glimpse of Freud’s “intention, never to be fulfilled, to mold her to his perfect image,” when he wrote her that she must “become quite young, a sweetheart, only a week old, who will quickly lose every trace of tartness.” But he then reproaches himself:
The loved one is not to become a toy doll, but a good comrade who still has a sensible word left when the strict master has come to the end of his wisdom. And I have been trying to smash her frankness so that she should reserve opinion until she is sure of mine.13
As Jones pointed out, Freud was pained when she did not meet his chief test—“complete identification with himself, his opinions, his feelings, and his intentions. She was not really his unless he could perceive his ‘stamp’ on her.” Freud “even admitted that it was boring if one could find nothing in the other person to put right.” And he stresses again that Freud’s love “could be set free and displayed only under very favorable conditions…. Martha was probably afraid of her masterful lover and she would commonly take refuge in silence.”14
So, he eventually wrote her, “I renounce what I demanded. I do not need a comrade-in-arms, such as I hoped to make you into. I am strong enough to fight alone…. You remain for me a precious sweet, loved one.”15 Thus evidently ended “the only time in his life when such emotions [love and hate] centered on a woman.”16
The marriage was conventional, but without that passion. As Jones described it:
There can have been few more successful marriages. Martha certainly made an excellent wife and mother. She was an admirable manager—the rare kind of woman who could keep servants indefinitely—but she was never the kind of Hausfrau who put things before people. Her husband’s comfort and convenience always ranked first…. It was not to be expected that she should follow the roaming flights of his imagination any more than most of the world could.17
She was as devoted to his physical needs as the most doting Jewish mother, organizing each meal on a rigid schedule to fit the convenience of “der Papa.” But she never dreamed of sharing his life as an equal. Nor did Freud consider her a fit guardian for their children, especially of their education, in case of his death. He himself recalls a dream in which he forgets to call for her at the theater. His associations “imply that forgetting may be permissible in unimportant matters.”18
That limitless subservience of woman taken for granted by Freud’s culture, the very lack of opportunity for independent action or personal identity, seems often to have generated that uneasiness and inhibition in the wife, and that irritation in the husband, which characterized Freud’s marriage. As Jones summed it up, Freud’s attitude toward women “could probably be called rather old-fashioned, and it would be easy to ascribe this to his social environment and the period in which he grew up rather than to any personal factors.”
Whatever his intellectual opinions may have been in the matter, there are many indications in his writing and correspondence of his emotional attitude. It would certainly be going too far to say that he regarded the male sex as the lords of creation, for there was no tinge of arrogance or superiority in his nature, but it might perhaps be fair to describe his view of the female sex as having as their main function to be ministering angels to the needs and comforts of men. His letters and his love choice make it plain that he had only one type of sexual object in his mind, a gentle feminine one….
There is little doubt that Freud found the psychology of women more enigmatic than that of men. He said once to Marie Bonaparte: “The great