"Not Unsympathetic": Freud's Lesser-Known 1920 Case of the Female Homosexuality of Margarethe Csonka.

Additionally, sexologists like Ellis categorized cases of homosexuality as congenital or innate or as late acquired, whereas in 1920 Freud wanted to eliminate this question altogether; he believed that the patient's sexual and psychological history revealed just how "fruitless and inapposite" congenital or acquired homosexuality was.[59] Can the 1920 case of this young woman's homosexuality be labeled a late-acquired inversion, as these sexologists could have claimed? Historians of sexuality repeatedly focus on Freud's writings on male homosexuality, largely omitting his views on female homosexuality, which fluctuated between sexual conventionalism and the relative radicalism vis-à-vis male homosexuality.[8] Freud demonstrated a persistent, unresolved tension between seeing homosexuality as a fixation at an early stage of development on the way to mature heterosexuality and not seeing deviations as necessarily pathological. In 1905, however, Freud's starting point was a direct challenge to the hegemony of the congenital theory.[32] By 1935 Freud had even famously written to a mother concerned about the homosexuality of her son: "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we [psychoanalysts] consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by certain arrest of sexual development.... It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime."[33] Thus, Freud viewed homosexuals as different but not as sinners, criminals, or ill; he described them in increasingly nonjudgmental and neutral terms.[34] The 1920 text should be seen as part of this change, providing a missing link between the 1905 hypothesis and 1935 perspective while maintaining Freud's 1905 view that sexual object choice is more important than character inversion.