Androgyny, perversion, and social evolution in interwar psychoanalytic thought

Early twentieth-century psychoanalytic thought consistently made use of an imagined past in its most foundational concepts of sexual development. Darwinian evolution was central to Sigmund Freud's view of human culture, and the interwar period in Europe saw the development of a substantial uptake of these genetic dimensions of Freudian thought in a new series of reflections about femininity and female sexuality, in which notions of the primitive past appeared, contradictorily, both as an ideal about appropriate sexual pleasure and as the 'other' of evolved civilization. In her writings throughout the 1920s-1940s, Marie Bonaparte, French Freudian thinker and royal heiress, followed the erudite Spanish doctor Gregorio Maranon in mapping problems of gender differentiation, female masochism, and frigidity onto a vision of evolution from 'primitive' to 'civilized societies'. Both Bonaparte and Maranon shared similar views about evolution and sex in common with Freud. But their ideas were a significant development on Freud's view of the sexual past since both were acutely aware of the emerging currents of women's rights in European societies and both also grappled with the powerful pronatalist ideologies of the interwar period. This chapter considers, firstly, how a teleological view of the sexual past was adapted from both Darwinian evolutionary thought and fin-de-siecle psychiatric thought in Freud's account of the psyche; secondly, it examines how the differing permutations of this uptake in the work of Freud, Maranon, and Bonaparte produced each of their peculiar understandings of feminine sexual pleasures (clitorism and female masochism), and their understandings of them as signs of evolutionary progress or failure.