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Ines Rieder and Diana Voigt, The Story of Sidonie C.:

Freud's Famous ‘Case of Female Homosexuality’

Article in Psychoanalysis and History · April 2021

DOI: 10.3366/pah.2021.0372

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110 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2021) 23(1)

Ines Rieder and Diana Voigt, The Story of Sidonie C.: Freud’s Famous ‘Case of
Female Homosexuality’ (trans. from the German by Jill Hannum and Ines Rieder)
(Reno, NV: Helena History Press, 2019; 372 pp.); reviewed by Anna Borgos
DOI: 10.3366/pah.2021.0372

This book is the translation into English of a biography of a woman, better known
to history as ‘Freud’s famous “case of female homosexuality”.’ The authors’ aim
is to go beyond the analysis with Freud in their portrayal of Margarethe ‘Gretl’
von Trautenegg (née Csonka, alias Sidonie Csillag), to reconstruct her life
which spanned the twentieth century (1900–99).1 Both authors died before the
publication of the English edition, though one participated in beginning the work
of translation. Diana Voigt (1960–2009) – the granddaughter of a friend of
Sidonie Csillag – was the vice-chair of the Austrian Lesbian and Gay Forum and
published on issues to do with women, the environment and eco-psychology. Ines
Rieder (1954–2015) was an editor, journalist and activist, studying and publishing
mostly on twentieth-century lesbian lives. The book is based on several in-depth
interviews conducted with Margarethe over the course of about four years when
she was in her nineties; these interviews were then supplemented with historical
research on her family and her social and political environment. In 2004, her estate
was given to the Freud Museum in Vienna by the authors who owned it.
In the preface, Ines Rieder explains the genesis of the book, describing their
method and how they arrived at the chosen (published) name for the protagonist.
‘Sidonie’ had not wanted to reveal her real name; it was published only in the
2012 German edition. But within the text, the authors still kept the pseudonym,
Sidonie Csillag, which they chose after Gretl’s death. Although the commentary
on authorial method is relevant, I would have found a more comprehensive
introduction that addressed questions about the importance of Sidonie’s life
even further beyond her encounter with Freud – including more on the history of
psychoanalysis as well as the social and political contexts of lesbianism and ideas
about gender and sexuality as they shifted over the decades – particularly useful as
it would have helped situate the text’s interdisciplinary relevance.

1. The book had several editions before the English one (under slightly different titles) in
German, French, Spanish and Portuguese (Rieder & Voigt, 2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2008,
2012).
ANNA BORGOS is a psychologist and women’s historian, working as a research fellow in the
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
She holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Pécs. She is the editor in chief of the
Hungarian psychoanalytic journal Imágó Budapest. Her book, Women in the Budapest School of
Psychoanalysis: Girls of Tomorrow is forthcoming at Routledge. With Ferenc Erős and Júlia
Gyimesi she co-edited the volume Psychology and Politics: Intersections of Science and
Ideology in the History of Psy-Sciences, published in 2019 by CEU Press.
BOOKS 111

Sidonie entered analysis with Freud in early 1919, at her parents’ request; they
asked for help in diverting her sexual interest towards men after her persisting
infatuation with a ‘cocotte’ and her suicide attempt. Both Sidonie’s recollections
and Freud’s 1920 case study (Freud, 1920) demonstrate her complete resistance
during the four months of therapy. According to the conclusions drawn by Freud,
after the birth of her younger brother, Sidonie was disappointed in her beloved
father and ‘ceded’ him (and all men) to her adored, but neglectful and rivalrous,
mother. Relinquishing men, she pursued instead (mostly unattainable) ‘maternal
substitutes’ in mature women.
The stages of Sidonie’s life were evolving partly in sync with key periods
of twentieth-century history; the book presents them in relation to each other
(or rather, in parallel subsections) through the 12 chapters. As we learn from
the respective chapters, Sidonie was born in 1900 in Lemberg, into a wealthy
bourgeois Jewish family comprised of a Hungarian trader father and an Austrian
mother. They moved to Vienna in 1902. All of the four children were baptized as
Catholic, which was not just a tendency towards assimilation but also an escape
from and a refusal of the ‘otherness’ of being Jewish. Sidonie never felt any sense
of identity with her Jewish origin or with Jews in general.
The book starts by presenting the subject of Sidonie’s first crush, a déclassé
baroness of ‘ill repute’. This platonic adoration satisfied her for a long time,
but worried her parents – and prompted them to take their daughter into analysis.
She could not completely avoid internalizing the social concept of and pressure
for ‘normality’, so in 1930 she accepted the marriage proposal of her riding
instructor. The marriage proved to be unsuccessful in every way and in its
midst Sidonie got to know her greatest (long platonic) love, a married German
woman.
After the Anschluss, even the apolitical Sidonie could not ignore the persecution
of Jews. Moreover, in Austria, the penalization of same-sex relationships
applied to women as well, so she was doubly threatened. As the following
chapters depict, she escaped Austria at the last moment, in late 1940. Her
destination was Cuba where her two younger brothers had found refuge already. In
1949 she came back to Europe and had to face the losses and war-related traumas
of her friends and loves. After another decade of travelling in the 1960s in
Thailand, Spain, the USA, France and Brazil, which the authors describe in
detail, she resettled in Vienna, where she was physically and mentally active into
her nineties. It was a century-long life full of inner and outer turbulence.
The travels and emigrations were mostly prompted by political or financial
constraints, yet at the same time, this life in perpetual motion was not unsuited to
Sidonie’s personal needs.
What can we learn about Sidonie’s relation to her own lesbian identity? The
text represents it as an essential part of herself about which she felt no shame
or need for disavowal. She was quite brave, self-assured and autonomous,
approaching women to whom she was attracted. Her social standing and
prosperous background might have contributed to this confidence. But being
112 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2021) 23(1)

‘dissident’ and sexually non-conforming as a lesbian might have also enhanced

her independence. She was out to her closest friends and loves; however, she did
not take the risk of being completely open and non-normative, so as not to provoke
exclusion from elite society. At the same time, she also had one significant crush
and a few satisfying erotic encounters with men as well, so the question of her
sexual identity seems more complex than the text suggests.
She showed a high level of intellectual maturity and deep emotional
involvement in her romances. At the same time, she was – at least by the
authors’ account – sexually completely inexperienced and uninformed. Her
territory was crush, adoration, unrequited love, cruising and fantasy. She was
uninterested in the sexual act itself, not only with men, but also with women.
Moreover, she escaped the opportunity of a reciprocated, real, everyday
relationship when, after the war, it was offered to her by her above-mentioned
German love – a withdrawal she would mourn for the rest of her life. Yet, the
dynamics of these emotions are barely interpreted either by her or the authors.
According to the book, she had little connection with the urban lesbian
subculture, nor did she seek to find such a community, which largely existed
outside of her social class. She was looking for love in her own social circle,
sometimes transiting to the demimonde. And while in her love life she was brave,
free and unconventional, politically she was conservative and pro-monarchy.
Moreover, she had little interest in study and only pursued waged and/or creative
work when it was absolutely necessary.
Turning from Sidonie’s life to the construction of the book, it is in many ways an
impressive biography but nonetheless one that leaves the reader with a sense of
lack. One deficiency is the sparse and laconic interpretation; the analysis is at times
so scarce that it rarely goes beyond the mere telling of events. The political context
is correctly outlined, although sometimes a bit textbook-like. There are recurring
descriptions of the physical environment, atmospheric and nuanced details of
apartments, cafés and cities, and extensive family histories of auxiliary characters
(the latter of which are sometimes unnecessarily long and can appear irrelevant). It
feels as if the authors wanted to put into the book everything they found – all the
material of their background research – and it is this which at times makes the text
meandering and unwieldy.
The book also oscillates between different genres and potential readers.
Although it incorporates a set of primary and secondary sources, it is clearly not
supposed to be a scholarly work but instead a popular biography. There are no
references within the text, and the whole book is characterized by a kind of
fictionalized style, as if it was a novelized oral history or even a novel. This might
be a valid way of narrating, but it results in the most problematic aspect of the
book: it is often not at all evident who is speaking, whose voice we hear, whose
narrative is written in the text. The authors clearly intended Sidonie’s point of view
to prevail: ‘it is Gretl’s voice that remains the most decisive’ (p. xiii). However,
they do not quote the interviews but instead create a third-person narrative out of
them, together with reports from other characters and with the authors as
BOOKS 113

‘omniscient narrators’. The text therefore went through multiple transferences (and
arguably also projections): Sidonie’s own narrative (a construction itself) was
further reconstructed by the authors into a story, which is more an ‘externalized
autobiography’ than a biography. But after all, the title is ‘The Story of Sidonie C.’
and not the ‘biography’ of her. This need not have been in and of itself a problem,
but the lack of critical self-reflection on these questions diminishes the text’s value
as historical source.
Another lacuna is that there is hardly any discussion about the contemporary
lesbian subcultures and scenes in Vienna (or Central Europe more generally).
Although Sidonie’s life did not intersect with those subcultures or scenes directly,
the authors’ presumptions about the forms taken by sexual desires, emotions and
orientations and the questions they brought to their conversations with her were
most definitely shaped by their own knowledge and involvements. It would have
been relevant for the authors to include attention to that perspectival context, and
also to draw more fully on related literature on the topic (e.g. Hacker, 1987), which
they themselves listed in the bibliography.
An additional difficulty is that the book provides an insufficient picture
of Freud’s changing perceptions of sexuality. In his published account, Freud
certainly adjusted the details of the case to fit how he was thinking about
the Oedipal theory at that point (after important rounds of amending footnotes to
the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and in the midst of working on
Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and indicatively used such terms as ‘penis envy’
and ‘masculinity complex’.2 At the same time, this therapeutic encounter, ‘failure’
though it was, had also changed him. With regard to his stated position on
homosexuality, Freud represented especially modern views; he did not aim to
‘cure’ his patient and made expressly clear the pointlessness of all such efforts.
In his 1935 letter to an American mother of a homosexual boy (which was sent
by the boy’s mother to Alfred Kinsey in 1949), Freud even more firmly rejected
sexual conversion as a therapeutic aim (Freud, 1935). Moreover, he considered
the popular question regarding the congenital or acquired nature of homosexuality
to be ‘fruitless and inadequate’ (Freud, 1920, p. 155). In spite of this complexity,
the authors do not explore this psychoanalytic context at all; they ignore Freud’s
radical views on homosexuality as expounded in the Three Essays (1905) as well
as his problematic but striking conception of femininity represented in his 1925
study ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between
the Sexes’ and his infamous 1930s essays ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) and
‘Femininity’ (1933). Nor does the reader learn how Sidonie herself received the
case study.
Overall, then, this text is a respectable enterprise based on an exciting
and unique life story with dimensions that will be of interest to many readers.

2. For closer analyses of the case study, see e.g. Lesser & Schoenberg (1999), Allouch (2004),
Lahl (2021).
 114 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY (2021) 23(1)

It is important that this story has been reconstructed, although it could surely
have been elaborated in other ways. As it stands, the text reads more as a novel than
a biography.

References
Allouch, J. (2004) Ombre de ton chien: Discours psychanalytique, discours lesbien. Paris:
Epel.
Freud, S. (1905) Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In S. Freud, The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. from the German by
J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, vol. 7, pp. 123–243.
Freud, S. (1920) The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. SE 18, 1955,
pp. 145–72. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1925) Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the
sexes. SE 19, pp. 241–58. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1931) Female sexuality. SE 21, pp. 221–43. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1933) Femininity. In S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.
SE 22, pp. 112–35. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1935) Historical notes – a letter from Freud. American Journal of Psychiatry
107(10): 786–7.
Hacker, H. (1987) Frauen und Freundinnen. Studien zur ‘weiblichen Homosexualitat’ am
Beispiel Österreich 1870–1938. Weinheim: Beltz.
Lahl, A. (2021) Herrische Liebe: Zu Freuds homosexueller Patientin Margarethe
Trautenegg (geborene Csonka). In V. Preis, A. Lahl & P. Henze-Lindhorst (eds),
Vom Lärmen des Begehrens: Psychoanalyse und lesbische Sexualität. Giessen:
Psychosozial-Verlag.
Lesser, R.C. & Schoenberg, E. (eds) (1999) That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s
Female Homosexual Revisited. London & New York: Routledge.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2000) Heimliches Begehren: Die Geschichte der Sidonie C. Vienna
& Munich: Deuticke Verlag.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2003a) Heimliches Begehren: Eine verbotene Liebe in Wien. Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2003b) Sidonie Csillag, homosexuelle chez Freud: Lesbienne dans le
siècle. Paris: Epel.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2004) Sidonie Csillag: La ‘joven homosexual’ de Freud. Buenos
Aires: El Cuenco de Plata.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2008) Desejos secretos: A história de Sidonie C., a paciente
homossexual de Freud. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Rieder, I. & Voigt, D. (2012) Die Geschichte der Sidonie C.: Sigmund Freuds berühmte
Patientin. Vienna: Zaglossus.

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