Forbidden passions in psychoanalysis and literature
To illustrate this, we will present a decisive moment in the case of Elizabeth Von R’s hysteria, analysed by Freud in 1892, exactly the same year as the publication of Délia’s ‘Sensitiva’, only on the other side of the Atlantic, in Vienna, the home of the father of psychoanalysis. Like Délia’s Sofia, the youngest Fraulein daughter, Elizabeth, had a very close relationship with her father, which would deepen after the misfortune of a heart condition restricted him to his bed under the intensive care of his daughter until his dying days. Elizabeth had no brothers, but she did have older sisters, and transferred part of her passion for her father not to her sisters, but to one of her brothers-in-law. Someone she wished to marry should he become a widower. The unconscious desire for her sister’s death, a thriving passion for her brother-in-law, plus the signs of a forbidden passion towards her father, according to Freud, all preformed ingredients for Elizabeth to convert her erotic desires into a disease located in her lower limbs, her legs, dragging them along in her ‘painful gait’.
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Case Histories: Fraülein Elizabeth von R.’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2) ([1893 and 1895] London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), pp. 135–181. For Freud, Elizabeth had a great ambition, which was ‘her demand for love’,
2 Sigmund Freud, ʼCase Histories’, p. 161 but, like Délia’s female characters, her gifts, her moral sensitivity, her obstinacy, meant that Elizabeth did not shun forbidden desires, even though she unconsciously converted them into physical pain that profoundly hindered her life. Misfortune was her fate:
While she was nursing her father … she for the first time developed a hysterical symptom – a pain in a particular area of her right thigh. It was possible by means of analysis to find an adequate elucidation of the mechanism of the symptom. It happened at a moment when the circle of ideas embracing her duties to her sick father came into conflict with the content of the erotic desire she was feeling at the time. Under the pressure of lively self-reproaches she decided in favour of the former, and in doing so brought about her hysterical pain.
3 Sigmund Freud, ʼCase Histories’, p. 164.Elizabeth’s first ailments arise from intimate and forbidden contact with a sick man, in this case her father. In need of care and assistance, as his condition worsens, the father’s exposed body in bed ends up arousing sexual desires in his daughter. This leads Freud to pay attention to the ‘circle of ideas’ that emerge from the intimate scene between father and daughter: it consists of a range of meanings and values that arises from the erotic desire experienced, although censored and transformed, firstly, into a repressive moral idea, then converted into physical pain. Regarding this circle of ideas, we prefer to speak in terms of structure of feeling; it relates to the eroticism in family relationships, here called forbidden passions.
An exactly similar conflict – though of higher ethical significance and even more clearly established by the analysis – developed once more some years later and led to an intensification of the same pains and to an extension beyond their original limits. Once again it was a circle of ideas of an erotic kind that came into conflict with all her moral ideas; for her inclinations centred upon her brother-in-law, and, both during her sister’s lifetime and after her death, the thought of being attracted by precisely this man was totally unacceptable to her.
4 Sigmund Freud, ʼCase Histories’, pp. 164–165The need for a man’s love was what Elizabeth sought, according to Freud, but her misfortune consisted of being in love precisely with her brother-in-law, her dead sister’s man, a family member. Elizabeth and her sister loved the same man; and the younger girl’s triumph upon her sister’s death was what caused all the illnesses that Freud described, as well as the circle of ideas that consequently erupted: a fervent combination of erotic desires for family members, accompanied by moral ideas, precisely raised to combat these desires related to intimacies deemed improper. Because women’s sexual needs, within patriarchal societies such as those of Brazil or Austria, should be satisfied within marriage, and not in nuclear family life, with siblings, or in its extensions, with friends, or even through masturbation.
This is the terrain of the forbidden passions, which, years later, lead to the discussion about the horror of incest, whether as a practice or as a temptation of fantasy, as Freud wrote: ‘the possibility of incest is an immediate one and the intention to prevent it may be conscious; in the other cases […] the possibility of incest would seem to be a temptation in phantasy set in motion through the agency of unconscious connecting links’,
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, p. 16. which is what happens with both Délia’s character Sofia and Freud’s Elizabeth.
Still accompanied by Freud and Elizabeth, but thinking once again about Délia’s characters, such as Rosa and Branca, we realise that their misfortune consisted of falling in love with the same man and their feelings not being reciprocated, because they were ‘forbidden’. The same kind of prohibition experienced by Sofia, who loved her own brother, dealing with forbidden incest.