As a group of queer women, supported by the works of queer female psychoanalytic writers, we tried to come to terms with Freud’s views about us.

Freud is famous for being contradictory to read, and can be maddeningly inconsistent; sometimes he seems close to accepting queer sexuality as a normal part of the range of human experience, and his view of sexuality can be read as being fundamentally queer
(Baraitser, 2019), but he always reverts to a normative heterosexual developmental path.

For me, the experience of reading Freud on female homosexuality was like regressing to the state of a misunderstood child who is looking for approval from a parent, ever-hopeful but always disappointed. We wondered in the group if these contradictions reflected the subtleties of Freud’s own sexuality, noting his close and sometimes explosive relationships with men, and the limitations that his precarity as a Jewish man in early twentieth-century Vienna placed on him. We could imagine, sometimes, that he would have liked to describe normative development paths to non-heterosexual sexualities, finding a satisfactory parental figure in a “Pink Freud” (Fuss, 1995).

But at other times we lost patience with him and stopped wanting
to engage with him; Pink Freud seemed like a wishful fantasy.