Abstract

This chapter explores Sappho’s model of eros as egalitarian reciprocity between lovers that adopts many of the values associated with Ancient Greek practices of hospitality, where both lovers offer respect and unconditional receptivity to one another and attend to each other’s needs with precise awareness. Sappho’s model of eros sharply contrasts with the androcentric model of eros that emphasizes hierarchical value and competition, conquest, possession, and mastery over the love object. Reading the Freudian cases of Gretl (“The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”) and Dora (Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria), I will demonstrate that androcentric fantasy cannot fathom lesbian eros and violently responds to it as a threat to the illusion of male control over women. In the cases of Gretl and Dora, Freud’s blindness to the possibility of lesbian eros reveals many of the androcentric fantasies that are built up to ensure the dominance of the father over the daughter and the primacy of the phallus and phallic desire as the only possible form of active sexuality. Dora and Gretl, as patients of Freud, speak through their case histories and show the way toward “hysterical” communication and the validity of bodily, and feminine experience.