A history of bourgeois sexuality or the “witness” that I did not want to see

Abstract

Published in Austria in 2000, the biography of Sidonie Csillag, a centenary woman, born in 1900 in Vienna, who stayed there until 1940, interested me, above all, because she was a patient of Freud, about whom he published a case study. in 1920, seeking to understand the “origin and development” of homosexuality in women. 2The authors, Ines Rieder and Diana Voigt, are countrymen of Sidonie, a name that, as they write in the preface, invented for “the character” of this “plot”, which is a “true story”, obtained through the transcription of several hours of conversation recorded and extensive documentation. Rieder is a writer and Voigt is a psychologist and, right at the end of the book's plot, they appear as characters who are Sidonie's “two young friends”, to whom she told her story. The preface points to the lack of “homosexual life and experience” in the immense literature produced on the Vienna of the fin de siècle, suggesting that the book can fill that gap.