Meet the Author: Michal Shapira

IN PERSON EVENT

Meet the Author: Michal Shapira

“Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna”

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

7:30 – 9:00 PM (EST)

Michal Shapira, Ph.D., a member of the History Department at Tel Aviv University, will be a Friends of the Library guest speaker on April 2nd, when she will discuss her new book, Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka, a historical analysis of one of Sigmund Freud’s least-studied cases, published in 1920 as The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. Scholars of sexuality often focus on Freud’s writings on male homosexuality, disregarding his views on homosexual women. Michal Shapira’s book serves as a corrective to this imbalance. Part I introduces the case and explores Freud’s attitudes towards lesbianism, radical among his medical colleagues in the early twentieth century. It also puts Margarethe Csonka, the patient, at its center. Michal Shapira considers Freud’s only treatment of a “female homosexual” and assesses Csonka’s background life before and after her encounter with Freud. Part II expands the case beyond the scientific-medical purview of the times and looks at the new opportunities afforded to women and assimilated Jews through growing equality and the modernization of urban life in 1920s Vienna. The book places Csonka’s case within the broader context of contemporary medical and psychological texts, Freud’s writings, Jewish and queer history, and modern Vienna’s urban and artistic milieu.

No CME/CE credits offered.

Professor Michal Shapira joined the History Department at Tel Aviv University in 2013. She previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University as an ACLS-Mellon New Faculty Fellow and at Amherst College as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She received her B.A. from Tel Aviv University and her Ph.D. in History and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.

Shapira has published articles in leading journals such as Twentieth Century British History, Medical History, History of Psychology, Gender & History, Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Theory & Criticism, Modern Intellectual History, Psychoanalysis & History and more.

She is the author of the book The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013; paperback 2015) and her most recent book is titled A Case of Female Homosexuality in Modern Vienna: Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka (Routledge, 2023).