Ana Tomčić uses the case of the modernist writer and film critic Bryher to discuss how psychoanalysis viewed trans identities and trans trainees in the 1920s and 1930s.
They were the child of a shipping magnate and one of the richest people in the UK. Roughly since the age of four, and possibly before that, they expressed a deep wish to be a boy. They grew up on “boys’” novels and adventure tales. They developed a taste for literature and history, partly because the gender fluidity of ancient societies and Elizabethan theatre allowed for more expansiveness than the world in which they were forced to inhabit: the turn-of-the-century upper-middle-class British society. Just after World War I, they fell in love with the American poet Hilda Doolittle. During their decades-long relationship, they formed a household with their friend and occasional partner Kenneth Macpherson, a bisexual man. Bryher and Macpherson formally adopted H.D.’s daughter Perdita. By today’s standards, the trio were a queer, polyamorous family raising a child. They also made films together, founded the influential, progressive film magazine Close Up and profoundly influenced each other’s writing. However, the group of queer writers and filmmakers shared another common interest: psychoanalysis.
In 1927, in Berlin, Bryher and Macpherson often frequented the social gatherings of filmmakers affiliated with the New Objectivity movement, known for its psychological depth and social criticism, where they quickly befriended the Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Pabst was good friends with the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs – part of Freud’s inner circle – who had just advised him on The Secrets of a Soul (1926), the first cinematic depiction of a psychoanalytic case study. As it turned out, Bryher and the film-loving analyst had a lot in common, so Bryher soon found themselves on the analytic couch, having, as they put it in their personal notes, “the time of their life.” “I felt that the analysis of that period had been invented just for my own pleasure. I loved it. […] I used to go to Dr Hanns Sachs […] for my hour and in time was promoted to be allowed to go to the evening lectures on theory and with examples.” (“Berlin” n. p.) The lectures took place at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute where Sachs had been active since its opening in 1920 (Danto 59). In many ways, the Institute and its members were the epitome of everything psychoanalysis had become since the end of World War I. Social service to the masses was an essential part of the Institute’s project. From its opening, the clinic was flooded with patients and its lectures attracted physicians, nurses, teachers and social workers who wished to apply psychoanalytic knowledge within their profession. Analysts who worked at the Institute considered it their priority to treat those who could not afford sessions or could only pay nominal fees (Hale 31). Bryher, who considered becoming an analyst too, worked with patients from the Institute, particularly with adolescents from poor backgrounds.
Within psychoanalysis and without, ways of understanding gender non-conformity were different in the interwar period than they are now. One of the starkest differences was that there was much less categorisation in modernist queer life. While queer subjects in the early twentieth century all suffered from a sense of exclusion, there was, for a long time, no clear division between subjects who were non-conforming because of their gender identity (who we would now refer to as transgender or non-binary) and those whose non-conformism was founded primarily on their choice of sexual partners (who we would today refer to as gay, lesbian, bisexual or pansexual). One of the prevalent narratives for understanding LGBTQ+ identities in the modernist period was the theory of psychic hermaphroditism. Relying on biology, this theory claimed that every individual contains physical residues of the opposite sex, but the line of development (in the womb as well as in puberty) leads towards a monosexual body. Just as intersex persons (originally known as hermaphrodites) present cases in which this development got stuck, psychological development might lead a person to assume some, or most, features of the opposite sex. People assigned male at birth who felt themselves to be women and behaved in ways that were considered “feminine” (or vice versa) were thus “psychic hermaphrodites.” Depending on the source in question, psychic hermaphrodites were also frequently called “inverts” and this term encompassed both “aberrations” in gender identity and in the choice of sexual partner. The choice of sexual partner was considered just one expression of one’s gendered self (alongside of dress, movement, habits, activity, passivity and so forth). For Freud, this choice was the but the end point of a convoluted Oedipal journey and not at all a matter of biological automatism. Within the scheme that explained inversion through psychic hermaphroditism, transgender individuals were considered “extreme inverts”: their identification with the opposite sex had not only affected their choice of sexual partner, but also other features of their gendered life.
That biology and gender expression were closely intertwined in modernist depictions of gender and sexual development is clear. However, even the biology of “maleness” and “femaleness” was understood by a number of modernist psychologists and philosophers to be more of a scale than a journey necessarily ending in two binary points of destination. In The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women(1909), the philosopher Edward Carpenter understood sex not in terms of separate categories, but as a fluid scale, with the individuals on both ends of the spectrum occupying binary gender and heterosexuality, with a vast realm of combinations and fluctuations in between. “It is beginning to be recognised,” wrote Carpenter, “that the sexes do not […] normally form two groups hopelessly isolated in habit and feeling from each other, but that they rather represent two poles of one group, so that while certainly the two specimens at either pole are vastly divergent, there are great numbers in the middle region who are by emotion and temperament very near to each other. Nature, in mixing the elements that go to compose each individual, does not always keep her two groups of ingredients, which represent the two sexes, properly apart.” (6) In psychoanalysis too, the assumption of one’s gender and sexual roles depends on the interaction between one’s drives, one’s relationships and one’s social surroundings and is therefore open to an almost infinite variety of options and outcomes.
A consequence of modernist resistances to categorisation has been both exciting and confounding to scholars trying to write about Bryher’s life. Amanda Holm (2013) refers to Bryher’s biography as “negotiating and signifying female masculinity,” while Hayley M. Fedor (2013) speaks of Bryher’s historical novels as “cross-writing lesbian characters.” “Lesbian” (Souhami 2020), “trans” (Punzi 2024), “non-binary” (McCabe 2021), “trans” and “lesbian” (Funke, English, Parker 2023) and even “genderqueer” (McCabe 2021) are all terms that have been used to describe Bryher’s way of living their gender and sexuality. My use of the “they” pronoun is, above all, a sign of respect for this resistance, even if there is, as we saw, not a complete correspondence between today’s notions of non-binariness and modernist understandings of gender.
Going back to psychoanalysis, however, Bryher’s psychoanalytic journey can teach a lot about what psychoanalysis has become since Bryher’s initial surge of enthusiasm in the 1920s. Although Sachs and Bryher explored the roots of Bryher’s “gender trouble” in analysis, Sachs did not believe that this “gender trouble” would in any way prevent them from training or of becoming a good analyst. And neither, for that matter, did Freud. Freud knew Bryher and had reputedly at one point referred to them as “only a boy” (in contrast to H.D.’s girl-boy identifications) (Punzi 75; Friedman 112). On the eve of World War II, as well as after it, both Bryher and Sachs were worried that psychoanalysis’ open attitude towards the vicissitudes of human sexuality and gender roles was closing down, especially in the UK-context (“Congress PA” n.p.). What might remembering these worries, or cherishing the memory of psychoanalysis’ welcoming attitude towards people like Bryher, do for trans and non-binary patients and training candidates looking to expand the views of psychoanalysis today?
References:
Bryher, “Berlin”. Bryher Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Autobiographical notes, GEN MSS 97, Series II, Box 72, Folder 2855.
Bryher, “Congress PA”. Bryher Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Autobiographical notes, GEN MSS 97, Series II, Box 72, Folder 2855.
Carpenter, Edward (2022): The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women. Good Press Publishing. [orig. publ. 1908]
Danto, Elizabeth (2005): Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-1938. New York: Columbia University Press
Fedor, M. Haley (2013): Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience and Masculinity in Bryher’s Historical Fiction. PhD thesis
Funke, Jana, English, Elizabeth, Parker, Sarah (2023): Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres. Edinbirgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hale, Nathan J. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Holm, Amanda (2013): Female Masculinity in Bryher’s Development and Two Selves. PhD thesis.
McCabe, Susan (2022): H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Punzi, Elizabeth (2025): “H.D. and Bryher: Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and Gender”, in Sinclair, Vanessa, Punzi, Elizabeth, Sauer, Myriam (eds.): The Queerness of Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Souhami, Diana (2021): No Modernism Without Lesbians. London: Head of Zeus.
Stanford Friedman, Susan (2002): Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and their Circle. New York: New Directions.
