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The friendship of Freud and Yvette Guilbert, the famous French "diseuse," well-known today by Toulouse-Lautrec's pictures of her, was based manifestly on mutual admiration, affection, and respect, if not on reciprocal understanding. Guilbert had little or no knowledge of Freud's research into unconscious processes, and Freud seemed not to have understood or empathized with Yvette.
Their superficial albeit congenial friendship was challenged when Yvette asked Freud to explain how she was able to enter into the characters she portrayed on the stage. Freud provided an answer based on the influence of early unconscious memories. Yvette roundly rejected this view, and defended the intense effort of the performer.
It is the opinion of the author that Freud and Yvette had each seized one end of the performer's activity: the regressive, on one hand, and the conscious, creative ego work on the other. While advancing the concept of "regression in the service of the ego," psychoanalysts have paid little attention to the actual work of the ego.
On a wall in Freud's study, at Bergasse 19, were the photographs of three women: The first two were of Lou Andreas-Salome and Marie Bonaparte, well-known to psychoanalysts as among Freud's cherished friends and colleagues. The third photograph was inscribed "Au savant Sigmund Freud le salut d'une artiste," and was signed Yvette Guilbert, the French diseuse (Engelman, 1976).1
Freud was given this photgraph in 1926 by the world-famous entertainer whose name was known throughout Europe and in major cities on the east coast of the United States. Today, although her name is less familiar, she is immediately recognized in the scores of pictures of her painted and drawn by prominent artistsprincipally Toulouse-Lautrec, but also Forain, Degas, Steinlen, and many others. Typically, she is portrayed as a tall, gawky woman, with henna-red hair, a turned-up nose, and a large mouth. She usually wears a green gown with a deep decollete, and black gloves that reach above her elbows.
Beyond being simply a biographical footnote, Freud's relationship with Yvette (as she was called) presents two aspects that are of interest. The first is that it casts some light on a facet of Freud's personality that is frequently lost in the welter of idolatrous or demonizing stereotypes. The second aspect relates to...