Rozsika on Sigmund

In my airport goody bag I packed 5 different embroidery projects and Rozsika Parker’s “Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine.” If you can track down a copy, I can’t recommend this book enough.  It is out of print and very expensive ($99 used on Amazon), but hopefully your local library has a copy.

Parker’s tome has nothing to do with the Julie Jackson’s Subversive Cross Stitch, but is rather an in-depth look at the inextricable link between embroidery and femininity, tracing the relationship back over 300 years. This is not a DIY or craft theory book.

I don’t know much about Freud, he never did much for me, and now he does even less. This is a quote from page 11:

“By the end of the [19th] century, Freud was to decide that constant needlework was one of the factors that ‘rendered women particularly prone to hysteria’ because daydreaming over the embroidery produced ‘dispositional hypnoid states.’

Um…

Hysteria? Daydreaming? “Dispositional hypnoid states?”

This idea induces hysteria because I cannot possibly wrap my head around all of the ways I disagree with it.

I may have to do some more research and get back to you, in the meantime, what are your thoughts about this?

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~ by rubi on December 30, 2008.