“Sexuality and the Psychology of Love” by Sigmund Freud

I noticed that I privately referred (in my own thoughts) to Sexuality and the Psychology of Love as "that Shakespeare book." Why Shakespeare? Freud teaches us to notice such errors. Gradually I realized: I confused Shakespeare with Freud because Freud was Shakespeare. The author of Hamlet knew very little about human life. Most of his experience was with cloistered theater troupes. Shakespeare’s immense sympathy for servants, farmers, murderers, Jews, was a sympathy of the imagination. Freud also lived a sheltered life, in the upper middle-class precincts of Vienna. His intuitions about the mind were gymnastic leaps. None of us has met a Lady Macbeth, yet we know she exists. Similarly, the id is only a hypothesis, but we all feel it throbbing within us. Shakespeare and Freud shared the omniscience of innocence.

This book comes to life when lesbians appear. The best such piece is "The Psychogenesis of A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" (1920) which, despite its barricaded title, almost immediately becomes literature on the level of de Maupassant:

A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, belonging to a family of good standing, had aroused displeasure and concern in her parents by the devoted adoration with which she pursued a certain lady "in society" who was about ten years older than herself. The parents asserted that, in spite of her distinguished name, this lady was nothing but a cocotte…