Okay guys, buckle up for a speculative history on Freud + ferns. (The ferns stuff isn't speculative, it's historical, but Freud's fear of ferns--pteridophobia--seems to be urban legend at best.) But it's an interesting thing to think about! https://twitter.com/artcrimeprof/status/1245788737189171202

The history of botany has, since at least the mid-18thC, been bound up in questions of gender + sex. Linnaeus' sexual system of classification named + ordered plants based on their stamens ("male" sex organs) + pistils ("female" sex organs)--his nuptiae (marriages) plantarum.

In that (very pixelated) image, you'll notice the 24th category: cryptogams. Cryptogams, for Linnaeus, were spore-reproducing plants like moss, algae, fungi (worth another thread on its own), and, yes, FERNS.