Freud could have been a champion -- in fact, very briefly in history he was a champion -- for uncovering child abuse, childhood seduction, childhood sexual assault, and for advancing women's rights in this regard. But unfortunately, that moment in history was brief, as Freud reversed his theoretical and clinical tracks shortly thereafter.
The time of Freud's first dramatic, controversial clinical psychology statements unveiling the issue of childhood sexual abuse relative to the aetiology (cause) of hysteria was April 26th, 1896. There would be many more controversial clinical statements to come in the years that followed but none that continued along this same 'childhood sexual abuse' aetiology path.
After 1896, Freud started to write more and more about the aetiological factors of 'childhood sexual wishes and fantasies', 'distorted memories', 'symbolism', 'dreams', 'the Oedipal Complex', 'stages of 'psycho-sexual development, and the like. But there would be no more concerted writing about the factor of childhood sexual abuse -- whether it be 'rape' and/or 'seduction' -- like there was in this mostly succinct and direct paper on April 26th, 1896, read to a very disbelieving and angry medical audience at the time.
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Jeffrey Masson writes on this most dramatic and controversial change of events in his equally controversial book, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984, 1985, 1992). From Chapter 1 of Masson's book:
"I had shown them the solution to a more than thousand-year-old problem-- a caput Nili." -- Sigmund Freud, 1896.
On the evening of April 21st, 1896, Sigmund Freud gave a paper before his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, entitled 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'. (The paper has been included below as Appendix B.) Freud realized that in giving this paper he would become "one of those who had disturbed the sleep of the world." The address presented a revolutionary theory of mental illness. Its title refers to Freud's new theory that the origin of neurosis lay in early sexual traumas which Freud called "infantile sexual scenes" or "sexual intercourse in childhood". This is what later came to be called 'the seduction theory' -- namely, the belief that these early experiences were real, not fantasies, and had a damaging and lasting effect on the later lives of the children who suffered them.
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Now there are at least three or four theories of speculatively interpreting what happened back in 1896 -- and thereafter.
Theory 1. Masson's Thesis: Freud basically 'ran out of ethical courage'. He went charging into this 1896 meeting like a lion -- and he came out of it more or less wimpering like a lamb. Maybe not totally. Nor immediately. But still this theory asserts that Freud basically 'chickened out' of his sexual abuse theory because it was met with too much resistance in the (totally male) medical community. These men in the medical community had the power to destroy Freud's young medical career by ceasing to 'refer' patients to him, and in so doing, they had the power to economically destroy Freud as well. According to this Masson theory, Freud knew this, caved in to the medical pressure exerted on him, and eventually 'significantly modified' his theory in such a way that these doctors ceased to exert career and financial controls over him. Freud's various 'modifications in clinical theory' -- his 'Screen Memories' theory, his 'Dream Theory', his 'Wish Theory', his theory of 'forgetting' and 'jokes', his 'Oedipal' theory, his 'Childhood Sexuality' Theory, his 'Psycho-Sexual Stages of Development' Theory, his Libido Theory, his 'Psychic Apparatus' (Id, Ego, and Superego) -- all of these and more accumulated into what became together known as 'Classical Psychoanalysis'. But by this time, Freud's earlier 'Traumacy' and then 'Seduction' Theory had to all extents and purposes -- become dead and buried.
Some Psychoanalysts would argue that Freud still kept these two earlier theories at least partly alive in particular circumstances, but the vast majority of the evidence seems to indicate that the Traumacy and Seduction Theories were 'marginalized' in Classical Psychoanalysis at best, 'suppressed' in Masson's words, and to all extents and purposes -- dead and buried, a product of 'extinction' by earlier 'ethical' and/or unethical', 'right' or 'wrong' forces.
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From the internet...
Classical Psychoanalysis
Theory of Illness
-Three-Stage Compromise Model of Mental Illness:
- Stage 1: Primal repression in the pregenital stages
- Step A: Id prompting (wish)
- Step B: Ego defends (counterwish)
- Stage 2: Return of the repressed content following
pubescence
- Stage 3: Compromise deflection (conversion) to
“symptoms”
Theory of Cure
Freud’s original theory:
1. Understanding of hidden meanings = insight (Freud
tells the secret and patient is obliged to change)
2. Client had to be free and open with therapist – relax
level of censorship (let the patient talk – whatever comes
to him/her = free association -> psychic determinism)
Freud’s final theory:
1. The neurotic is a person with significant primal
repressions, including those surrounding the
unresolved Oedipal complex
2. In therapy, this same acting-out process occurs in
the transference of feelings onto the therapist
a. Transfers affectionate, friendly feelings for the
therapist as a person
b. There are positive transferences of an erotic,
sexually lustful nature that are actually aimed at
the image
c. There are negative transferences of a hostile,
death-wishing variety that are also aimed at the
image rather than the person of the therapist
3. Neuroses stem from a personal dynamic, and it is
only the neurotic who can directly confront his/her
own unconscious and try to end the lack of
communication between the private realms of mind
4. As the neurotic client moves through
psychoanalysis, he/she develops an artificial or
transformed neurosis within the four walls of the
consulting room
5. When we speak of positive or negative feelings
being transferred to the therapist via imagoes, we are
also saying that libidinal or hostile
cathexes are taking place
6. The patient in psychoanalysis comes gradually to
remove libido from object cathexes in the environment
and from the symptoms manifested in the body and to
redirect this free libido onto the relationship with the therapist
Therapy
- A scientific investigation in addition to a curative process
- Rules for dream interpretation/analysis:
1. Do not take the manifest content of a dream
literally, because it never reflects the unconscious
meaning intended.
2. Present various portions of the dream contents to
the client as a prompt for free association, and do not
worry about how far this line of investigation takes
you from the original dream story.
3. Never lead or suggest things about the dream to
the client; wait until several dreams and/or free
associations to dream contents suggest the direction to
be taken in making interpretations.
- Patient lies on sofa, Freud sits behind head of patient - out of sight (Freud did not like being stared at for eight hours a day)
- Met several times/week, for at least a year
- Pay was discussed up front and charge would occur for even missed appointments
- Saw patients for 50 minute hour - took notes between sessions (not during)
- In earliest sessions, Freud turned lead to patient: “Before I can say anything to you I must know a great deal about you; please tell me what you know about yourself.”
- Freud began instructing on basis of psychoanalysis around the 5th or 6th session (very much against independent reading/studying of psychoanalysis by patient)
- Advised patients not to make important decisions during course of treatment - to limit making of errors in life decisions
- Hold out on interpretation until client is one step short of making it himself or herself.
- Psychoanalysis ends when both analyst and analysand decide to stop seeing one another.
To contact the web manager:
E-mail Colin M. Burchfield, Ph.D.
Use the above link (e.g., image) to purchase my favorite textbook on clinical psychology. Use the below (e.g., image) link to purchase the book from which much of the information on this page came.
Links to Resources on Classical Psychoanalysis:
Psychoanalysis Related Organizations
Psychoanalysis Related Journals
Psychoanalysis Related Books
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Theory 2: This thesis is probably held by most orthodox and classically trained Psychoanalysts: That Freud's 'new' theoretical modifications after he slowly 'dropped' his 'Traumacy' and 'Seduction' Theories were warrented by 'new' clinical evidence and were superior theories based on this 'new' and/or 'accumulative' clinical evidence. Freud's biggest argument seemed to be that these 'alledged' incidents of 'childhood sexual abuse/seduction' were just far too common for Freud to believe that they were all 'real'; that conversely, they represented 'distorted memories and real fantasies of unconcsious childhood wishes on the part of his female clients and that these fantasy-wishes were a "normal" part of their evolving childhood and adult sexual process'. In particular, the little girl's evolving 'romantic/sexual fantasies' towards her father became labelled by Freud in Classical Psychoanalysis as 'The Oedipal Complex'.
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Theory 3: The DGB Psychology Theory: That Freud overgeneralized on his Repressed Memory Theory, he overgeneralized on his Repressed Fantasy/Wish/Impulse Theory, he overgeneralized on his Traumacy Theory, he overgeneralized on his Seduction Theory, he overgeneralized when he abandoned both his Traumacy and Seduction Theory, he overgeneralized on his Oedipal Theory, and he overgeneralized on his Sexual-Libido Theory. In effect, both Pre-Psychoanalysis and Classical were/are full of overgeneralizations that to this day have not been fully compensated for except by differing elements of 'Post-Freudian' and 'anti-Freudian' schools of psychology, each of which have their own unique and particular way of focusing on human behavior and human pathology -- and each of which only sees a 'certain element of the whole of human life and human mental pathology' just like Classical Psychoanalysis still does. As theorists, we all play 'The Fitting Game' (Fritz Perls) where we all make 'boxes' and 'generalizations' and 'theories' most of which generally see 'elements of the whole' but never 'the entire whole'. We all come up with these 'generic theories' -- some better or worse than others -- but none ever 'perfect' enough to encompass the whole of 'human life' and 'human pathology'. There are different ways that we -- meaning theorists and/or therapists -- can play the fitting game. Mostly, a therapist is taught one particular theory and sticks with that theory. However, we can also change and/or modify our theories according to the clinical cases and information that we receive.
The worst thing we can do is try to 'force' our generic theory on case information that doesn't fit the theory. This is a Cardinal Sin amongst theorists and therapists -- and when we are dealing with a theory that handles clinical information that is potentially as emotionally volatile and devastating as The Seduction Theory (or its opposite, The Oedipal Theory) -- with potential legal ramifications to boot -- it is imperative for theorists and/or therapists to either get this information 'absolutely right' and/or at the very least to not make any claims of 'absolute rightness' when the clinical information is based on 'subjective, narcissistically biased testimony' -- or even more dangerously -- therapist interpretation (that is potentially based on the therapist's own projections and/or counter-transferences) that could be right or wrong or anywhere in between. If some father's legal, family, and/or social reputation is at stake -- and the consequences involve the very real potential of his life being ruined -- the people who get involved in this type of case better make sure that they have an iron-clad case of what they are talking about. There is absolutely no room for ethical and/or legal error here because the potential consequences to a 'falsely accused and/or convicted man or woman are so great.
One only has to be reminded of the horrific case of Dr. Charles Smith who's 'seemingly expert' testimony helped to convict numerous parents of 'killing their own babies' -- only to find out significantly later that much of this testimony was fraught with errors and 'not expert at all'. The doctor was totally discredited, his medical license was revoked, and numerous cases came back up for re-investigation -- with some people having spent years in jail already -- based on Smith's 'bad' testimony.
While there are some differences in the two professions here -- childhood forensics vs. psychotherapy -- still, there are many similarities in issues, logic vs. illogic, and horrific consequences that deserve to be seriously looked at and analyzed for their potential for error...Here are two articles relative to the 'Dr. Charles Smith' horror show...
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Court lets dad appeal Dr. Smith baby case
Judge waives deadline to challenge conviction
January 7, 2009
Tracey Tyler
LEGAL AFFAIRS REPORTER
The Ontario Court of Appeal is giving Richard Brant a second chance to prove he didn't kill his 2-month-old baby, contrary to highly damaging findings made by disgraced pathologist Dr. Charles Smith.
Brant's deadline for appealing his 1995 conviction expired more than 13 years ago, but the court yesterday agreed to an extension. Lawyers for Brant, 36, have until Friday to file documents formally setting the appeal process in motion.
"The applicant (Brant) has explained the delay and there is obvious merit to the appeal," Justice Marc Rosenberg said in a written endorsement yesterday, after hearing submissions from Brant's lawyer, James Lockyer, and Crown counsel Alison Wheeler.
Wheeler did not oppose Lockyer's request for a time extension. Brant's case was one of nearly two dozen that led to a recent public inquiry into Ontario's pediatric forensic pathology system.
A team of international forensic experts found Smith, described by Brant's trial lawyer as "the king" of child death investigations, made mistake after mistake and reached findings not supported by evidence.
In Brant's case, Smith concluded 2-month-old Dustin Brant's death in Nov. 1992 was a homicide from blunt-force trauma, likely the result of being shaken. In his findings, he contradicted a neuropathologist who performed an autopsy and found Dustin died of respiratory failure and pneumonia.
In an affidavit filed with the court, Brant, who had originally been charged with manslaughter, said he agreed to accept an offer from the Crown and plead guilty to aggravated assault because he felt he stood no chance against Smith, then a powerful and persuasive witness.
Brant served six months in jail.
Speaking with reporters outside court yesterday, Lockyer said his client and many other parents who were convicted of killing their children on the basis of Smith's testimony share another common denominator. Most, like Brant, had little money.
To this day, Brant, who now lives in New Brunswick, doesn't have the money to fight to clear his name.
As a result, Rosenberg ruled yesterday that Lockyer will have his legal fees covered by the province, as allowed by the Criminal Code, at a rate of $225 an hour. His law student will get $35 an hour.
Toronto Star
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the charles smith blog
Monday, June 9, 2008
Extraordinary Article: Dr. James Le Fanu: Why Have Women Been Wrongly Convicted Of Killing Their Children?
My attention was recently drawn to an extraordinary article entitled: "Expert witnesses, suspect science and dead babies: Why have women been wrongly convicted of killing their children?"
The author is Dr. James Le Fanu - a medical columnist for London's Daily and Sunday Telegraph and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for "The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine" published by Diane Publishing Company in 2001;
The article was published in a feisty medical publication called "Spiked Health" on June 27, 2005.
As a practicing physician, Le Fanu saw first hand the emergence of the dubious proposition that there might be a hidden epidemic of abusive injury of children emerged in the 1980s with the description by British paediatricians of two covert forms of child abuse - factitious illness and smothering - and its tragic results.
Le Fanu's insightful article is preceded by the following quotes:
'PLEASE, IF THERE IS ANY WAY YOU COULD HELP WITH OUR SITUATION, BY YOURSELF OR ANYONE YOU KNOW, COULD YOU PLEASE GET IN TOUCH. WE CAN HONESTLY SAY, HAND ON HEART, WE HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING TO HURT OUR BABY. WE ARE NOW BEEN [SIC] ASSESSED AND WE GOT TOLD [SIC] THAT WHEN WE GO TO THE FINDING OF FACTS HEARING AND WE STILL INSIST WE HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING, OUR TWINS WILL GO UP FOR ADOPTION.';
LETTER FROM PARENT
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'FOR ME, THE UNUSUAL FEATURE IS DEATH SO SOON AFTER BEING SEEN WELL, THE FACT THAT THERE HAVE BEEN PREVIOUS DEATHS IN THE FAMILY AND THE FACT THAT HE HAD HAD AN EPISODE OF SOME SORT ONLY NINE DAYS BEFORE HE DIED THAT CAUSED HIM TO BE ASSESSED IN HOSPITAL, BECAUSE THOSE FEATURES ARE ONES THAT ARE FOUND REALLY QUITE COMMONLY IN CHILDREN WHO HAVE BEEN SMOTHERED BY THEIR MOTHERS. SO THE DIAGNOSIS FOR ME, THE CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS, WOULD BE THIS WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF SMOTHERING.';
TESTIMONY OF PROFESSOR SIR ROY MEADOW, R V CANNINGS, MARCH 2002;
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THE AUTHORITY OF MEDICINE DERIVES FROM ITS SCIENCE BASE, SO IT WOULD BE REASONABLE TO ASSUME THAT DOCTORS WHEN CALLED ON TO GIVE THEIR EXPERT OPINION IN COURT WOULD HAVE A THOROUGH BALANCED GRASP OF THE RELEVANT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. THE SUCCESSFUL APPEALS OF SALLY CLARK AND ANGELA CANNINGS AGAINST THEIR CONVICTIONS FOR CHILD MURDER WOULD SUGGEST OTHERWISE, AS DOES THE RECENT RULING OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL THAT A FURTHER 28 CASES OF PARENTS CONVICTED OF SMOTHERING OR SHAKING THEIR CHILDREN ARE 'POTENTIALLY UNSAFE';
NOR CAN THAT BE ALL, FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S REVIEW WAS RESTRICTED TO THE CRIMINAL COURTS, AND THUS DOES NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE SEVERAL HUNDRED CASES A YEAR HEARD IN THE FAMILY COURTS WHOSE LESS STRINGENT STANDARDS OF PROOF ('BALANCE OF PROBABILITY' RATHER THAN 'BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT') WOULD FURTHER INCREASE THE RISK OF UNSAFE CONVICTIONS. THUS THE MEDICAL ADVOCACY OF CONTENTIOUS THEORIES OF THE MECHANISMS OF CHILD ABUSE IS LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR A SYSTEMATIC MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE ON A SCALE WITHOUT PRECEDENT IN BRITISH LEGAL HISTORY - WITH DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PARENTS WRONGLY CONVICTED. HERE I OFFER A 'MASTER THEORY' TO EXPLAIN HOW THIS EXTRAORDINARY SITUATION HAS COME ABOUT.
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The article proceeds as follows:
The hidden epidemic of child abuse;
Since Kempe's description of the 'battered-child syndrome' in 1962, paediatricians have become only too familiar with the burns, bruises, fractures and neglect of the child victim of abusive physical assault. The current concerns about the wrongful diagnosis of child abuse, however, centre on a trio of very different clinical situations whose defining characteristic might be described rather as one of uncertainty or ambiguity.
-- Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) - SIDS remains much the commonest cause of unexpected death in childhood, whose primary aetiology, despite much research, has proved elusive.
-- Childhood injuries - children are by nature accident-prone but sometimes the severity of their injuries might seem disproportionate to the explanation provided.
-- Medically unexplained symptoms - all doctors have patients whose signs and symptoms are difficult to explain.
Doctors are no different from anyone else in being reluctant to admit they 'do not know'. Why, for example, might SIDS affect two or more children in the same family, or how might a seemingly trivial accident cause an acute intracranial injury? Some might thus be unduly susceptible to the notion that the uncertainties arise not from their lack of knowledge or clinical skills but from parental concealment - that each of these ambiguous clinical situations is potentially a form of hidden or covert abuse inflicted by parents in such a way as to hide their intentions from external scrutiny. Further, these clinically ambiguous situations are not uncommon, which would suggest that child abuse is both more prevalent than is widely appreciated and perpetrated by even the most apparently respectable of parents. Paediatricians clearly have a major responsibility in identifying these concealed forms of abuse if they are to protect children from further injury or death.
The evidence for a hidden epidemic of child abuse;
The proposition that there might be a hidden epidemic of abusive injury of children emerged in the 1980s with the description by British paediatricians of two covert forms of child abuse - factitious illness and smothering. Roy Meadow, in his pioneering paper on Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, described two cases illustrating a phenomenon, familiar now but puzzling at the time, where mothers sought the sympathy of doctors and nursing staff by fabricating the symptoms of a perplexing illness in their child that warranted repeated hospital admissions and investigative procedures. In the first case the mother contaminated her six-year-old daughter's urine specimens to simulate recurrent urinary tract infections, while in the second the mother fed her six-week-old son high doses of salt, causing him to be admitted to hospital several times with 'unexplained' hypernatraemia. Four years later Meadow reported a further series of 19 cases in which 'fraudulent clinical histories and fabricated signs' encompassed the entire spectrum of paediatric illness - bleeding from every orifice, neurological symptoms of drowsiness, seizures and unsteadiness, rashes, glycosuria, fevers and 'biochemical chaos'.
The implications of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy were twofold: it alerted doctors to the possibility of fabricated illness as a potential differential diagnosis in children with unexplained symptoms. But it also demonstrated how the seemingly most devoted of parents might, in reality, be potential child abusers. Meadow himself, commenting on the mothers in the cases he described, observed how they were 'very pleasant to deal with, cooperative and appreciative of good medical care'.
David Southall's innovative technique of covert video surveillance for investigating apnoeic episodes in children vividly confirmed the sinister reality of hidden abuse. Now paediatricians attending meetings and conferences could see for themselves the blurry black and white images of mothers caught in the act of smothering or choking their babies. Southall's study widened the spectrum of child abuse in two significant directions. It offered, in smothering, a plausible explanation for why a child might experience recurrent acute life-threatening events necessitating urgent admission to hospital. And it emphasised, once again, the possibility that some at least of those children whose deaths were labelled as SIDS might have been the victims of smothering. Southall in a further report of 30 children undergoing covert video surveillance identified 12 siblings who had died unexpectedly, eight of whom the parents subsequently confessed to having smothered. Thus parental smothering must be a clear possibility in any child with recurrent acute life-threatening events where there has been more than one unexplained childhood death in the family;
The hidden epidemic revealed;
There could be no doubt following Meadow and Southall's findings that paediatricians must have been missing a substantial number of cases of child abuse and would in future need to be much more alert to the possibility of parental harm where the diagnosis was not clear. Frequently, however, such suspicions could not be confirmed with the sort of direct evidence provided by techniques such as covert video surveillance. So how could doctors be confident that covert abuse was the cause - and convince others to take the necessary steps to protect the child from further danger?
Significantly, there were certain similarities in the signs and symptoms of children with these clinically ambiguous situations and those recorded in well-authenticated forms of abuse such as smothering, poisoning and abusive head injury. Thus it seemed reasonable to infer, by extrapolation, that these presentations were 'characteristic' of covert forms of abuse which could then be confidently diagnosed - even in the absence of any other circumstantial evidence such as bruises, signs of neglect or parental history of violence. During the 1980s the trio of clinically ambiguous situations would become redesignated as 'child abuse syndromes'. A key influence was 'Meadow's rule' regarding SIDS. While the absence of reliable pathological findings made it difficult to distinguish SIDS from smothering, Meadow argued that two or more childhood deaths in the same family, along with a recognisable 'pattern' of events (such as previous acute life-threatening episodes) was strongly suggestive of infanticide: 'two is suspicious and three murder unless proved otherwise...';
Another was the proposal that two specific presentations of childhood injury were 'characteristic' of abusive assault. Caffey's original description of shaken baby syndrome suggested that the whiplash effect of vigorous shaking offered a 'reasonable explanation' for the presence of subdural and retinal haemorrhages in severely abused children. The imagery of how the violent to-and-fro movement of the baby's head could cause bleeding of the vessels of the eye and brain proved very persuasive, and it seemed logical to infer that any child presenting with retinal and subdural haemorrhages must have been shaken - despite the absence of other circumstantial evidence of abuse;
Similarly, Caffey attributed a radiological 'bucket handle' appearance of the metaphyses of the long bones in severely abused children as being due to a 'twisting and wrenching' of the child's limbs by the parents. Subsequently, it was suggested that those children in whom abuse was suspected should have a skeletal survey for similar 'suspicious' metaphyseal lesions that were interpreted as being characteristic of abusive assault - again, despite the absence of clinical signs of fracture or subsequent radiological evidence of healing. A third was a widened case definition for Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Meadow, in his initial series, had confirmed the diagnosis either by covert surveillance or by confronting the perpetrator and obtaining a confession. In a widened definition the presence of 'diagnostic pointers' was proposed for use in children with medically unexplained symptoms. They included:
-- Parents unusually calm for the severity of illness;
-- Parents unusually knowledgeable about the illness;
-- Parents fitting in contentedly with ward life and attention from staff;
-- Symptoms and signs inconsistent with known pathophysiology;
-- Treatments ineffective or poorly tolerated;
The hidden epidemic confirmed;
These novel child abuse syndromes, taken together, represented a major conceptual breakthrough in paediatrics. The uncertainty of clinically ambiguous situations had given place to the certainty of the single unifying and plausible diagnosis of covert abuse. The scale of the hidden epidemic then turned out to be substantially greater than had been expected, with a fourfold increase in the number of child abuse cases in the 10 years from 1978 to 1988. This was reflected regionally in an increase from 40 to over 200 cases a year in the City of Leeds while, by the end of the decade, an extra 7,500 children every year were being placed on the child protection register on the grounds of physical abuse;
Nonetheless, the facility with which the syndromes could bring to light covert abuse concealed from view their poor evidential basis. The causal link between the putative mechanism of assault and subsequent injury could be neither independently confirmed nor experimentally investigated. It might seem reasonable to extrapolate from the presence of retinal and subdural haemorrhages in the battered child that these features had the same significance in a child with no other circumstantial evidence of injury. Certainly the powerful imagery of violent shearing forces disrupting the blood vessels was persuasive, but shaking has never been directly observed or proven to cause such injuries; the supposition that they do is based on (contested) theories of biomechanics;
Rather, the legitimacy of the syndromes was predicated on two related and highly improbable assumptions, scientific and legal. The scientific assumption was that there could be no other explanation, either known or that might be discovered at some time in the future, that might explain these 'characteristic' presentations. Meadow's 'rule', for example, precluded the possibility that there might be some unknown genetic explanation for multiple unexpected childhood deaths in the same family, while the 'characteristic' pattern of shaken baby syndrome precluded the possibility of some alternative explanation for the retinal and subdural haemorrhages - such as an acute increase in retinal venous pressure from intracranial bleeding caused by accidental head injury. The legal assumption presupposed that these presentations were so specific for abuse that they were by themselves sufficient to secure a conviction - even in the absence of the sort of circumstantial evidence of violence or neglect that would normally be required to return a guilty verdict in a court of law.
Put another way, the 'characteristic' presentations of the syndromes could not sustain the interpretation placed upon them: they might be 'consistent with' but could not, by themselves, be 'diagnostic of' child abuse. Thus some at least of the parents contributing to the statistics of the fourfold rise in child abuse were likely to be innocent. Three additional factors, in particular, bolstered the credibility of the syndromes in the family and criminal courts.
The authority of the child abuse expert;
By the close of the 1980s, the leading experts in child abuse had acquired an international reputation and were thus called on to instruct and educate not just their fellow paediatricians but also the police, lawyers, social workers and judges in the child abuse syndromes. Their persuasive expert opinion, when expressed in court, was guaranteed a sympathetic hearing, while their confidence in the syndromes they had discovered was virtually unchallengeable. Further, they could scarcely accept the force of contrary evidence since to do so would require them to concede that their expert testimonies might, in similar cases, have resulted in wrongful conviction. Meanwhile the costs of the process of investigating allegations arising out of the child abuse syndromes rose to an estimated £1billion per year, with the more prominent experts receiving fees for the preparation of their reports and appearances in court in excess of £100,000 a year;
The circular argument of successful convictions;
The validity of the child abuse syndromes would appear to be confirmed by the high proportion of successful convictions that followed the courts' careful scrutiny of the allegations against parents. These convictions, however, came to rely increasingly on a circular argument - whereby the main evidence for the child abuse syndrome of which the parents were accused was that parents had been convicted of it in the past. Thus parents whose child presents with subdural and retinal haemorrhages are accused of inflicting shaken baby syndrome because, in the vast majority of cases, parents of children with subdural and retinal haemorrhages are convicted of causing shaken baby syndrome. Similarly, Meadow argued that 'the likelihood that the court verdicts about parental responsibility for [causing their children's death] were correct was very high indeed', without making clear that it was his expert testimony that repetitive SIDS was 'murder unless proved otherwise' that had been a major factor in securing those convictions;
There is a further element of circularity in the presumed pathogenesis of the syndrome of which the parents are accused. The theory of shaken baby syndrome presupposes that violent, abusive force (comparable, it is claimed, to that sustained in a high-speed road traffic accident or a fall from a second storey window) is necessary to cause retinal and subdural haemorrhages. The parents are then caught in the catch-22 of either confessing to the alleged assault (for which they might be offered the inducement 'if you say you did it we will let you have your child back') or denying it, in which case their denial is evidence they must be lying about the events surrounding their child's injury, which is then further evidence of their guilt;
The silencing of parents;
The forces of expertise ranged against the parents were formidable enough, but it is apparent too from their personal accounts that they were subjected to a series of intimidatory tactics to silence their protestations of innocence and deny the validity of their testimony as the only witnesses of the circumstances surrounding their child's injury or death. Thus parents describe how, when summoned to see the consultant to learn (they presume) about their child's progress, they were 'ambushed' with the diagnosis of, for example, shaken baby syndrome, presented to them as irrefutable fact ('your son must have been violently shaken for several minutes to cause these injuries') without any suggestion that there could be some alternative explanation.
The prompt involvement of the police and social workers would lead to further accusatory interrogations that begin from the principle that the parents must be guilty - as the doctors would not have made such serious accusations if they were not convinced they were true. The transcript of these interrogations would subsequently be turned against them in court so that any inconsistencies in their explanations of how their child's injuries might have occurred were then presented as evidence of their efforts to conceal their guilt. Parents describe the same pattern of events where they would only be informed late on a Friday evening that a preliminary court hearing had been arranged for the following Monday morning - thus leaving them the weekend to find a lawyer (who was unlikely to have any expertise in this field) to contest their child being taken into foster care;
These psychological tactics were a prelude to the yet more powerful intimidatory weapon of technical obscurantism - the description of their child's injuries and couching of the charges against them in a language in which the professionals were fluent but the bewildered parents were not. How could they hope to dispute the allegations when they did not know what was being talked about? Parents are of course entitled to seek their own expert opinion, but soon discovered that the overwhelming consensus about the validity of the child abuse syndromes meant it was very difficult to find anyone to argue in their defence; or worse, the expert reports they requested were actively detrimental to their case;
This silencing of parents was made more effective still by the rules of confidentiality that wrap the proceedings of the family courts in a cocoon of secrecy, making parents liable to a charge of contempt of court if they sought advice or support from anyone not directly involved in their case. This secrecy in turn protected the proceedings of the court, and in particular the testimony of expert witnesses, from external scrutiny while concealing from public view the spectacle of so many apparently respectable parents being convicted of inflicting these terrible injuries on their children - without any circumstantial evidence that they had done so.
For parents there was no escaping their fate. From the moment of the initial allegation against them, the alliance of medical experts, police, social workers and an unsympathetic judiciary - well organised, experienced and well financed - meant that their eventual conviction was almost a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, the two assumptions, scientific and legal, of the specificity of the syndromes as being diagnostic of abuse remained as insecure as ever, with the courts' willingness to convict parents in the absence of circumstantial evidence of abuse resting almost entirely on their faith in the reliability and trustworthiness of medical expert opinion.
The first sign that such faith might be misplaced came in 2003 during Sally Clark's successful appeal, with the revelation of 'fundamental errors' in the testimony of Meadow and other prominent experts that had resulted in her original conviction. Their credibility was further undermined by Justice Judge's Appeal Court ruling exonerating Angela Cannings of murdering her two children. Justice Judge dismissed the central plank of the prosecution case, Meadow's claim that there had been a 'pattern of events' leading up to the deaths of children that was 'characteristic' of smothering: 'We doubt the aptness of the description "pattern"...the history of each child was different from every other child.' Further research would refute Meadow's claim (as reflected in his 'rule') that recurrent SIDS in the same family was 'extremely rare' - in other words, that in such cases the cause was likely to be unnatural. On the contrary, a follow-up study of SIDS families found two or more deaths in the same family to be 'not uncommon' with the overwhelming majority (80-90 per cent) due to natural causes. There are, it has subsequently emerged, several genetic mechanisms that could account for recurrent SIDS including congenital visceroautonomic dysfunction and cardiac dysrhythmias;
Similarly, further research has undermined the validity of retinal and subdural haemorrhages as being characteristic of shaken baby syndrome, with an evidence-based review finding 'serious data gaps, flaws of logic and inconsistency of case definition' in the relevant scientific work. Shaken baby syndrome was not, as its name implied, a 'syndrome', but rather encompassed several different forms of brain injury, with different clinical history and neuropathology, involving some mechanism other than shaking to account for the presence of retinal haemorrhages. Thus a series of independently witnessed accidents confirmed that, as parents had maintained, minor falls could cause an acute subdural bleed with the retinal haemorrhages being due to a sudden rise in retinal venous pressure (44). Further, parental histories of a preceding episode of respiratory collapse were compatible with the very different pathological findings of anoxic brain damage, with disturbance of the microcirculation causing thin subdural and retinal haemorrhages;
Meanwhile, the widened definition of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy based on 'diagnostic pointers' has also resulted in wrongful convictions, with the child's unexplained symptoms proving to be due to some rare or unusual medical condition with which the doctor was not familiar. Subsequently the syndrome would be renamed 'factitious illness' in recognition of the fact that, while some parents may fabricate the symptoms of their child's illness, the combination of unexplained symptoms and the mother's personality profile did not constitute a syndrome of abuse. Finally, radiologists' misinterpretation of normal variants of ossification in the first year of life as being metaphyseal fractures accounts for the obvious discrepancy between the findings of multiple fractures on skeletal survey and the absence of any clinical signs of abusive injury;
This serial collapse of the improbable scientific assumption that there could be no explanation other than abuse for the characteristic presentation of these syndromes has exposed in turn the equally improbable legal assumption that, contrary to sound judicial practice, it is possible to convict parents without there being additional circumstantial evidence or reasonable motive for their abusive intentions. Thus Justice Judge would, in his exoneration of Angela Cannings, draw attention to 'the absence of the slightest evidence of physical interference which might support the allegation she had deliberately harmed them'. And, again, he emphasised how 'the absence of any indication of ill temper or ill treatment of any child at any time' and 'the evidence of both her family and outsiders about the love and care she bestowed on her children' made it extraordinarily unlikely that she might have smothered them. Justice Judge's exoneration of Angela Cannings' character as a loving mother focuses attention on the moral and judgmental dimension of the child abuse syndromes, arising from extrapolation from Meadow's original description of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, that all parents are potential child abusers. Is this extrapolation plausible? The psychological profile of those who unambiguously have harmed their children reveals, as would be expected, them to be psychopaths, criminals, opioid abusers, alcoholics and so on. So when parents such as Angela Cannings, with no blemish on their character, appear as loving, concerned parents, the likelihood must be that it is because they are loving concerned parents - and very powerful evidence is required to argue otherwise.
Meadow and the proponents of the child abuse syndromes necessarily take the contrary view, and in so doing are required to portray parents' protestations of innocence as deceitful. That moral judgment, together with the failure to recognise that medical knowledge may be incomplete, meant that Angela Cannings' wrongful conviction for infanticide was almost inevitable. The question remains how many other parents have similarly been wrongly convicted of the terrible crime of injuring their children, and been robbed of their families, livelihoods and good name.
Next Post: A critique of this article by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick as published in "Spiked Health."
................................................................................
DGB
In Conclusion:
The best that we can say regarding the whole 'Seduction Theory' vs. 'Oedipal Theory' is that:
1. 'Every case is different and each case needs to be thorough analyzed and judged on its own particular merits and idiosyncrisies';
2. Beware of so-called 'expert testimony' whether it is Classical Freudian (Oedipal) or pre-Classic-Freudian (Seduction) Theory;
3. Let us not lose focus on that most important democratic principle that a man or woman is innocent until proven guilty.
4. If in doubt, remain skeptical -- and don't turn 'subjectively biased testimony' into 'righteous truth or fact'.
5. Both Freud's early 'Traumacy-Seduction' Theory and his later 'Impulse-Restraint' Ideas are deserved of proper recognition and respect -- and should be combined into a more comprehensive Integrative Theory. How tightly -- or whether at all -- one wants to hold onto Freud's Oedipal Theory is a matter for further debate. I accept it 'metaphorically' or 'symbolically' but not literally; similarily, with Freud's 'psycho-sexual stages of development';
6. Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Klein, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and others all had legitimately good things to say on much of this inter-related clinical material and all deserve to be properly read and studied for anyone who is a psychotherapist -- or thinking of being one.
-- dgb, Feb. 28th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Monday, March 2, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Freud's Causal Interpretations -- And Generalizations -- About 'The Aetiology of Hysteria'
Freud and Joseph Breuer made a good team -- as short-lived as it turned out to be.
Breuer was the older and in some ways the wiser of the two. He was more conservative and cautious with his 'causal interpretations and generalizations'. He was the more 'grounded' of the two. He was the better 'rational-empiricist' in that he was not quite so quick to jump to fast fast conclusions and over-generalizations.
In contrast, Freud was younger and more ambitious. Freud was quicker to jump to new -- and more provocative, controversial, dramatic -- conclusions. Freud was the better 'marketer' and 'seller'. It's just you had to pay a little closer attention to what Freud was marketing and selling because Freud was quicker to 'jump off the deep end' with his conclusions. When this happened, Freud needed someone to 'reel him back to earth again'. Breuer was that man. Unfortunately, Freud was stubborn and would not take 'no' for an answer. It was his way or the highway. So Breuer took the highway leaving Freud to fend for himself and to deal with whatever provocative, controversial issues he got himself into. They were frequent -- and many.
However, Freud was charismatic and always seemed to attract -- and then lose -- male followers. This would be one of the main 'serial, transference patterns' in Freud's life. Freud would attract all these male 'followers', 'co-workers', and/or students. He would teach them his 'Psychoanalytic system'. Then he would 'spit them out' (or they would 'spit him out') when they 'refused to buy completely into the Psychoanalytic program'.
With Freud, there was not too much room for 'variations on a theme' unless these variations came from the mouth of Freud. Between about 1906 and 1926, a whole host of very brilliant pschologists had passed through Freud's very 'tight Vienna circle', made their impression, rebelled against Freud's very 'tight reign over Freudian theory' -- and either quickly or slowly left. We can included amongst this group: Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and Otto Rank. (And that is a select list.)
All of this is to say that Psychoanalysis could have offered a much, much richer playing field for understanding human behavior and human neurosis and/or psychopathology. But time and time again, smart men with very smart ideas were turned away by Freud -- to the ongoing and ultimate detriment of Psychoanalysis in terms of its very 'anal-retentive' development which can be viewed as a projection of Freud's very anal-retentive -- and largely 'unemotional' -- character.
Breuer was the first smart man to fall by the way side. He would be far from the last.
Between about 1893 and 1895 Freud and Breuer came up with a 'whole host of partial and interconnected sub-theories' on the various 'causes' and/or 'co-factors' of hysteria which they put together into a more or less integrative theory of hysteria.
Having said this, it could be argued that Breuer's strength was primarily as a scientist and as a doctor -- and his contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a more or less 'physio-genic' theory of hysteria that went nowhere. In contrast, Freud's contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a psychological one, and a 'theory of resistance or defense' -- that went everywhere. So maybe Breuer had reached the limit of his capabilities even though his greatest contribution to Psychoanalysis was his treatment of 'Anna O' which Freud freely acknowledged as the birthpoint of Psychoanalysis.
Off the top of my head, I will itemize most of the Freudian 'hysterical co-factors' -- and then check them later.
1. Shock: A shocking experience that rattles the personality.
2. Unconscious/Repressed Memory or Memories: The memory of the shocking experience doesn't go through the usual 'conscious memory channel'. Rather it is denied entry into the personality and enters an 'unconscious or repressed memory channel' which is totally different than the usual conscious memory channel.
3. Hysterical Conversion: From its vantage point in the unconcious memory channel, the memory is able to 'cause havoc' in the personality and in the body. 'Repressed emotional energy' gets converted into 'bodily symptoms' that often have an associative and/or symbolic connection with the original shocking experience.
4. There may be something in the 'hysterical personality' that may be 'hyper-sensitive' and prone to 'hysterical conversion pathway'.
5. Unlock the repressed memory -- complete with all emotions locked up with the memory -- and you unlock the hysterical symptom, and 'set the client free' of the particular symptom associated with the particular memory.
6. I am speculating here but I imagine that one of the main problems that a therapist like Breuer or Freud might have had with a hysterical patient is that as fast as you help 'cure' the patient of one symptom, the patient might well 'create one or more new ones'. In doing so, she has the creative capability of keeping you busuy as a therapist for either the rest of her life or the rest of yours.
Here is where the full 'transference relationship' can be seen and diagnosed. It was often the case that these young hysterical women were also 'home nurses' who treated their acutely and chronically sick fathers who, in this regard, were monopolizing all of their time and energy.
How could these women 'break free' of their fathers' constant needs in order to fulfill some of their own 'freedom' and 'womanly' needs? Presto. On a subconscious or unconscious level the women learn how to behave like their fathers were -- i.e., the hysterical young women, in effect, 'identify with their sick fathers'.
Now from a position of previous 'powerlessness', they are 'transferred' into a position of 'power' -- just like their sick father. This is the power of the sick.
The young women go to a doctor with very 'mystifying' symptoms. The doctor is 'stumped' and can't help them. They go to another doctor -- a 'neurological' and/or 'psychological' specialist.
The 'hysterical daughter of a sick father' -- quickly becomes subconsciously very creative in keeping the new doctor 'very busy' just like her father has very creatively kept his daughter busy for the last x number of years.
What goes around comes around. I call this 'transference-reversal'. From an 'underdog' position as 'nurse', the daughter quickly learns the 'power-advantage' of playing the role of 'hysterical patient' -- she gets to control the young doctor just as her sick father controls her. It's more 'fun' 'being in control', 'being in power' and controlling the young doctor.
At least until or unless the young doctor is finally smart enough to figure out what is going on. That is where the therapy really starts. It starts with understanding the full dynamics of the transference complex and the corresponding nature of the therapeutic transference relationship. In 1895, Freud hadn't quite gotten there yet. And I'm not sure he ever fully did.
Transference is not always about 'sex' and/or 'love'. Even more often, it is about 'power' and 'self-esteem' and 'aiming to undo or repair a narcissistic self-esteem injury'. Often, all the factors listed above -- and more (anxiety, guilt, anger, rage, jealousy, possessiveness, hate, revenge...) are 'mixed together' into a whole smorgasboard of different and conflicting emotions and impulses and restraints that make up the entire 'transference package or complex'.
Call this my 'Nietzschean-Adlerian-Jungian' influence when I say this. Freud had part of the transference picture figured out -- more so than anyone else at the time -- but he did not have all of it figured out. Not in 1895. Not when he was treating 'Dora' from 1900-1901. And not when he came to associate transference with 'the repetition compulsion' and 'the death instinct' late in his career.
Freud was constantly hampered in his theorizing about transference by the 'tight constraints of his own very anal-retentive theorizing about Psychoanalysis in general'. Probaby the theorist who could have helped him the most in his understanding of transference -- Alfred Adler with his theories of 'inferiority feeling', 'superiority striving', and 'compensation' -- was not around long enough and/or respected enough for his deviation off the 'main Psychoanalytic path' to have any significant and long-lasting impact on Freud's understanding of transference. For the briefest moment in history -- specifically, Nov. 7th, 1906, in the minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society -- Freud and Adler seemed fully on the same page together:
.............................................................................
Freud first turns against Hitschmann and his 'rationalistic' point of view.
He (Freud) attributes great importance to Adler's work; it has brought his own work a step further. To judge from the immediate impression, much of what Adler said may be correct. (Notes by the editors, Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn: It seems that Freud had in mind what was later characterized as overcompensation or counterbalance for a narcissisitic 'injury' although he uses 'anatomical' language here.)
He singled out two leading ideas as significant and fertile: (1) the concept of compensation, according to which an organic inferiority (later to include the idea of 'psychic inferiority') is counterbalanced by a supervalent cerebral activity, and (2) that the repression is accomplished by the formation of a psychic superstructure. A similar formulation had occurred to him. (Notes by the editors, Nunberg and Federn: This may refer to the formulation that repression is accomplished by the ego.)
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Volume 1: 1906-1908, Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, New York, International Universities Press, Inc., 1962.
...............................................................................
But this was only a fleeting moment in time -- and the rest is history -- Adler ultimately, like so many others, separating from Freud and developing his own school of psychology -- Adlerian or Individual Psychology.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology goes back to re-integrate some of the separated pieces.
In the case of 'Anna O', one of the distinctions that DGB Psychology wants to make is between a simple case of 'Traumacy Neurosis' -- say, in the form of an 'emotional-to-physical hysterical conversion' symptom (such as Anna O 'refusing to drink) -- and a full-blown 'Father-Complex Transference Neurosis' (such as between Anna O and Joseph Breuer or between Freud and Dora).
...........................................................................
From the internet, see Freud, Anna O, and her 'not drinking water'.
Cathartic Method
Psychoanalysis: Cathartic Method
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The so-called "cathartic method" was a treatment for psychiatric disorders developed during 1881-1882 by Joseph Breuer with his patient "Anna O." The aim was to enable the hypnotized patient to recollect the traumatic event at the root of a particular symptom and thereby eliminate the associated pathogenic memory through "catharsis." The term was derived from Aristotle's use of it to describe the emotionally purgative effect of Greek tragedies.
Reading the case history of Anna O., one sees that the method developed gradually. At first, Breuer limited himself to making use of the patient's self-induced hypnotic states in which she would strive to express what she preferred to avoid talking about when normally conscious. Later on, Anna O. began inventing stories around a word or words she heard, at the conclusion of which she awakened serene and improved. After the death of her father, such stories evoked diurnal fears and hallucinations. The cathartic effect, linked to the emotional state that accompanied these fears, required the doctor to listen without actively seeking etiological clues. Anna O. aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a "talking cure", while she referred to it jokingly as "chimney-sweeping" (1895d, p. 30). At this juncture Breuer began to more systematically employ a technique by which, while Anna O. was in a trance, he repeated to her a few words that she herself had muttered while in a self-induced "absence."
It was probably in August 1881 that the method acquired its definitive form. This was when Anna O., after refusing to drink water and suffering near-hydrophobia during hot weather, remembered the disgust she felt when she happened upon her English lady-companion's dog while it was drinking from a water glass. As soon as she described the event, she asked for water and "thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return" (p. 35) Other examples provided Breuer with evidence that "in the case of this patient the hysterical phenomena disappeared as soon as the event which had give rise to them was reproduced in her hypnosis" (p. 35), and that systematic application of what she called "chimney sweeping" would put an end to one after another of such morbid phenomena. To move the treatment along faster, Breuer began use hypnosis, which he had not regularly employed previously.
Freud and Breuer filled out the notion of catharsis with the concept of "abreaction"—a quantity of affect that was linked to memory of a traumatic and pathogenic event that could not be evacuated through normal physical and organic processes as required by the "principle of constancy" and so, thus blocked (eingeklemmt), was redirected through somatic channels to become the process at the origin of the pathological symptoms (1893a).
Tired of poor results and of the monotony of hypnotic suggestion, by 1889 Freud appears to have decided, in treating Emmy von N., to employ "the cathartic method of J. Breuer." But failure to regularly induce hypnotic states inclined him by 1892 to give up hypnosis, which his patient Elisabeth von R. disliked. He asked her to lay down and close her eyes but allowed her to move about or open her eyes as she wished, and he experimented with a "pressure technique": "I placed my hand on the patient's forehead or took her head between my hands and said: 'You will think of it [a symptom or its origin] under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my pressure you will see something in front of you or something will come into your head. Catch hold of it. It will be what we are looking for.—Well, what have you seen or what has occurred to you?" (Freud 1895d, p. 110). This procedure "has scarcely ever left me in the lurch since then," (p. 111) Freud added, claiming that this was the case to such an extent that he told patients that it could not possibly fail but invariably enabled him to "at last [extract] the information" (p. 111).
Breuer's method little by little thus became an "analysis of the psyche" which prefigured "psychoanalysis," a term that first appeared in print in 1896. The technique would be developed progressively over the course of a dozen years.By 1907, when Freud undertook analysis of the "Rat Man," he no longer actively demanded that patients produce material, but asked only that they verbalize what spontaneously came to mind.
Freud's thesis, according to which trauma at the root of displaced energy towards the soma is invariably sexual in nature, led to a rupture in his relationship with Breuer, but it also determined the future course of psychoanalysis. His explanation of the difficulties that patients experienced during treatment to defend themselves against pathogenic memories would come to be known as "resistance," while the concept of "transference" would emerge from his understanding of Breuer's sudden termination of Anna O., or the time that a patient, upon waking from hypnosis, threw her arms around his neck.
Catharsis and abreaction, even while still observed during psychoanalytic treatment, no longer constitute therapeutic aims as in 1895. However, they remain prominent in several psychotherapeutic techniques, such as in "Primal Scream" therapy and certain types of psychodrama.
Bibliography
Anderson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
Chertok Léon; and Saussure, Raymond de. (1973). Naissance du psychanalyste. Paris: Payot.
Freud, Sigmund. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE,2.
——. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.
Mijolla Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccart (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse. Paris: Hachette.
.................................................................................
DGB Psychology does not let Freud totally off the hook for abandoning his infamous 'Seduction Theory'. In doing so, Freud put 'the theoretical and therapeutic lid back on child sexual abuse' or 'swept it under the carpet' if you will. However, at the same time, DGB Psychology does not let Freud off the hook for his totally focusing on 'The Seduction Theory' to begin with. Nowhere have I read in the case of 'Anna O' that she was sexually abused by her father. Nor does Anna O's 'refusing to drink water' because 'a dog drank water out of a human glass' constitute anything close to 'The Seduction Theory' in my mind (unless the dog seduced Anna O). Freud had an unfortuante habit of overgeneralizing his theoretical conclusions -- and then 'grandstanding' these conclusions until they collapsed under the weight of his own overgeneralizing. 'One or two robins does not necessarily mean spring.' Any man of Freud's scientific background and training should know that. Sometimes a person's need to 'make scientific or social or political waves' can interfere with, and push into the back seat, the same person's need to 'stay grounded in good, logical, rational-empirical common sense'. Narcissistic bias can easily interfere with scientific, epistemological -- and Psychoanalytic -- evolution.
DGB Psychology mixes and matches elements of Freud's Traumacy, Seduction, Childhood Sexuality, Oedipal, and Life-Death Instinct Theory with elements from other theorists such as Bacon, Nietzsche, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Perls, and Masson.
More on this to come.
-- dgb, Feb. 21st-23rd, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Breuer was the older and in some ways the wiser of the two. He was more conservative and cautious with his 'causal interpretations and generalizations'. He was the more 'grounded' of the two. He was the better 'rational-empiricist' in that he was not quite so quick to jump to fast fast conclusions and over-generalizations.
In contrast, Freud was younger and more ambitious. Freud was quicker to jump to new -- and more provocative, controversial, dramatic -- conclusions. Freud was the better 'marketer' and 'seller'. It's just you had to pay a little closer attention to what Freud was marketing and selling because Freud was quicker to 'jump off the deep end' with his conclusions. When this happened, Freud needed someone to 'reel him back to earth again'. Breuer was that man. Unfortunately, Freud was stubborn and would not take 'no' for an answer. It was his way or the highway. So Breuer took the highway leaving Freud to fend for himself and to deal with whatever provocative, controversial issues he got himself into. They were frequent -- and many.
However, Freud was charismatic and always seemed to attract -- and then lose -- male followers. This would be one of the main 'serial, transference patterns' in Freud's life. Freud would attract all these male 'followers', 'co-workers', and/or students. He would teach them his 'Psychoanalytic system'. Then he would 'spit them out' (or they would 'spit him out') when they 'refused to buy completely into the Psychoanalytic program'.
With Freud, there was not too much room for 'variations on a theme' unless these variations came from the mouth of Freud. Between about 1906 and 1926, a whole host of very brilliant pschologists had passed through Freud's very 'tight Vienna circle', made their impression, rebelled against Freud's very 'tight reign over Freudian theory' -- and either quickly or slowly left. We can included amongst this group: Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and Otto Rank. (And that is a select list.)
All of this is to say that Psychoanalysis could have offered a much, much richer playing field for understanding human behavior and human neurosis and/or psychopathology. But time and time again, smart men with very smart ideas were turned away by Freud -- to the ongoing and ultimate detriment of Psychoanalysis in terms of its very 'anal-retentive' development which can be viewed as a projection of Freud's very anal-retentive -- and largely 'unemotional' -- character.
Breuer was the first smart man to fall by the way side. He would be far from the last.
Between about 1893 and 1895 Freud and Breuer came up with a 'whole host of partial and interconnected sub-theories' on the various 'causes' and/or 'co-factors' of hysteria which they put together into a more or less integrative theory of hysteria.
Having said this, it could be argued that Breuer's strength was primarily as a scientist and as a doctor -- and his contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a more or less 'physio-genic' theory of hysteria that went nowhere. In contrast, Freud's contribution to the 'cause of hysteria' was a psychological one, and a 'theory of resistance or defense' -- that went everywhere. So maybe Breuer had reached the limit of his capabilities even though his greatest contribution to Psychoanalysis was his treatment of 'Anna O' which Freud freely acknowledged as the birthpoint of Psychoanalysis.
Off the top of my head, I will itemize most of the Freudian 'hysterical co-factors' -- and then check them later.
1. Shock: A shocking experience that rattles the personality.
2. Unconscious/Repressed Memory or Memories: The memory of the shocking experience doesn't go through the usual 'conscious memory channel'. Rather it is denied entry into the personality and enters an 'unconscious or repressed memory channel' which is totally different than the usual conscious memory channel.
3. Hysterical Conversion: From its vantage point in the unconcious memory channel, the memory is able to 'cause havoc' in the personality and in the body. 'Repressed emotional energy' gets converted into 'bodily symptoms' that often have an associative and/or symbolic connection with the original shocking experience.
4. There may be something in the 'hysterical personality' that may be 'hyper-sensitive' and prone to 'hysterical conversion pathway'.
5. Unlock the repressed memory -- complete with all emotions locked up with the memory -- and you unlock the hysterical symptom, and 'set the client free' of the particular symptom associated with the particular memory.
6. I am speculating here but I imagine that one of the main problems that a therapist like Breuer or Freud might have had with a hysterical patient is that as fast as you help 'cure' the patient of one symptom, the patient might well 'create one or more new ones'. In doing so, she has the creative capability of keeping you busuy as a therapist for either the rest of her life or the rest of yours.
Here is where the full 'transference relationship' can be seen and diagnosed. It was often the case that these young hysterical women were also 'home nurses' who treated their acutely and chronically sick fathers who, in this regard, were monopolizing all of their time and energy.
How could these women 'break free' of their fathers' constant needs in order to fulfill some of their own 'freedom' and 'womanly' needs? Presto. On a subconscious or unconscious level the women learn how to behave like their fathers were -- i.e., the hysterical young women, in effect, 'identify with their sick fathers'.
Now from a position of previous 'powerlessness', they are 'transferred' into a position of 'power' -- just like their sick father. This is the power of the sick.
The young women go to a doctor with very 'mystifying' symptoms. The doctor is 'stumped' and can't help them. They go to another doctor -- a 'neurological' and/or 'psychological' specialist.
The 'hysterical daughter of a sick father' -- quickly becomes subconsciously very creative in keeping the new doctor 'very busy' just like her father has very creatively kept his daughter busy for the last x number of years.
What goes around comes around. I call this 'transference-reversal'. From an 'underdog' position as 'nurse', the daughter quickly learns the 'power-advantage' of playing the role of 'hysterical patient' -- she gets to control the young doctor just as her sick father controls her. It's more 'fun' 'being in control', 'being in power' and controlling the young doctor.
At least until or unless the young doctor is finally smart enough to figure out what is going on. That is where the therapy really starts. It starts with understanding the full dynamics of the transference complex and the corresponding nature of the therapeutic transference relationship. In 1895, Freud hadn't quite gotten there yet. And I'm not sure he ever fully did.
Transference is not always about 'sex' and/or 'love'. Even more often, it is about 'power' and 'self-esteem' and 'aiming to undo or repair a narcissistic self-esteem injury'. Often, all the factors listed above -- and more (anxiety, guilt, anger, rage, jealousy, possessiveness, hate, revenge...) are 'mixed together' into a whole smorgasboard of different and conflicting emotions and impulses and restraints that make up the entire 'transference package or complex'.
Call this my 'Nietzschean-Adlerian-Jungian' influence when I say this. Freud had part of the transference picture figured out -- more so than anyone else at the time -- but he did not have all of it figured out. Not in 1895. Not when he was treating 'Dora' from 1900-1901. And not when he came to associate transference with 'the repetition compulsion' and 'the death instinct' late in his career.
Freud was constantly hampered in his theorizing about transference by the 'tight constraints of his own very anal-retentive theorizing about Psychoanalysis in general'. Probaby the theorist who could have helped him the most in his understanding of transference -- Alfred Adler with his theories of 'inferiority feeling', 'superiority striving', and 'compensation' -- was not around long enough and/or respected enough for his deviation off the 'main Psychoanalytic path' to have any significant and long-lasting impact on Freud's understanding of transference. For the briefest moment in history -- specifically, Nov. 7th, 1906, in the minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society -- Freud and Adler seemed fully on the same page together:
.............................................................................
Freud first turns against Hitschmann and his 'rationalistic' point of view.
He (Freud) attributes great importance to Adler's work; it has brought his own work a step further. To judge from the immediate impression, much of what Adler said may be correct. (Notes by the editors, Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn: It seems that Freud had in mind what was later characterized as overcompensation or counterbalance for a narcissisitic 'injury' although he uses 'anatomical' language here.)
He singled out two leading ideas as significant and fertile: (1) the concept of compensation, according to which an organic inferiority (later to include the idea of 'psychic inferiority') is counterbalanced by a supervalent cerebral activity, and (2) that the repression is accomplished by the formation of a psychic superstructure. A similar formulation had occurred to him. (Notes by the editors, Nunberg and Federn: This may refer to the formulation that repression is accomplished by the ego.)
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Volume 1: 1906-1908, Edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, New York, International Universities Press, Inc., 1962.
...............................................................................
But this was only a fleeting moment in time -- and the rest is history -- Adler ultimately, like so many others, separating from Freud and developing his own school of psychology -- Adlerian or Individual Psychology.
DGB Philosophy-Psychology goes back to re-integrate some of the separated pieces.
In the case of 'Anna O', one of the distinctions that DGB Psychology wants to make is between a simple case of 'Traumacy Neurosis' -- say, in the form of an 'emotional-to-physical hysterical conversion' symptom (such as Anna O 'refusing to drink) -- and a full-blown 'Father-Complex Transference Neurosis' (such as between Anna O and Joseph Breuer or between Freud and Dora).
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From the internet, see Freud, Anna O, and her 'not drinking water'.
Cathartic Method
Psychoanalysis: Cathartic Method
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The so-called "cathartic method" was a treatment for psychiatric disorders developed during 1881-1882 by Joseph Breuer with his patient "Anna O." The aim was to enable the hypnotized patient to recollect the traumatic event at the root of a particular symptom and thereby eliminate the associated pathogenic memory through "catharsis." The term was derived from Aristotle's use of it to describe the emotionally purgative effect of Greek tragedies.
Reading the case history of Anna O., one sees that the method developed gradually. At first, Breuer limited himself to making use of the patient's self-induced hypnotic states in which she would strive to express what she preferred to avoid talking about when normally conscious. Later on, Anna O. began inventing stories around a word or words she heard, at the conclusion of which she awakened serene and improved. After the death of her father, such stories evoked diurnal fears and hallucinations. The cathartic effect, linked to the emotional state that accompanied these fears, required the doctor to listen without actively seeking etiological clues. Anna O. aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a "talking cure", while she referred to it jokingly as "chimney-sweeping" (1895d, p. 30). At this juncture Breuer began to more systematically employ a technique by which, while Anna O. was in a trance, he repeated to her a few words that she herself had muttered while in a self-induced "absence."
It was probably in August 1881 that the method acquired its definitive form. This was when Anna O., after refusing to drink water and suffering near-hydrophobia during hot weather, remembered the disgust she felt when she happened upon her English lady-companion's dog while it was drinking from a water glass. As soon as she described the event, she asked for water and "thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return" (p. 35) Other examples provided Breuer with evidence that "in the case of this patient the hysterical phenomena disappeared as soon as the event which had give rise to them was reproduced in her hypnosis" (p. 35), and that systematic application of what she called "chimney sweeping" would put an end to one after another of such morbid phenomena. To move the treatment along faster, Breuer began use hypnosis, which he had not regularly employed previously.
Freud and Breuer filled out the notion of catharsis with the concept of "abreaction"—a quantity of affect that was linked to memory of a traumatic and pathogenic event that could not be evacuated through normal physical and organic processes as required by the "principle of constancy" and so, thus blocked (eingeklemmt), was redirected through somatic channels to become the process at the origin of the pathological symptoms (1893a).
Tired of poor results and of the monotony of hypnotic suggestion, by 1889 Freud appears to have decided, in treating Emmy von N., to employ "the cathartic method of J. Breuer." But failure to regularly induce hypnotic states inclined him by 1892 to give up hypnosis, which his patient Elisabeth von R. disliked. He asked her to lay down and close her eyes but allowed her to move about or open her eyes as she wished, and he experimented with a "pressure technique": "I placed my hand on the patient's forehead or took her head between my hands and said: 'You will think of it [a symptom or its origin] under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my pressure you will see something in front of you or something will come into your head. Catch hold of it. It will be what we are looking for.—Well, what have you seen or what has occurred to you?" (Freud 1895d, p. 110). This procedure "has scarcely ever left me in the lurch since then," (p. 111) Freud added, claiming that this was the case to such an extent that he told patients that it could not possibly fail but invariably enabled him to "at last [extract] the information" (p. 111).
Breuer's method little by little thus became an "analysis of the psyche" which prefigured "psychoanalysis," a term that first appeared in print in 1896. The technique would be developed progressively over the course of a dozen years.By 1907, when Freud undertook analysis of the "Rat Man," he no longer actively demanded that patients produce material, but asked only that they verbalize what spontaneously came to mind.
Freud's thesis, according to which trauma at the root of displaced energy towards the soma is invariably sexual in nature, led to a rupture in his relationship with Breuer, but it also determined the future course of psychoanalysis. His explanation of the difficulties that patients experienced during treatment to defend themselves against pathogenic memories would come to be known as "resistance," while the concept of "transference" would emerge from his understanding of Breuer's sudden termination of Anna O., or the time that a patient, upon waking from hypnosis, threw her arms around his neck.
Catharsis and abreaction, even while still observed during psychoanalytic treatment, no longer constitute therapeutic aims as in 1895. However, they remain prominent in several psychotherapeutic techniques, such as in "Primal Scream" therapy and certain types of psychodrama.
Bibliography
Anderson, Ola. (1962). Studies in the prehistory of psychoanalysis. Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget.
Chertok Léon; and Saussure, Raymond de. (1973). Naissance du psychanalyste. Paris: Payot.
Freud, Sigmund. (1893a). On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: Preliminary communication. SE,2.
——. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. SE, 2: 48-106.
Mijolla Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccart (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse. Paris: Hachette.
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DGB Psychology does not let Freud totally off the hook for abandoning his infamous 'Seduction Theory'. In doing so, Freud put 'the theoretical and therapeutic lid back on child sexual abuse' or 'swept it under the carpet' if you will. However, at the same time, DGB Psychology does not let Freud off the hook for his totally focusing on 'The Seduction Theory' to begin with. Nowhere have I read in the case of 'Anna O' that she was sexually abused by her father. Nor does Anna O's 'refusing to drink water' because 'a dog drank water out of a human glass' constitute anything close to 'The Seduction Theory' in my mind (unless the dog seduced Anna O). Freud had an unfortuante habit of overgeneralizing his theoretical conclusions -- and then 'grandstanding' these conclusions until they collapsed under the weight of his own overgeneralizing. 'One or two robins does not necessarily mean spring.' Any man of Freud's scientific background and training should know that. Sometimes a person's need to 'make scientific or social or political waves' can interfere with, and push into the back seat, the same person's need to 'stay grounded in good, logical, rational-empirical common sense'. Narcissistic bias can easily interfere with scientific, epistemological -- and Psychoanalytic -- evolution.
DGB Psychology mixes and matches elements of Freud's Traumacy, Seduction, Childhood Sexuality, Oedipal, and Life-Death Instinct Theory with elements from other theorists such as Bacon, Nietzsche, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Perls, and Masson.
More on this to come.
-- dgb, Feb. 21st-23rd, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Friday, February 20, 2009
Freud, Psychoanalysis, Hysteria -- and Childhood Traumacy, Sexual Traumacy, Sexual Abuse
I am about to embark on what I view as one of my most difficult tasks as a philosopher and psycho-theorist. I have to go back into Psychoanalytic history -- back to between about 1885 and 1900 and determine for myself what 'right' and 'wrong' turns Freud made when he was learning about -- and treating -- 'hysteria', learning about the connection between hysteria and sexuality, learning about the connection between hysteria and childhood sexuality, and finally learning about the connection between hysteria and childhood sexual traumacy and/or childhood sexual abuse.
Freud was a very provocative and controversial man -- he generally did not run away from provocative and controversial opinions. In fact, he tended to run towards them -- not away from them. Provocative, controversial opinions and theories were 'the name and essence of his character and game' if you will. Psychoanalysis was nothing if it was not provocative and controversial -- particulary about issues of human sexuality.
And yet in the late 1970s, along came another very provocative and controversial man -- trained right here in my area at The University of Toronto as a Freudian Psychoanalyst (1971-1979) while I was finishing up my Honours B.A. in psychology at The University of Waterloo. Jeffrey Masson is one of my few philosophical and psychological mentors (that I know of) who is still very much alive -- and much 'cooking'. Well, back between about 1979 and let us say 1992, Jeffrey Masson sure 'cooked up a storm' in The Freudian Establishment -- kind of like Carl Jung, first viewed as the fastest rising young star in the Freudian World, gaining the trust of Anna Freud at the top of the Freudian hierarchy, gaining access to Freud's most private letters in The Freudian Archives -- and then 'all Hell started to break loose' as Masson obviously didn't like what he was reading...
............................................................................
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Masson basically accused Freud of running away from the issue of childhood sexual abuse after bumping into this very difficult problem in his clinical practise, first incorporating the issue of childhood sexual abuse in one of his earliest and most provocative essays and theories on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- and then something 'very funny happened on the way to the forum' -- Freud essentially 'abandoned' this theoretical position and started to develop one equally provocative and controversial -- but not as legally provocative and controversial -- specifically, Freud began to develop the idea of 'childhood sexuality' and 'childhood sexual fantasies' as opposed to 'real, live sexual traumacies and abuses'. That was one very, very large turn that basically shook, rattled and completely 'reconstructed' the 'etiological foundations' of Psychoanalysis -- and this theoretical changeover seemed to start happening very shortly after Freud read his most controversial essay -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- to a very, very shocked and disbelieving audience of medical professionals on April 21st, 1896.
Masson believes that Freud was basically 'intimidated' by these doctors who held the balance of power over his future career as a medical practictioner -- and had the full power to determine whether he got any patients referred to him or not -- and in effect, 'chickened out' of the theoretical he presented to the doctors that night.
Masson could be right. How many of us can say that our ethical values have not been compromised at some point in our lives because we have 'shut up' in order to stay employed by the company who is signing our paycheque. I, for one, can't. I cannot say that I have always stayed 'ethically strong' in the face of the possibility of losing my employment.
So maybe Freud ethically 'caved in'.
However, maybe there were other mitigating factors at work here that deserve at least some if not equal or superior consideration.
Chief amongst these is possibly the fact that Freud was evolving into a 'more clinically experienced practicitioner' and as such, he was bumping into the fact that life is not always about 'clear-cut theoretical categories'. Or maybe Freud thought that life was about 'clear-cut theoretical categories' and the experiences that Freud was bumping into as he moved along in his clinical practise were not 'fitting neatly' into his early Aetiology of Hysteria Seduction-(Sexual Assault) Theory. Maybe he seriously believed that some significant alterations needed to be made to his earlier theory. Freud was certainly not shy about changing or modifying his theories if he thought he had a better one. (He just didn't like his theories being changed or modified by anyone else!).
Freud was a very complicated man. He was certainly vry 'multi-bi-polar' -- and his theories reflected this. Sometimes Freud oversimplified his theories. Other times, he over-complicated them. Sometimes Freud was very 'anal-retentive' and 'conservative'. Other times he was very 'liberal'. Sometimes he was very 'rational-empirical' -- a student of science and of The Enlightenment. Othertimes, Freud was on 'Pluto' or 'Mars' -- exploring the most outrageous, 'out of this world' theories that any man could reasonably or unreasonably explore. Symbolism, fantasy, sexuality, and childhood sexuality were four areas of Freud's thinking that would remain with him the rest of his life -- even after Freud started to basically or seemingly 'abandon' the idea of 'sexual traumacy and childhood abuse' as being central to his psychological theories.
Maybe Freud didn't have the emotional, ethical, and economic fortitude -- in short, the 'courage' -- to continue to stand up to a roomful of doctors who had the power to control -- and/or destroy -- his future. Or maybe Freud's ideas were simply changing in other directions -- towards more 'symbolism' and 'sexual fantasy' -- that gave a different value priority to the direction of his work, even as he may or may not have every completely abandoned his earlier 'traumacy' and 'seduction' (sexual assault) theories.
Probably, in the end, none of us will never know for sure.
However, I will point out one type of clinical and theoretical problem that I do believe Freud was bumping into in his work -- that was in Freud's eyes -- contradicting both his 'Traumacy' and his 'Seduction' Theory. Why? Because he was getting clinical information from his clients that seemed to be violating one of Freud's most basic underlying principles of Psychoanalysis -- and that was/is 'The Pleasure Principle'.
And here I think there was a question that needed to be clinically answered that Freud could not properly answer -- without in effect, abandoning his traumacy-seduction theory. The question ran something like this:
If these early childhood scenes of childhood traumacy and sexual abuse were really as horrifically traumatic and painful as Freud originally believed them to be, then why now, was Freud many years later in his clinical practise with these 'adult women' of allegedly 'childhood sexual traumacy and seduction and/or assault' -- why were these adult women now 're-creating and re-enacting these early scenes of traumacy and abuse' not as 'painful events' but rather as 'sexually exciting events'?
Maybe this wasn't happening all of the time. But maybe it was happening often enough in Freud's clinical practise that Freud couldn't ignore the evidence. It happened to Breuer when Breuer was treating 'Anna O'. And even more frightening to an evolving therapist -- 'Anna O's' sexual excitement was aimed squared at Breuer. Breuer had a wife and a marriage to protect. Breuer ran from 'Anna O' -- and that was basically the last we heard of Breuer as a 'psychotherapist'.
Obviously, by 1896 or 1897, Freud was probably running into some of the same clinical complications -- specifically, 'love and sexual transference' -- that Breuer ran into with 'Anna O'. How would Freud handle this very difficult clinical problem differently than Breuer?
So that -- for Breuer, Freud, and for me -- may have been the 50 million dollar clinical and theoretical question that Freud could not answer -- without abandoning his 'traumacy-seduction' theory and moving more and more towards a theory of 'childhood sexual fantasy'. How do you account for women re-creating their supposedly painful childhood sexual assaults as 'adult sexual fantasies' -- and how do you account for the phenomenon of 'love transference' -- without changing Freud's original 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'? And that is exactly what Freud went ahead and did. I will give DGB's answer to this most complicated clinical and theoretical problem in another essay and/or series of essays to come.
Freud may or may not have been wrong in doing what he did. But I can see Freud doing this -- in a spirit of 'maintaining his ethical and theoretical integrity'; not in a spirit of running away from an unpopular social-psychological theory. Or maybe Freud 'killed two birds with one stone' -- I wasn't there, I don't know.
But I will give Freud the benefit of the doubt on this last theoretical account.
He had a very difficult clinical question to answer -- and he answered it by modifying his psychological theory away from 'childhood sexual abuse' and towards 'childhood sexual fantasy'. The second theory would become almost as unpopular as the first one. But there was one critical difference. Fathers would not be called up on 'the red carpet' to account for possible incidents of 'sexually abusing their children'. That was a very big legal difference that would probably make fathers rest a lot easier at night. And perhaps in the process, Freud's future as a medical practictioner was safeguarded and maintained.
No one will probably ever fully know.
-- dgb, Feb. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Freud was a very provocative and controversial man -- he generally did not run away from provocative and controversial opinions. In fact, he tended to run towards them -- not away from them. Provocative, controversial opinions and theories were 'the name and essence of his character and game' if you will. Psychoanalysis was nothing if it was not provocative and controversial -- particulary about issues of human sexuality.
And yet in the late 1970s, along came another very provocative and controversial man -- trained right here in my area at The University of Toronto as a Freudian Psychoanalyst (1971-1979) while I was finishing up my Honours B.A. in psychology at The University of Waterloo. Jeffrey Masson is one of my few philosophical and psychological mentors (that I know of) who is still very much alive -- and much 'cooking'. Well, back between about 1979 and let us say 1992, Jeffrey Masson sure 'cooked up a storm' in The Freudian Establishment -- kind of like Carl Jung, first viewed as the fastest rising young star in the Freudian World, gaining the trust of Anna Freud at the top of the Freudian hierarchy, gaining access to Freud's most private letters in The Freudian Archives -- and then 'all Hell started to break loose' as Masson obviously didn't like what he was reading...
............................................................................
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
.................................................................................
Masson basically accused Freud of running away from the issue of childhood sexual abuse after bumping into this very difficult problem in his clinical practise, first incorporating the issue of childhood sexual abuse in one of his earliest and most provocative essays and theories on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- and then something 'very funny happened on the way to the forum' -- Freud essentially 'abandoned' this theoretical position and started to develop one equally provocative and controversial -- but not as legally provocative and controversial -- specifically, Freud began to develop the idea of 'childhood sexuality' and 'childhood sexual fantasies' as opposed to 'real, live sexual traumacies and abuses'. That was one very, very large turn that basically shook, rattled and completely 'reconstructed' the 'etiological foundations' of Psychoanalysis -- and this theoretical changeover seemed to start happening very shortly after Freud read his most controversial essay -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' -- to a very, very shocked and disbelieving audience of medical professionals on April 21st, 1896.
Masson believes that Freud was basically 'intimidated' by these doctors who held the balance of power over his future career as a medical practictioner -- and had the full power to determine whether he got any patients referred to him or not -- and in effect, 'chickened out' of the theoretical he presented to the doctors that night.
Masson could be right. How many of us can say that our ethical values have not been compromised at some point in our lives because we have 'shut up' in order to stay employed by the company who is signing our paycheque. I, for one, can't. I cannot say that I have always stayed 'ethically strong' in the face of the possibility of losing my employment.
So maybe Freud ethically 'caved in'.
However, maybe there were other mitigating factors at work here that deserve at least some if not equal or superior consideration.
Chief amongst these is possibly the fact that Freud was evolving into a 'more clinically experienced practicitioner' and as such, he was bumping into the fact that life is not always about 'clear-cut theoretical categories'. Or maybe Freud thought that life was about 'clear-cut theoretical categories' and the experiences that Freud was bumping into as he moved along in his clinical practise were not 'fitting neatly' into his early Aetiology of Hysteria Seduction-(Sexual Assault) Theory. Maybe he seriously believed that some significant alterations needed to be made to his earlier theory. Freud was certainly not shy about changing or modifying his theories if he thought he had a better one. (He just didn't like his theories being changed or modified by anyone else!).
Freud was a very complicated man. He was certainly vry 'multi-bi-polar' -- and his theories reflected this. Sometimes Freud oversimplified his theories. Other times, he over-complicated them. Sometimes Freud was very 'anal-retentive' and 'conservative'. Other times he was very 'liberal'. Sometimes he was very 'rational-empirical' -- a student of science and of The Enlightenment. Othertimes, Freud was on 'Pluto' or 'Mars' -- exploring the most outrageous, 'out of this world' theories that any man could reasonably or unreasonably explore. Symbolism, fantasy, sexuality, and childhood sexuality were four areas of Freud's thinking that would remain with him the rest of his life -- even after Freud started to basically or seemingly 'abandon' the idea of 'sexual traumacy and childhood abuse' as being central to his psychological theories.
Maybe Freud didn't have the emotional, ethical, and economic fortitude -- in short, the 'courage' -- to continue to stand up to a roomful of doctors who had the power to control -- and/or destroy -- his future. Or maybe Freud's ideas were simply changing in other directions -- towards more 'symbolism' and 'sexual fantasy' -- that gave a different value priority to the direction of his work, even as he may or may not have every completely abandoned his earlier 'traumacy' and 'seduction' (sexual assault) theories.
Probably, in the end, none of us will never know for sure.
However, I will point out one type of clinical and theoretical problem that I do believe Freud was bumping into in his work -- that was in Freud's eyes -- contradicting both his 'Traumacy' and his 'Seduction' Theory. Why? Because he was getting clinical information from his clients that seemed to be violating one of Freud's most basic underlying principles of Psychoanalysis -- and that was/is 'The Pleasure Principle'.
And here I think there was a question that needed to be clinically answered that Freud could not properly answer -- without in effect, abandoning his traumacy-seduction theory. The question ran something like this:
If these early childhood scenes of childhood traumacy and sexual abuse were really as horrifically traumatic and painful as Freud originally believed them to be, then why now, was Freud many years later in his clinical practise with these 'adult women' of allegedly 'childhood sexual traumacy and seduction and/or assault' -- why were these adult women now 're-creating and re-enacting these early scenes of traumacy and abuse' not as 'painful events' but rather as 'sexually exciting events'?
Maybe this wasn't happening all of the time. But maybe it was happening often enough in Freud's clinical practise that Freud couldn't ignore the evidence. It happened to Breuer when Breuer was treating 'Anna O'. And even more frightening to an evolving therapist -- 'Anna O's' sexual excitement was aimed squared at Breuer. Breuer had a wife and a marriage to protect. Breuer ran from 'Anna O' -- and that was basically the last we heard of Breuer as a 'psychotherapist'.
Obviously, by 1896 or 1897, Freud was probably running into some of the same clinical complications -- specifically, 'love and sexual transference' -- that Breuer ran into with 'Anna O'. How would Freud handle this very difficult clinical problem differently than Breuer?
So that -- for Breuer, Freud, and for me -- may have been the 50 million dollar clinical and theoretical question that Freud could not answer -- without abandoning his 'traumacy-seduction' theory and moving more and more towards a theory of 'childhood sexual fantasy'. How do you account for women re-creating their supposedly painful childhood sexual assaults as 'adult sexual fantasies' -- and how do you account for the phenomenon of 'love transference' -- without changing Freud's original 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory'? And that is exactly what Freud went ahead and did. I will give DGB's answer to this most complicated clinical and theoretical problem in another essay and/or series of essays to come.
Freud may or may not have been wrong in doing what he did. But I can see Freud doing this -- in a spirit of 'maintaining his ethical and theoretical integrity'; not in a spirit of running away from an unpopular social-psychological theory. Or maybe Freud 'killed two birds with one stone' -- I wasn't there, I don't know.
But I will give Freud the benefit of the doubt on this last theoretical account.
He had a very difficult clinical question to answer -- and he answered it by modifying his psychological theory away from 'childhood sexual abuse' and towards 'childhood sexual fantasy'. The second theory would become almost as unpopular as the first one. But there was one critical difference. Fathers would not be called up on 'the red carpet' to account for possible incidents of 'sexually abusing their children'. That was a very big legal difference that would probably make fathers rest a lot easier at night. And perhaps in the process, Freud's future as a medical practictioner was safeguarded and maintained.
No one will probably ever fully know.
-- dgb, Feb. 20th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
Thursday, February 19, 2009
DGB Transference and Personality Theory Integrates Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, Masson
It's funny. Freud was a Gestalt Therapist before he was a Psychoanalyst.
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. Some might say 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Alternatively, I would say 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
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DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory -- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me 'The Imperative 12'.
More history...
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From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
..........................................................................
DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- compromise-formations can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a 'filter and editorial screening process' for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it. I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, to what extent, and the particular details around this event. 'Commit to flames' the ideas of 'unconscious and repressed memories'. Work with 'conscious memories'!
............................................................................
'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience. The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one. This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. 'The truth shall set you free.'
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
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From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
§ § §
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old. Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come very early in Freud's evolutionary clinical development, maybe as early as 1895 or 1896, maybe even earlier back to the time when Freud actually was practising hypnosis.
Indeed, I wonder if something very important in the evolution of Psychoanalysis wasn't lost in the first Psychoanalytic case -- i.e., Breuer's case -- of 'Anna O'.
Or shortly thereafter.
That was the point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Jeffrey and his family
Skeptical that humans could be understood (at least by psychologists) Masson turned to animals. In 1995 he published When Elephants Weep, an international best seller, followed by the equally popular Dogs Never Lie About Love.
Since those two books he has published 6 more books about animals, looking in every one at their emotions: About cats he wrote The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (along with a fable, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold); He looked at fatherhood in the animal world and the lessons to be learned for humans in The Evolution of Fatherhood; writing about the emotional world of farm animals in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon turned Jeff into a vegan.
Lately he wondered why animals did not engage in genocide, and wrote Raising the Peaceable Kingdom. Finally he wrote an encyclopedia of his 100 favorite animals (often with an animal-rights angle) called Altruistic Armadillos - Zenlike Zebras. He has just signed a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book about vegetarianism (Veganism) called The Face on Your Plate.
Leila, Jeff and Manu are all vegan. Ilan and his three rats are vegetarian. The cats could not be persuaded to follow either philosophy, and are, alas, carnivores.
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What I believe:
I believe that in 500 years (maybe less) people will look back on us and wonder about many things. No doubt behavior we consider normal today will inspire horror in our more enlightened successors. War, for example. But I also think they may believe our disdain of insects is incomprehensible. Perhaps they will marvel that we could so easily cut down trees and perhaps even flowers.
I am completely opposed to any form of animal exploitation, including animal experimentation, keeping animals in zoos or in circuses, (indeed any form of captivity for animals), the use of leather, fur, wool and silk. I am even questioning my use of hearts of palm and maple syrup (thinking about the wounds necessary to create the sap). I also have begun to wonder whether any domesticated animal can lead an ideal life in the company of humans. Cats seem to me to come the closest, when they are able to wander freely and in safety.
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Take a look at some of Jeff's favorite books.
Copyright © 2000-2008, All Rights Reserved.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's website is dedicated to the emotional lives of animals, vegetarianism, veganism (the ethics of food), animal rights, and human-animal interactions.
Painting of Jeff and family on their beach in New Zealand, by Carina Koning
All of Freud's early work with hysterical patients, using hypnosis (let us loosely say between 1886 and the early 1890s) was geared towards 'finishing the unfinished situation'. Some might say 'making the unconscious, conscious'. Alternatively, I would say 'emotionally resolving unresolved emotional situations from years gone by'.
In conceptuology and terminology that had not been close to fully developed yet, we might say that: Hysterical symptoms were 'compromise-formations' between deep, underlying impulses for self-expression and more surface-level, social resistances, restraints, and/or defenses against the underlying and 'rising' impulses for self-expression.
Let's back up and do a quick history lesson before we go any further.
...............................................................................
From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
II. HISTORY
Suggestion x Free Association
Hysteria, Charcot, Breuer, Anna O.
Hysteria, now commonly referred to as a conversion disorder, displays physical symptoms (numbness/paralysis of a limb, loss of voice or blindness) that occur in a healthy body.
The French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, who was concerned with the treatment of hysteria, believed it to be a genuine ailment that afflicted men and women, and tried to free his patient's from their symptoms through hypnotic suggestion.
Joseph Breuer, a Vienese physician who also chose hypnosis as a clinical procedure, didn't intend just to suppress his patient's symptoms but rather searched for the deep causes of their suffering. He realized, during the treatment of his young patient "Anna O." (1880-82), that the results were far reaching if he let her talk about her feelings and thoughts. He named "spontaneous hypnosis" her trance-like states. Anna named 'talking cure' or 'chimney sweeping' the process that lead to the disappearance of her symptoms whenever she was able to recollect their root events.
Freud studied with Charcot in 1885-86. He collaborated with Joseph Breuer, while progressively formulating his theory on the mind, and considered hypnosis far more satisfactory than the electrotherapy he had tried until 1890.
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From the internet...
Hypnosis and Catharsis in Freud
David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University
Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralyses and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in nonhysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.
Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. In his work with Anna O, he found that by tracing her associations in an autohypnotic state, he could not only find an original repressed incident, but could actually cure her of her symptom. When she related an event to a symptom while in a hypnotic state, her symptom would become terribly powerful and dramatic, but would then be purged, never to trouble her again. This powerful and often traumatic transfer of an memory from the unconscious to the conscious is known as catharsis, an effective method which also seems to corroborate Freud's theories on the mind.
However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.
.....................................................................
DGB Editorial Comments
Now understand that I am a 'freelance and/or integrative theorist' who does not feel restricted by the boundaries of any one theorist's language, conceptuology, and/or theorizing. In fact, I can, and do, easily integrate them all -- particularily Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Breuer, Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Berne, Kohut, Perls, and Masson.
When it comes to pre-Freudian, Freudian, and post-Freudian integrative theorizing about the nature, structure, and different process-dynamics in the personality -- in other words, in this instance, DGB Integrative Personality and Transference Theory -- I will call these 12 personality theorists who preceded me 'The Imperative 12'.
More history...
......................................................................
From the internet...
The Freud Page
Psychoanalysis
©1998-2009 Maria Helena Rowell
Beginnings of Psychoanalysis
Breuer and Freud published their findings and theories in Studies in Hysteria , in 1895. They assumed that hysterical symptoms occurred when a mental process highly charged with affect found its normal path blocked to consciousness and movement. This 'strangulated' affect diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic innervation (conversion).
Through hypnosis, the thoughts and memories connected with the symptoms would eventually reach consciousness. 'Catharsis' (cleansing in Greek) would come about bringing a normal discharge of affect; despite these facts, symptoms tended to reappear if the relation with the physician was disturbed in any way, signaling that an intense emotional tie with him played an important role in the cure.
The authors stated that these symptoms had sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts and were caused by unconscious wishes and forgotten memories (psychic traumas).Thus, hysterics suffered mainly from 'reminiscences' that had not been worked-through.
The cornerstone of this theory was the assumption of the existence of unconscious mental processes that follow laws that do not apply to conscious thinking. Later, these processes were better understood and the mechanisms of psychological productions such as dreams could be grasped.
The Fundamental Technical Rule
Finding hypnosis inadequate, Freud refined Breuer's methods, based on his increasing clinical understanding of neuroses. He realized that success of the treatment depended upon the patient's relation to his physician whose task was to make the unconscious become conscious.
An entirely new relation between patient and physician developed out of a change in the technique and the surprising results thus obtained extended themselves to many other forms of neurotic disorders. Freud named this procedure Psychoanalysis - an art of interpretation, in 1896.
Freud thought that disturbing thoughts and conflicting urges were kept unconscious (repression) but, even so, they caused strong guilty feelings and great anxiety, interfering with conscious mental activity, as they consumed vital psychic energy in their struggle for release. As they were incompatible with the individual's normal standards, he would feel compelled to raise defenses against the intrusive ideas and the release of such urges, in order to maintain his inner equilibrium (defense mechanisms).
As Freud believed in the strict determination of mental events and assumed that all memories were interconnected, so that one recollection would lead to the next, he insisted that the patient should tell him everything that came to his mind, regardless of how irrelevant, senseless or disagreeable the idea might seem to him (free association). He found it possible for the patient to recover crucial memories while conscious.
By surrendering to his own unconscious mental activity (a state of evenly-suspended attention), Freud would follow the unconscious flow of his patient's mental productions, in order to trace the connections between the chain of allusive associations and the forgotten memories.
Occasionally, the patient might omit some material and this very gap in the communication would reveal that the association was avoided (resistance) due to its potential evocative power to bring the underlying forgotten memories to the surface of consciousness, along with the emergence of its previously inaccessible meaning.
Freud noticed that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual ideas. In 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories of actual events, they were the residues of infantile impulses and desires (fantasies). Thus he assumed that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed libido, which found expression in various symptoms.
By being in touch with his inner experiences in a state of regression, in which long-forgotten 'events' would be remembered, the analysand would relate to the analyst as if the latter were a figure from his past (transference).
Freud would communicate the connection between the patient's fantasies and feelings about the analyst and the origin of these thoughts and emotions in childhood experiences (interpretation).
This powerful re-experience of original conflicts caused great distress to the patient, but the working-through of the emotional pain (insight) rendered the treatment efficient, due to a new balance and distribution of psychic energy, promoting a reorganization of the psychological structures into healthier mental configurations.
..........................................................................
DGB Editorial Comments
Integrative theorizing is not a completely 'random' and/or 'democratic' process. As an integrative theorist, there are times when I have make 'either/or' judgments and decisions. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Adler's ideas. Either I support Freud's ideas or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Adler's ideas. Or I support Perls' ideas. Either I support Freud's 'Traumacy and Seduction Theories' or I support his Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theories. Sometimes -- indeed, oftentimes -- compromise-formations can be arrived at between the different theories. But not always. Like every theorist before me, my brain becomes a 'filter and editorial screening process' for those ideas that I let into my brain to become a vital part of DGB Personality and Transference Theory -- and those ideas that I don't let through this editorial screening process.
Example 1:
I think Freud invested way too much Psychoanalytic time and energy locked up in the concepts of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These ideas play no part in DGB Personality and Transference Theory. To put it bluntly, they get tossed away.
Between 1974 and 1979, while I was at The University of Waterloo working through my Honours B.A. in psychology, I was involved in numerous 'group psychotherapy' processes. Never once, did I witness -- either in myself or someone else -- an 'unconscious memory becoming conscious'. Never once did I witness the so-called phenomenon of 'repression'. I don't believe in concepts that I can't -- or don't -- experience. In this regard, I am an John Locke rational-empiricist, through and through. Don't give me any 'no-sense' concepts that do not have a 'sensory-experiential' ('phenomenological-existential') foundation. If you do -- then at least properly label these concepts as 'metaphysical' and/or 'mythological'. DGB Philosophy-Psychology uses metaphysical-mythological concepts but they are labelled as such. Metaphysical and/or mythological concepts are not to be confused with 'down-to-earth' concepts that have 'physical referents' that can be seen, heard, and/or touched. Our loved ones, we can see, touch, experience. I've never seen an 'unconscous memory' or a 'repression' seen, touched, experienced. My roughly 12 years off and on at The Gestalt Institute (1979-1991) in Toronto only further reinforced what I am saying here.
I've never seen a 'memory therapeutically worked with' that couldn't be brought to the client's awareness usually in pretty easy and timely fashion. 'Resistance' and 'suppression' are verifiable concepts.
With some degree of apprehension, I will use the concepts of 'suppressed memories' and 'subconscious memories' -- meaning 'out-of-awareness' memories that can usually be quickly brought into awareness with the right associations and/or the right degree of focus of attention -- but these are not to be confused with the ideas of 'unconscious memories' and 'repression'. These latter two concepts give a psychotherapist far too much liberty and license to 'project his or her own theoretical and/or experiential material' onto the client. Psychotherapeutically and legally there is the potential for much abuse and damage here -- in essence, creating or interpreting or reconstructing or analysing 'unconscious or repressed memories that don't exist, and that never existed' in a client's life history. Perhaps Freud, as an Oedipal and Childhood Sexuality Theorist was the worst violator of supposedly unconscious or repressed memories -- see 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' -- but the potential for this type of violation exists just as strongly, maybe even more so, at the hands of present-day Traumacy-Seduction Theory Psychotherapists. I cringe at the very real event of some father being dragged into court -- and his life ruined -- because some Traumacy-Seduction-Repressed Memory Therapist has 'interpreted or analyzed or reconstructed' a supposedly repressed memory from a client who doesn't even remember this memory. At least until the therapist convinces him or her elsewise. In most courts, that is called 'leading the witness'. All such cases should be thrown out of court. If a person can't remember something -- it's not a memory. Period.
Don't let some psychotherapist's or even some school of psychotherapy's theorizing --whether from one polar extreme, such as 'Classical Psychoanlytic-Oedipal-Childhood Sexuality-Fantasy' Theorizing; or from another polar extreme, such as Childhood-Traumacy-Seduction-Sexual-Assault' Theorizing -- destroy a person's life and/or a family's life because he/she/they 'projected his/her/their own theory onto a client whose case material didn't support this theory but rather was 'forced' into this theory like trying to put a circular piece into a rectangular box. We are talking about any situation where the therapist is playing the 'fitting game' with the client -- and the client's life experiences don't neatly 'fit into the therapist's theory, diagnosis, and therapeutic gameplan'. Any use of 'unconscious' or 'repressed' memories gives a therapist far too much liberty, license -- and potential for abuse -- of what a client does and doesn't remember.
How many men or women who as children or as adults were sexually assaulted -- don't remember the assault? They may not want to talk about it. But that is a different thing entirely from 'not remembering' it. I don't support everything that Jeffrey Masson has written about Freud's Controversial Abandonment of his Traumacy-Seduction Theory but I support Masson's editorial opinion on this account (The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory) -- people can almost always remember if they have been sexually assaulted, to what extent, and the particular details around this event. 'Commit to flames' the ideas of 'unconscious and repressed memories'. Work with 'conscious memories'!
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'Hysteria' and 'Neurotic Symptoms' as 'Compromise-Formations' and 'Allusions to Immediacy'
We have to be very careful that we not abuse the label of 'hysteria' and that it represents a legitimate diagnostic phenomenon, and not some 'medically unknown and/or undiagnosed phenomenon' either in present day or in Freud's time such as perhaps 'epilepsy' or a 'brain tumor' or 'schizophrenia' or 'hypochondria'.
Having said this, Freud, in his earliest psychotherapy sessions, worked in much more 'immediacy-oriented, Gestalt-fashion' than he did in his later more interpretive and analytical Psychoanalytical sessions.
I believe that Freud might have taken some serious steps backwards in this regard.
It is important that any form of psychotherapy be well-grounded in immediacy, contact, and the client's experience. The higher a therapist climbs into his or her own abstractions, interpretations, and analysis, more often than not, the less meaningful and therapeutically important this 'flight into therapist interpretation and abstraction' is going to be for the client. Did 'Dora' get anything out of Freud's rather 'wild transference interpretation' of Dora's symptoms? Or did she cut off Freud's treatment of her believing that perhaps she had met a therapist who was crazier than she was? (See Freud's 'Dora case' for your own interpretation and judgment here.)
In contrast, you look back at the way Breuer handled the 'Anna O' case and you have the classic essence of any form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a 'talking cure' -- meaning the client is doing most of the talking, not the therapist. The 'talking cure' leads to 'chimney sweeping' and 'emotional catharsis' -- turning an 'unfinished emotional event' into a 'finished' one. This is the Gestalt theory of 'paradoxical change'. By accepting first who we are, and who we have been, and by 'closing unclosed emotional events' or by 'finishing unfinished emotional events', we then give ourselves the opportunity to move beyond who we are and/or who we have been, to who we now can be. 'The truth shall set you free.'
The further Freud moved away from Breuer's more 'client-centred approach' (which Breuer basically 'fluked' upon) where 'Anna O' basically led the way and 'closed some of her own emotional issues and neurotic symtoms', and the further Freud moved into his own more 'therapist-directed, interpretive and analytic directed, and Oedipal-sexual fantasy directed' form of psychotherapy -- i.e., Classic Psychoanalysis -- the more it is quite possible if not probable that Freud was leaving patients behind in his own 'unilateral dust'. 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man' being two cases in point.
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From the internet...
Freud:
A Very Short
Introduction
Anthony Storr
Neville Jason, Reader
(Naxos AudioBooks)
Civilization and Its Discontents, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Anna (and Anna O!), penis envy, the Oedipus Complex, the Electra Complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, cigars, Charcot, Fleiss, hysteria, infantile sexuality, jokes, the unconscious, neuroses, slips of the tongue, the oral, the anal, and death. It is astonishing what the man accomplished in his almost eight decades on earth.
At one point, Storr wonders out loud why Freud was so influential. He cites his marvelous writing style (and it is wondrous, even in translation --- Norman Mailer said Freud was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century). But we suspect it is more simple than that.
Most of us want to know what makes us tick, and most of us run into people and events that affect us strangely, that make no sense. We wonder where they come from, what it all means, how could we --- for example --- fall into a trap, any trap, that trap again.
Positing id, ego, and the hidden unconscious gave us a chance to explain these oddities. For those lucky enough, or rich enough, psychoanalysis offered the chance to peer into one's own mind with the assistance of a nonjudging, tolerant, and infinitely patient helper.
§ § §
Storr was a practicing psychoanalyst, which would mean that he should also be patient, observant, non-judgmental. In writing about Freud, he is patient and observant but very judgmental. He wants to make sure that we know that when Freud defined the obsessional character ("order, cleanliness, control") the master was talking about himself: a man of detail, one who was detached, one who did not brook rebellion in the ranks.
Storr suggests that although Freud repeatedly called his handiwork a science --- not a philosophy, not a religion --- those who deviated from the dogma (Fleiss, Jung, Rank) were cut off, even labeled by the other followers as "Neurotic" or "Psychotic."
There are some surprises here. Freud was called "my golden Ziggy" by his mother. He took a dim view of humanity, called it "trash." He was generous. One of his long-term patients he christened The Wolf Man because of a dream he related to Freud --- a dream, perhaps, next to the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the most famous in existence:
I dreamed that it was night and I was lying in my bed. Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.
Wolf Man lived into the 1970s, was often interviewed on the master's technique. He tells us that Freud chatted with him about his own life, talking of his children, daily events; he even loaned him money, arranged for loans from others when he was broke. The only thing Freud did not do, Storr tells us, was to cure him. Even in later life Wolf Man suffered from depression, from the frightening thoughts that first brought him to treatment when he was a young man.
Freud's books, and monographs as published constitute some twenty-four volumes, but Storr informs us that he did not even begin writing until he was thirty-nine years old. Storr doesn't think much of most of Freud's writings outside of his theories (although he does make an exception for his paper on Michelangelo's Moses). Moreover, he suggests that Freud was not all that great an analyst. He offers up the idea that he saw patients mainly to create or shore up his own theories of the mind.
Storr also gives short shrift to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. He points out that modern psychoanalysts do not see dreams as hiding repressed sexual fantasies or memories. He merely credits Freud for rescuing dreams from the realm of mystics and witches, and he ignores Freud's insight that dreams represent one of the richest treasure-chests of insight to those who bother to record them.
Many of us who bother to interpret our own dreams learn quickly that they are as Freud saw them --- puns and games, a superb internal movie going on nightly, with hints and clues that can tell us more than we ever dreamed possible what the hell is going on there in our psyches, creating its own subtle symbolic system, the system that possibly rules us, possibly can free us.
Freud preferred his patients --- they weren't called "clients" in those pre-Carl Rogers' days --- to be well educated. He also was not interested in treating the overtly mad, nor those over the age of fifty. (In 1900 the life expectancy was such that to analyze an older person, he suggested, would be a waste). Freud also chose the couch for his analysands because he didn't like "being stared at for eight hours a day."
From his time with Charcot, Freud learned that the traumas could be retrieved and defused through hypnosis. This led to one of his major theories, that of trauma and repression. From his own experience, he learned of the significant phenomena of transference and counter-transference --- a subtle but powerful tool that brought the reality of a patient's passions and needs right into the consulting room where they could be examined by doctor and patient to understood where he or she came from, where he or she was going.
Patients were thus given permission to fall in love with the analyst without fear or shame. And an artful analyst could help one define fears and hopes from childhood, artfully transferred to the consulting room.
He cites Freud's showing the profound importance of how children are raised, and how they are hurt. The child, he proved, is indeed "father of the man." You and I as we exist now were formed by those who created us, nurtured us --- or in some cases, maltreated us.
The major gift of the master, in Storr's view, is that individuals were offered the opportunity to have an uncritical, sympathetic listener, one who would devote extensive time to those who may have needed it the most. It was the chance to be in the presence of one who would listen, would not judge nor criticize, and at appropriate times, could guide one into soul-changing insight.
These three discs run for four hours. Nevill Jason is a fine and precise (and dare we say , a compulsive) reader ... in the dry, BBC sense. Storr's judgmental view of his subject would be more befitting a parent rather than a historical figure. Perhaps it is appropriate that Storr emphasizes Wolf Man's oft repeated sentiment that Freud was "like a father" to him.
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DGB Editorial Comments
The only point on which I take issue with the writer above is on just how 'non-interpretive and non-judgmental a listener' Freud really was -- particularly the older Freud got and the more 'entrenched' his own theories became in his own mind.
I think that there may have been a point at which Freud's theoretical conclusions and the clinical applications of these theories may have come to supersede and dominate any client's feeling of being 'freely and non-judgmentally listened to'.
That point may have come very early in Freud's evolutionary clinical development, maybe as early as 1895 or 1896, maybe even earlier back to the time when Freud actually was practising hypnosis.
Indeed, I wonder if something very important in the evolution of Psychoanalysis wasn't lost in the first Psychoanalytic case -- i.e., Breuer's case -- of 'Anna O'.
Or shortly thereafter.
That was the point at which Freud ceased to be a Gestalt Therapist -- and started to become a 'Psycho-analyst'.
-- dgb, Feb. 18th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a writer who lives with his family in New Zealand. He has a 32-year-old daughter, Simone, who works with animals in California. His wife Leila is a pediatrician (visit her website) and they have two sons: Ilan (10) and Manu (5). They live on a beach in Auckland with three cats and three rats.
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University. He was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto. While at the university he trained as a Freudian analyst (from 1971-1979) graduating as a full member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1980 he became Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Given access to Freud's papers in London and the Library of Congress, his research led him to believe that Freud made a mistake when he stopped believing that the source of much human misery lay in sexual abuse. Masson's view was so controversial within traditional analytic circles that he was fired from the archives and had his membership in the international society taken away. Janet Malcolm has written a book about this episode (In the Freud Archives - the subject of a libel suit by Masson) and Jeff has published a series of books critical of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and therapy.
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Jeffrey and his family
Skeptical that humans could be understood (at least by psychologists) Masson turned to animals. In 1995 he published When Elephants Weep, an international best seller, followed by the equally popular Dogs Never Lie About Love.
Since those two books he has published 6 more books about animals, looking in every one at their emotions: About cats he wrote The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (along with a fable, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold); He looked at fatherhood in the animal world and the lessons to be learned for humans in The Evolution of Fatherhood; writing about the emotional world of farm animals in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon turned Jeff into a vegan.
Lately he wondered why animals did not engage in genocide, and wrote Raising the Peaceable Kingdom. Finally he wrote an encyclopedia of his 100 favorite animals (often with an animal-rights angle) called Altruistic Armadillos - Zenlike Zebras. He has just signed a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book about vegetarianism (Veganism) called The Face on Your Plate.
Leila, Jeff and Manu are all vegan. Ilan and his three rats are vegetarian. The cats could not be persuaded to follow either philosophy, and are, alas, carnivores.
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What I believe:
I believe that in 500 years (maybe less) people will look back on us and wonder about many things. No doubt behavior we consider normal today will inspire horror in our more enlightened successors. War, for example. But I also think they may believe our disdain of insects is incomprehensible. Perhaps they will marvel that we could so easily cut down trees and perhaps even flowers.
I am completely opposed to any form of animal exploitation, including animal experimentation, keeping animals in zoos or in circuses, (indeed any form of captivity for animals), the use of leather, fur, wool and silk. I am even questioning my use of hearts of palm and maple syrup (thinking about the wounds necessary to create the sap). I also have begun to wonder whether any domesticated animal can lead an ideal life in the company of humans. Cats seem to me to come the closest, when they are able to wander freely and in safety.
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Take a look at some of Jeff's favorite books.
Copyright © 2000-2008, All Rights Reserved.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's website is dedicated to the emotional lives of animals, vegetarianism, veganism (the ethics of food), animal rights, and human-animal interactions.
Painting of Jeff and family on their beach in New Zealand, by Carina Koning
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