Freud as Degenerate: Psychoanalysis, the Seduction Papers, and Racial Theory

D. A. Begelman, Ph.D.

 A neglected but important aspect of Freud’s formulations during what Young-Bruel (1994) has termed the originary decade of psychoanalytic theory, from 1890 to 1900, has already been dealt with to some extent by others (Stewart, 1976; Sulloway, 1992; Gilman, 1993a, 1993b). Essentially, it is a subtext of theorizing involving the notion of degeneration, a widespread preoccupation within Victorian medical circles. As then understood, degeneration conflated ideas of psychiatric disorder, ethnicity, and the hereditary transmission of traits. It figured negatively (1) in Freud’s Seduction Theory (ST), which, while a predominantly environmentalist account of the psychoneuroses, was tacitly wedded to his wish to “dislodge heredity” as a formative factor. He says as much at key junctures in his three seduction papers of 1896: Heredity and the Etiology of the Neuroses (Freud, 1896a), Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (Freud, 1896b), and The Aetiology of Hysteria (Freud, 1896c), as well as in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (Masson, 1985, pp. 264-266).

On the first occasion of Freud’s public repudiation of the ST, in his Three Essays On the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905), we find him still dismissing the role of heredity in explaining sexual inversion. Freud first alluded to the ST in October of 1895, in one of his numerous letters to Wilhelm Fliess. What might be characterized as the “official” story in the minds of many of Freud’s followers and biographers has been summarized as follows:

During the 1890s, when Freud was energetically searching for an explanation of the causes of the neuroses, many of his patients reported that they had been sexually abused in early childhood. Freud became convinced that in eliciting the accounts of infantile assaults he had indeed found what he was seeking, and announced the fact in a number of papers. However, he eventually came to realize that he had been deceived, and that in most cases the assaults had not actually occurred. This led to the revolutionary discovery that the events in question had been phantasied by his patients, and from this he developed the theory of infantile phantasies which became one of the cornerstones of classical psychoanalytic theory (Esterson, 1993, p. 11).

Of the three seduction papers, The Aetiology of Hysteria focuses primarily on Freud’s arguments for the reality of infantile seductions. It has been given the most critical attention in recent years, in part due to Jeffrey Masson’s book The Assault on Truth (Masson, 1984). Masson argued that Freud’s abandonment of the ST, based as it was on the view that his patients’ reports of early sexual abuse were fantasies rather than realities, was a mistake. According to Masson, the abuse was real, not imagined. Masson also contends that the switch from reality to fantasy sprang from less than honorable motives on Freud’s part. Among these was the need to exonerate his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, from a charge of medical incompetence in the Emma Eckstein case.

Nineteen months (2) after the delivery of The Aetiology of Hysteria to the Viennese Medical Society and in a letter to Fliess dated September 21, 1897, Freud indicated he no longer believed in the ST. The admission is startling for several reasons. First, it drenches in irony Freud’s bitterness over what he felt was a hostile reaction to the paper by the medical group to which it was presented. Since Freud himself abandoned the ST months after delivering his paper, what was the justification for his indignation at colleagues who felt the same way a short time earlier?

Second, the actual reasons Freud adduced for abandoning the ST are paradoxical. Among several he enumerated in the letter to Fliess were: (1) he had been unable to bring even one analysis to a successful conclusion, noting an “absence of complete successes” upon which he depended; (2) the fact that his “partial successes” might admit of alternative explanations; (3) that the ST was predicated upon an epidemiological paradox: a prevalence of sexual abuse implausibly high to accept as a true sociological picture, and that (4) he was unable to distinguish truth from fantasy. In the September, 1897 letter to Fliess, Freud stated that because of these four considerations, he was moved to give up his “neurotica” (i.e., the ST), and no longer knew where he stood theoretically. These explanations for his reversal bear further critical scrutiny.

(1) Incomplete Successes. This reason for abandonment of the ST seems odd in the light of Freud’s obvious enthusiasm about therapeutic successes when he delivered his third seduction paper. Despite this, his expression of disappointment is difficult to assess in advance of understanding what he meant by “a successful conclusion.” As in the case history of Frau P., clinical outcomes routinely counted as “successes” are frequently admixtures of favorable and unfavorable results. Given this, how did the actual course of improvement in such a case bear on any definition of “cure” or “successful conclusion” motivating Freud to rework his etiological formulation in 1897? In other words, if Frau P’s checkered therapeutic history paralleled those of other patients in Freud’s caseload, how did the character of such clinical courses fuel doubts he began to harbor about the ST?

      Frau P.’s analysis was reported by Freud to culminate in the remission of psychotic symptoms, maintained up to the authorship of his second seduction paper. In the paper, Freud indicated that an exacerbation of symptomatology all but nullified the gains of treatment, at which point Frau P. was given institutional care. Despite the clinical regression, she rallied and returned home. Improvement lasted another twelve to fifteen years, and she functioned well enough to carry on household responsibilities. The only reported sign of morbidity was her ostensible avoidance of contact with family members. Her symptoms returned once again later on in her life, whereupon she was rehospitalized, only to die of pneumonia in an asylum (Freud, 1896b, pp. 175-183). Since the onset of Frau P.’s problem coincided with a post-partum period, it possible that the psychosis was precipitated by this crucial life phase.

Rosy conceptions of “cure” often enjoy a connotation that fail to match the realities of clinical practice—whatever the condition. Clinicians who pin their hopes on making perfectionist criteria probative of their etiological formulations will frequently have to confront standards of “cure” unworkably stringent as requirements of serviceable theories. Accordingly, a question arises over whether Freud’s 1897 standard of “success” involved an overly idealistic one. Did “cure” for him mean complete remission of symptoms with no possibility of relapse? Some salient symptoms? Most symptoms? If the first of these possibilities, it is doubtful whether any post-1897 adjustments of theoretical perspective would meet the demands of such idealistic criteria of treatment “success.” The idea of fantasies of seduction as pathogenic would also appear to have been no more consistent with therapeutic results than the ST discarded for this reason.

The issue of therapeutic success is important in another respect. It bears on a larger and more contentious issue of the relationship between Freud’s theories and the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment procedures (3_. Whatever his later convictions, there is ample indication that in 1896 Freud relied heavily on therapeutic outcome as probative of theory confirmation. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, for example, he avers that in eighteen cases, his theory was confirmed by “therapeutic success” in every single case (Freud, 1896c, p. 199). At least his self-professed reasons for giving up his “neurotica” imply the same standard. In Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, Freud avers that when repressions of memories of early seduction scenes are lifted, patients’ problems are “resolved” (Freud, 1896b, p. 174).

Elsewhere, Freud laments the therapeutic upshot of analyses lagging behind if one has not penetrated earliest sexual trauma, implying that desired results are contingent upon unearthing such memories. Here, his conviction about the connection between correct interpretation and treatment cure is obvious, although one may raise a question about the logical status of the linkage. If Freud held to conceptually independent criteria of “cure” and “correct analysis,” his 1897 contention that the majority of his unresolved cases represented “incomplete analyses” was an empirical one. On the other hand, it is possible Freud may have fudged the point for the purposes of making forays into fresh theoretical territory. This would have been the case had he married the correctness of a theoretical formulation to beneficial results obtained in the consulting room. Whatever the case, there can be little doubt that in 1896 Freud was depending in large measure on therapeutic success as a yardstick of theoretical legitimacy.

In Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, Freud declared that even his approach to stock or concurrent causes, stressors which may enter into the causation of the psychoneuroses, but are not “indispensable for the production of the latter” bore fruit (Freud, 1896a, p. 147). His proviso here, however, was that treatment focusing exclusively upon such factors cannot be shielded from the possibility of relapse. The implication is clear: treatment aimed at causes specific to these disorders, memories of sexual trauma, when “complete,” is immunized from relapse. The need to trace associations back to infantile sources in this phase of Freud’s theorizing was based upon his assumption that only such a strategy would guarantee permanent cure of the psychoneuroses. Accordingly, in the absence of the presumed connection between his therapeutic strategy and “cure,” the approach would be a fruitless one. That is, if in 1896 any technique founded upon alternative etiological assumptions was able to eradicate permanently all signs of neurotic disorder, the need to probe pre-adolescent memories of sexual trauma would be redundant. In such an event, the very basis for suspecting a connection between disorder and early sexual abuse would be weakened or nullified. Lasting symptom removal would then not be the upshot of a “deep analysis” exclusively. Consequently, the latter could not then monopolize the preferred approach or underscore a proper view of etiology.

In fact, Freud thought along roughly similar lines. One of his self-professed reasons for revising his outlook in 1897 was that the clinical course of his treatment cases suggested that the actual pathogen had to be driven back into the head. Actual sexual trauma, while capable of intensifying a clinical disorder—Freud subsequently did not come to deny either its existence or its role in exacerbating symptoms—no longer qualified as the true cause of the psychoneuroses. It was superseded by the unconscious process of organismic and essential, not merely accidentally heightened or externally derived, sexuality. It was Freud’s 1896 conviction that durable clinical results were exclusively the upshot of methods wedded to proper interpretations. During that time, he held fast to this belief, as well as its corollary: the failure to eradicate symptoms was a presumptive indication that an analysis had not been “complete,” had not dug deeply enough.

(2) Alternative Explanations. This reason for abandoning the ST remains a mystery, inasmuch as the possibility of alternative explanation is a theoretical risk of any formulation in the sciences, including those hypothetically associated with producing “complete” cures, however these are defined. It was not the fact that Freud’s cures were “incomplete” that increased the likelihood of the possibility of alternative explanations to the ST, since the same possibility existed had Freud produced the type of cure he sought in every case.

Vacillating emphases on the “completeness” or “incompleteness” of his cures in the originary canon seems to have kept pace with Freud’s shifting enthusiasms for particular theories. When promoting the ST in 1896, he proclaimed “complete cure,” using methods that owed allegiance to this theory, whereas in 1897 and thereafter he complained that the curative picture was grimmer than he had earlier indicated. In Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, and contrary to his 1897 pronouncements, Freud asserts that the symptoms of hysteria4 can only be understood if they are traced back to traumatic sexual experiences. How can hysteria only be understood as the delayed effect of sexual trauma when alternatives to such a formulation exist—and indeed existed by Freud’s own 1897 admission? Was Freud unaware of the possibility of alternative explanation in 1896, or did his enthusiasm for the ST at that time drown out the promptings of theoretical open-mindedness?

One of Freud’s specific examples of an alternative to the ST during the originary period was masturbation. Long held to be a chief cause of neurotic disturbance by Victorian medicine generally—atavisms of its dire consequences on development still resound in corridors of sensibility resistant to disengaging religious dogma from scientific knowledge—it was dismissed by Freud in Further remarks On the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence as the true basis for the psychoneuroses. Although found “side by side with hysteria, this is due to the circumstance that masturbation itself is a much more frequent consequence of abuse or seduction than is supposed” (Freud, 1896b, p.165). The argument begs the question, since its conclusion is arbitrarily selective about causality when the factors under consideration covary with each other. Another instance of  petitio principii appears in the very next paragraph where Freud assures us that the traumatic underpinnings of hysteria are proved by the development of the disorder. Here, precisely the theory Freud attempts to prove is used as evidence for itself.

(3) The Prevalence of Childhood Sexual Abuse. Freud’s 1897 reservations about the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse is in blatant contradiction to statements about it in the seduction papers. In The Aetiology of Hysteria he avers:

It seems to me certain that our children are far more exposed to sexual assaults than the few precautions taken by parents in this connection would lead us to expect. When I first made enquiries about what was known on the subject, I learnt from colleagues that there are several publications by paediatricians which stigmatize the frequency of sexual practices by nurses and nursery maids, carried out on infants in arms; and in the last few weeks I have come across a discussion of “Coitus in Childhood” by Dr. Stekel (1895) in Vienna. I have not had time to collect other published evidence; but even if it were only scanty, it is to be expected that increased attention to the subject will very soon confirm the great frequency of sexual experiences and sexual activity in childhood (Freud, 1896c, p. 207). (5) 

Despite these assurances about the widespread reality of the Victorian sexual abuse of children, we are asked by Freud nineteen months later to believe his doubts about the ST were in part triggered by his realization that such abuse was not all that prevalent. Even modern critics like Grünbaum (1979) have accepted Freud’s 1897 reasoning that the “preposterously high” level of sexual trauma required by the ST “over-taxed Freud’s own belief in his seduction etiology” (Grünbaum, 1979, p.135). However, the fancied statistical improbabilities implied by the ST was not the tale told in 1896, and the contrast between the earlier polemic and his remarks in the 1897 Fliess correspondence is noteworthy. Perhaps Freud had good reasons for renouncing a theory he propounded months before; but sudden awareness of epidemiological verities was not one of them. There was nothing new in the sociological picture of infant abuse he could have learned about in the intervening period that would explain his revisionism. He was as sociologically sophisticated about its prevalence in 1896 as he was in 1897. That Freud suddenly realized the lesser extent of the abuse in 1897, but not nineteen months earlier is difficult to swallow. Moreover, it flies in the face of the way he marshaled evidence for the widespread nature of the problem in The Aetiology of Hysteria.

(4) The Inability to Differentiate Between Real and Fantasized Events. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud felt that the reality of early sexual abuse as a causative factor was underscored by the striking similarity of accounts of the eighteen patients who had been in treatment with him up to April of 1896: 

There are, however, a whole number of other things that vouch for the reality of infantile sexual scenes. In the first place there is the uniformity which they exhibit in certain details, which is a necessary consequence if the preconditions of these experiences are always of the same kind, but which would otherwise lead us to believe that there were secret understandings between the various patients (Freud, 1896c, p. 205).   

Subsequently, as we have seen, Freud ostensibly felt no need to reconcile the similarity of reports of abuse with the newly hypothesized pathogen, fantasized experiences. The basis for the historical reality of seduction, the uniformity of reports from patient to patient, was suddenly forgotten in the flurry of enthusiasm for the power of fantasy. If, after 1897, reported seductions were construed as imagined rather than real, what was to be made of the uniformity of theme in patients’ disclosures that Freud leaned on earlier to bolster a case for the actuality of the traumas? How much uniformity of theme is to be expected in fantasized material? Ought it to be more thematically heterogeneous than reports of actual trauma? If so, how much more? If not, how much less?

Perhaps there is no basis for assuming that fantasized events should be less uniform thematically than actual ones. But Freud earlier was insistent on the idea that uniformity confirmed the reality of trauma, whereas when switching to fantasy in 1897 he was apparently not bothered by the issue. This is all the more surprising in the light of Freud’s wholesale reliance on the notion of uniformity for other polemical purposes. For example, the lack of uniformity among precipitating events of adolescence or late childhood was used by Freud to dramatize the fact the real pathogen must have lurked farther back in chronology (Schimek, 1987, p. 941). (7)

Preoccupations with the consistency of thematic material is a motif showing up at many historical junctures, and in many guises. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Erastus faulted Johann Weyer’s theory of the falsity of witch confessions in the latter’s 1563 treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum as implausible because their similarity from suspect to suspect across numerous witch trials proved they were based upon real events (Monter, 1969, p. 64). In the 1980s and 1990s, similarity of theme in reports of ritual cult abuse became the evidential basis for their reality, even when demons put in appearances at covens (Smith & Pazder, 1980; Stratford, 1988). “Similarity,” however, is itself an unexamined concept. When the seventeenth century Spanish inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar y Frías, subjected “similar” reports of satanic cult activity to more exacting scrutiny, he found them to be a mishmash of conflicting testimony, and pronounced the affair a gigantic hoax (Baroja, 1965; Henningsen, 1969, 1980). During the early modern period, witches harbored grandiose goals, such as the destruction of Christendom. Nowadays, the servants of Satan, who enjoy advance billing as engineers of Evil, allegedly sexually molest toddlers in day care establishments. Apparently, latter-day Satanists are either prone to underachievement, or believe in starting small (Ebersole & Ebersole, 1993; Sebald, 1995).

Issues pertaining to the uniformity of clinical material played a decisive role in yet another pre-1896 controversy. This was the wrangle over theories of hypnotism that had been waged between the Salpêtrière School led by Charcot, and the Nancy School of Bernheim. While critical of Charcot, Freud could not go along with Bernheim’s stress on a view of hypnotic phenomena as mere effects of suggestibility (Freud, 1888). In his critique of Bernheim, Freud argued that suggestibility could not account for the uniformity of particular and stereotyped stages of hypnosis produced by induction procedures. Freud thought that had hypnosis been the effect of suggestion merely, its psychic, motoric, and behavioral sequelae would have been much more varied than the stalwart patterns Charcot reliably produced without any seeming task demands on his subjects. It was only to emerge later that the manifestations were varied, and that the stereotypy of Charcot’s demonstrations with hysterics were in all likelihood shaped by the implicit task demands of the Salpêtriére context, unknown even to him (Sulloway, 1991).

Textual Inconsistencies
 

There are other paradoxes in the seduction papers. For example, despite Freud’s references to “reports” of early seduction by his hysterical and obsessional patients, the actual character of these disclosures remains unclear. While a question may be raised about the difficulty in discriminating between patient disclosures based upon actual trauma from those based upon fantasy if Freud’s patients reported memories of being molested as children, whether they did or not is itself a hotly contested issue of modern scholarship. Without belaboring the detailed exegeses of such critics as Cioffi (1972, 1974, 1988); Schimek (1987); Macmillan (1991); Sulloway (1991); Shatzman (1992); Esterson (1993); and Crews (1986; 1995; 1998), suffice it to say that there is ample evidence in the canon to suggest that the founder of psychoanalysis left a rather murky picture of his data-base for the ST. Indeed, and in line with Freud’s own statements, what he referred to as patient “memories” of early sexual abuse may have been reconstructions he had himself imposed on the material. Accordingly, conceptions of the data-base on the part of modern commentators have increasingly undergone transformations from the view that Freud’s patients recalled intact scenes of sexual assault they disclosed to him (Masson, 1984; Erdylei, 1984) to the view that Freud’s method involved purblind inferences to sexual scenarios from a less than suasive trail of symptoms, nodal points, and mental associations. (6) 

The Verbal Crucible 

In his second seduction paper, Further Remarks On the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, Freud insists that psychoanalysis is the only method that can unearth the true pathogen behind the psychoneuroses (Freud, 1896b, p. 164). The implication is that it is useless to depend upon patient reports outside of psychoanalysis to accomplish the same task. He is less than clear, however, about whether traumas disclosed in therapy are inaccessible to consciousness because they are only inferred from their symptomatic manifestations, or only inaccessible outside of the analytic treatment context. The problem here involves the aforementioned confusion over whether what Freud referred to as “reports” of seductions were just that, or whether they were inferences—tortuous or not—to sexual scenarios which even his patients protested they did not remember. Be that as it may, Freud’s distrust of anamnesis—questioning the patient as to events of the past—could hardly be said to spring from a wholesale distrust of verbal behavior as a channel of information. On the contrary, Freud’s approach to the latter in the seduction papers exhibited curious levels of selectivity. Reliance on conscious recollections was eschewed as a legitimate route to the reconstruction of the pathogen, whereas the method of free association, while a meandering and laborious one, was nonetheless considered to be a dependable verbal conduit to the unconscious. Yet even here the picture is inconsistent. When a reliance on anamnesis served polemical purposes, Freud resorted to it as if its shortcomings suddenly evaporated: “…the aetiological pretensions of the infantile scenes rest not only on the regularity of their appearance in the anamneses of hysterics (Italics mine), but, above all, on the evidence of there being associative and logical ties between those scenes and the hysterical symptoms” (Freud, 1896c, p. 210).  Ironically, Freud had been definite earlier in the same essay that it was “useless” to depend upon anamnestic material gleaned from outside psychoanalysis, and that it grossly distorts the psychoanalytic procedure to describe it as involved in any such enterprise.

The probative value of free association depends upon more than whether it is immune to the effects of “suggestion.” Suggestibility, while a significant issue in its own right, is only one worrisome aspect of the problem. There are several others: (2) the problem of whether a reconstructive method mediated by free association with the effect of suggestion controlled is an epistemologically sound way to identify pathogens, and (3) whether the factors so identified have the causally relevant status to begin with (Grünbaum, 1984; Erwin, 1993). With respect to (2), and even in the absence of practitioner (i. e., Rosenthal) effects, what ensures that free association wends an unerring way to the source of neurotic disorder? Here the risk is not so much contamination by a response-set created by the therapeutic relationship as much as it is a diversion of the investigative process. Columbus might manage to cross the Atlantic with his navigational skills to be sure, but why should he have assumed that where he landed was India? With respect to (3), what, absenting the role of suggestion or derailment from a proper mental spoor, guarantees that the factor unearthed is actually a pathogen at all? Had Columbus landed in India, what made him believe he would find there the gold to enrich Spain’s economy? Or if he found it, that there was a sufficient supply to mine? Or, if a sufficient supply, not tucked away in inaccessible hills? (Lourie, 1955).

Doubts about the nature of Freud’s data-base in his originally thirteen (and subsequently, eighteen) patient caseload aside, there are other troublesome inconsistencies in the text (Thornton, 1983; Vetter, 1988; Israëls & Schatzman, 1993). For example, after his momentous reversal in 1897 on the reality of the seductions, Freud subsequently reported that one of the reasons for his newer stance on fantasy was that he hadn’t realized in 1896 that seduction was only a necessary, not sufficient condition for hysteria. In other words, he later denied that he had been aware of the fact that while all hysterics were sexually abused as infants, not all individuals so abused later developed hysteria. The statement is belied by Freud’s comments in The Aetiology of Hysteria, where he explicitly takes pains to emphasize his conviction that trauma is not sufficient to produce hysteria:

Now let us turn to the other objection, which is based precisely on an acknowledgement of the frequency of infantile experiences and on the observed fact that many people who remember scenes of that [early sexually traumatic] kind have not become hysterics…It does not matter if many people experience infantile sexual scenes without becoming hysterics, provided only that all the people who become hysterics have experienced scenes of that kind (quoted in Masson, 1984, pp. 269-270).

The Identity of Perpetrators

In his later Autobiographical Study (Freud, 1925, pp. 33-35), Freud retrospectively finds support for the so-called “father etiology” in the 1895 cases he treated with Breuer (Breuer & Freud, 1895) as well as the 1896 caseload. The “father etiology” was presumably the pathogenic effect of paternal incest in the creation of hysteria. However, there is little in Freud’s identification of perpetrators in his original caseloads to justify such attributions. Accordingly, while Masson’s interpretations reflect recent social concerns about paternal incest, no such pattern is referenced in the original three seduction papers. In the thirteen-patient caseload of the first of those papers, over half the perpetrators are brothers. In the last of the papers, most perpetrators are hired servants. In addition, one stranger and two “close relatives” are cited (Esterson, 1993).

Some critics have insisted that Freud disguised the identity of fathers to protect Victorian family reputations. However, the identification of seven brothers as perpetrators suggests that maintaining veneers of social respectability was not uppermost in Freud’s mind. Nor can this hunch explain the formulation of a “father etiology” shortly after he took pains to protect fathers from the calumny such a theory advertises. The “father etiology,” after all, surfaces within a year after the delivery of the last seduction paper, as well as in the letters to Fliess. Mention of this theory is contained in the correspondence to Fliess in the 1896 letter of 12/6, and the 1897 letters of 1/3, 1/12, 1/24, 2/8, 4/28,/5/2, 5/31, 6/22, and 12/12 (Masson, 1985). Its introduction may have coincided with the development of alternative theory-driven surmises.

The theory that paternal perpetrators of incest were disguised as servants, uncles, or other relatives has been a popular one with apologists like Gay (1988, pp. 94-95), who favor exegeses diminishing textual inconsistencies or abrupt reversals in the canon. However, contradictions in the Freudian oeuvre are so numerous, retrospective remarks by the founder of psychoanalysis tend to come under a cloud. For example, in a footnote to the 1924 edition of the Studies in Hysteria, Freud discloses that two of his patients in the early caseload, Katherina and Rosalia H., had each been assaulted by their fathers—not as he originally reported, by other relatives. Katherina was reported by Freud in 1895 to have been abused by an “uncle.” Even taking the correction into account, the sexual episode disclosed by Katherina was not one of infantile molestation, but unsuccessful overtures starting at the age of fourteen by the would-be perpetrator. On one occasion the “uncle” promptly fell asleep after invading the patient’s bed. In addition, two years later, when Katherina was about sixteen, she merely witnessed him through a window engaging in coitus with a cousin, Francisca. The sexual provenance of this case is complicated by another component. Katherina’s “hallucination” of her uncle’s face, coinciding as this did with episodes of hyperventilation, also came after occurrences of threat and rage on the part of her uncle who felt the girl had blown his cover with his wife who subsequently abandoned him because of Katherina’s revelations.

Unmasking “uncles” as “fathers” may correct a hitherto bowdlerized record—providing the true identity of the perpetrator is thus revealed. However, the traumatic criteria Freud had outlined as cornerstone assumptions of the ST are not met in Katherina’s case, even if the perpetrator was her father. The required pathogenesis, a father who initiates sexually abusive patterns in the years of a patient’s life prior to eight to ten is, if anything, insinuated, not documented by Freud. The other possibility is that in 1924 Freud simply forgot what he had said in 1895, putting a later theoretical spin on his earlier discovery. Accordingly, readjustments in the identity of perpetrators alone are not necessarily tantamount to satisfying criteria of pathogenesis. Gay’s (1988) exegesis may be a study in irrelevance if it is based upon such cases as Katherina’s.

Katherina aside, there is every reason to suppose that early infantile seductions were themselves questionable inferential constructions in Freud’s theory that adult hysteria was produced by earlier pathogenic experiences meeting criteria of traumatic force and suitability as determinant (Freud, 1896c). “Force” and “suitability,” nowhere precisely defined by Freud, place constraints on the type of event he was prepared to allow as causal in 1896 although its intended theoretical effect was to dampen explanation based upon heritability or degeneration. In other words, to disallow that a touch, glance, frottage, or otherwise inconsequential adolescent event has “traumatic force” virtually precludes differential response sensitivities based upon inherent biological vulnerability. The latter portends the role of hereditarian blight, whereas Freud’s notions of force and suitability drew the boundaries of what environmental events could be deemed to play a sufficient causal role in hysteria without the complexities and variations introduced by a theory of degeneration.

The spell of Freud’s formulations lies in his capacity as rhetorician to convince the reader he is trotting out indisputable clinical truths, when he is only relying on assumptions that conspire to ensure a preordained outcome (Fish, 1986; Wilcocks, 1994). In The Aetiology of Hysteria, for example, he refers to the case of a married couple whose “high degree of readiness to feel hurt on one occasion” requires a background of smoldering past resentments or squabbles between them. Freud’s reasoning here is erroneous; the sensitivity in question demands no such assumption, since a plausible alternative hypothesis may attribute “readiness to become hurt” to a temperamental factor ungummed from an actual history of squabbling. Be that as it may, Freud then turns to the case of a neurosis produced in a nubile girl by the secret stroke of a boy’s hand:

You can, of course, answer the puzzle by pronouncing her an abnormal, eccentrically disposed and over-sensitive person; but you will think differently when analysis shows you that the touching of her hand reminded her of another, similar touching, which had happened very early in her childhood… (Freud, 1896a, p. 279).

The argument is circular if in the absence of robust evidence for the causal role of early seduction, analysis “shows” the necessity for assuming it. Ironically, the reasoning would still be fallacious even if such evidence were forthcoming. The assumptive causal role of early seduction in this case would still have to be weighed against the possibility of inherent temperamental or biogenic vulnerability, especially in light of Freud’s assumption that seduction is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of hysteria. If some individuals do not later develop hysteria despite earlier experiences meeting the “force” and “suitability as determinant” criteria, what accounts for why individuals having similar experiences early in life can be differentiated symptomatically later on?

Definitions of Sexual Abuse

The Freudian notion of childhood sexual abuse itself cries out for definition. Critics have in the main discussed Freud’s reliance on reports of early sexual abuse in terms of whether such disclosures could be construed as actual “reports” at all. Many have sidestepped the issue of what sense of the term “abuse” figured as essential to the ST. Masson, in commenting on the specific nature of the sexual scenarios, has referred to them as “aggressive acts against…children—for seduction was an act of violence” (Masson, 1984, p.12). The extreme nature of the acts, Masson feels, justifies designating them as abusive, even in their least brutal form. The abusiveness, Masson insists, is suggested by several of the leading terms Freud used to describe the acts in question: “Verguwaltigung (rape), Musbrauch (abuse), Verfuhrung (seduction), Angriff (attack), Attentat (assault), Aggression (aggression), Traumen (traumas)” (Masson, 1984, p. 3). As a general rule, other commentators tend to share Masson’s view that the sexual events underscored by the ST were in the category of childhood rape or molestation—with some exceptions.

At other times, Freud seemed to rely upon a somewhat wider notion of sexual trauma than that articulated in Masson’s book, or, indeed, in most recent commentary on the subject. This has already been pointed out by Cioffi. This writer insists that the ST did not require any such egregious aspect of “seductions”:

Freud’s seduction theory is not a theory of child rape, not even in the broadest sense of sexual relations between an adult and child. Though adults figured in an unspecified number of his patients’ seduction histories, this was not necessitated by Freud’s account of the source of the pathogenic power of sexual arousal in childhood which lies quite simply in its precocity. The question is not ‘What are the chances of getting through childhood without being at the receiving end of the attentions of an adult pervert?’ but ‘What are the chances of avoiding “doctor and nurse” games and kindred forms of sex play with other children…I can see nothing ‘preposterous’ about the assumption that such occurrences are common enough to account for the presumed incidence of hysteria (Cioffi, 1988, p. 62).

Cioffi claims that critics like Masson misconstrue the ST since the theory posits the pathogenic power of sexual arousal in childhood whatever that nature or degree of sexual stimulation (i.e., encompassing sexual acts not unduly aggressive in character). Yet that all or most of the seductions were in the nature of aggressive acts is apparent in several of the descriptions Freud supplies in his eighteen patient caseload. He mentions scenes described, inter alia, as those of “brutal assault,” “positively revolting,” involving “all the abuses known to debauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes” (Freud, 1896c, p. 214).

Cioffi’s minimalist theory of seduction founders on an important point. If such sociological universals as “doctor and nurse games” were for Freud pathogenic, the reasons for his 1897 disavowal of the ST remain incoherent. What sense attaches to having been previously mistaken about a preposterously high level of doctor and nurse games in accounting for hysteria? If brutal assaults—in contrast to any kind of sexual stimulation in childhood—were not etiologically necessary to produce later hysteria, what picture of things was Freud repudiating in 1897? Moreover, had sexual precocity been the culprit as Cioffi avers, even innocuous cleansing and toileting rituals might satisfy minimalist requirements for “seduction.” Whatever Freud meant by the term, such inconsequential daily routines seemed to be far from what he had in mind—at least in 1896.

Perhaps problems surrounding Freud’s definition of sexual abuse can be partially resolved by pointing out that he may have equivocated its meaning, depending on the needs dictated by alternative theoretical perspectives. That is, switching concepts of abuse may explain certain incongruities in the canon. For example, in 1931 in the essay Female Sexuality, Freud asserted that all of his earlier hysterical patients revealed that their mothers had seduced them in infancy (Freud, 1931, p. 238). Freud characterized this patient allegation as lodged “regularly,” although pages before in the same essay he maintains that those accused are mothers and nurses (Freud, 1931, p. 232). Far from contradicting the father etiology, or the identity of perpetrators in the seduction papers, the remark may only reflect a later and expanding notion of “infantile seduction” meeting minimalist criteria of sexual abuse. At other junctures in the canon, Freud considered “traumatic” such events as the visual witnessing of primal scenes as in the cases of Katherina (Freud & Breuer, 1895) and the Wolf-Man (Freud, 1918). While in the seduction papers Freud mentions the more gruesome types of sexual attack nowadays documented as all too prevalent, other of his later comments suggest such egregious events were only a subclass of a wider range he later considered pathogenic. Unquestionably, there is a radical transformation in the status of the pathogen after Freud emphasized the role of infantile fantasy, and it may be premature to suppose that the only significant alteration in theory was the switch from reality to fantasy. In fact, the coercive and brutal characteristics of “seduction” cited in The Aetiology of Hysteria all but vanished when the sexual episode was transmuted into a figment of childhood imagination.

Even at that, the picture is not always consistent. There seem to be changing definitions of the pathogen even within a single theoretical time frame—and during the originary period. In Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, there is mention of a pathogen involving “an event of passive sexuality, an experience submitted to with indifference or with a small degree of annoyance or fright” (Freud, 1896a, p. 155). How does such a low-keyed event comport with our idea of infantile rape or molestation? Additionally, how is the event in question experienced with indifference unless it instantiates a minimalist, and looser definition of sexual abuse? We are here torn between at least two possibilities: (1) that Freud still clung to the notion of “trauma” as narrowly defined, i.e., a coercive or brutal event, but opining it can on occasion be experienced indifferently by the victim, or that (2) that Freud shifted the meaning of “trauma” to cover sexual episodes of a far less dramatic nature. We have, in effect, two substantially different conceptions of the pathogen: a wider one which less often informed speculation in the seduction papers, and a more narrow one prevailing in the seduction papers and adumbrated in, for example, current theories of Dissociative Identity Disorder and sociological concerns about the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse (Lynn & Rhue, 1994; Cohen, Berzoff & Elin, 1995; Hacking, 1995). In the main, critics who have commented on the issue have elected to argue that Freud was adhering exclusively to the narrow (Masson) or wider (Cioffi) definition of sexual trauma. However, there is a third possibility: slippery and alternating reliance on both senses of “trauma,” depending upon rhetorical purpose.

Equivocating between the narrow and wider definitions may have had a strategic purpose: permitting Freud to exit the ST in late 1897. In the September 21, 1897 letter to Fliess, one of the reasons Freud gave for abandoning the ST was the unlikelihood of such widespread perversions by fathers—as if fathers had ever originally been cited as predators! Under the looser definition of trauma, of course, such “perversions” need not have been the restricted playing field in establishing ST surmises.

Ironically, suspecting a connection between infantile sexual episodes and later symptoms, far from being a Freudian innovation, was endemic in Victorian medical theorizing.7 In Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, Freud himself acknowledges that “Sexual disorders have always been admitted among the causes of nervous illness, “ although “subordinated to heredity” (Freud, 1896a, p. 149). During 1885 and before, fully a decade before Freud’s ST, Henoch, Cohn, Schaefer, and Herz all argued that that if infantile sexual episodes caused neurosis, the latter were more widespread than observed (Carter, 1983). This was the very same argument Freud relied on in 1897 when rejecting the ST. Under the looser definition of abuse, however, widespread “trauma” in children is not only not rare, it is virtually inevitable, and authored by a social cast of characters far more varied than fathers. As was mentioned, the wider notion also embraces phenomena we would refrain from classifying as “perverse” or abusive.” (8)  

Sidestepping Heredity

Returning to the other thematic emphasis in the seduction papers, we note that in Heredity and the Etiology of the Neuroses, the term heredity or its cognates is referenced about thirty-six times. The invisible grip that the Victorian glossing of this concept had on the founder of psychoanalysis in the originary decade and beyond remains to be clarified. Freud’s ST, whatever else it represents as a landmark contribution to trauma theory, was also a cryptic expression of its author’s need to circumvent attributing the neuroses to biogenic, particularly hereditarian, factors. The subtext of degeneration in the ST becomes more apparent when we see it as an aspect of Freud’s campaign to rescue the psychoneuroses from the aura of immutability cast by hereditarian doctrine.

Far from restricting himself to symptomatic patterns for which the notion of repression played a key role, Freud also supplied environmentalist accounts of the actual neuroses. These were subdivided into neurasthenia and the anxiety neuroses. The former embraced a pattern of debilitation and energy depletion (specifically, “fatigue, intra-cranial pressure, flatulent dyspepsia, constipation, spinal parasthesias, sexual weakness, etc. (Freud, 1896a, p. 150) traceable to patterns of masturbation, or depletion of the sexual factor. The other was the anxiety neuroses (Zwangsneurose), patterns roughly coextensive with what nowadays might be diagnosed as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, simple phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, or adjustment disorder with anxious mood (for Freud, irritability, states of anxious expectation, phobias, anxiety attacks, complete or rudimentary, attacks of fear and vertigo, tremors, sweating, congestion, dyspnea, tachycardia, etc., chronic diarrhea, chronic locomotor vertigo, hyperaesthesia, insomnia, etc.), the pathogen for which was frustration of the sexual factor, as in coitus interruptus, “enforced abstinence, unconsummated genital excitation…sexual efforts which exceed the subject’s psychical capacity, etc.” (Freud, 1896a, pp. 150-151).

Much is made of the fact that the reception accorded the seduction papers on the part of the medical community was a hostile one—as though Freud delivered his address to a medical community unprepared to receive discoveries in advance of their time. On the contrary, Freud would have never had the temerity to present what in terms of modern medicine constitutes junk science had not his peers been already partially receptive to a linkage between sexuality and neurotic disorder. Kraft-Ebbing’s comment about Freud’s ST that it “sounded like a scientific fairy-tale” (“Es klingt wie ein wissenschaftliches Märchen”) was in all likelihood prompted by the convoluted explanations of its author, not by the idea of a connection between sexual events and later neurotic disturbance simpliciter, a linkage many Victorian physicians already held as established.   

Freud’s attitude towards heredity was not always of a piece. It underwent several distinct changes in the originary period. The hereditarian cast to speculation over psychiatric conditions was rife in Victorian academic and medical theorizing, and Freud, like many of his contemporaries, originally endorsed heredity as a primary pathogen. The trend was especially discernable in the early days of his sojourn at Salpêtrière, under Charcot’s influence. In 1888 he claimed that hysteria was hereditary, sexual factors being of secondary importance:
 

The etiology of the status hystericus is to be looked for entirely in heredity…Compared with the factor of heredity all other factors take a second place and play the part of incidental causes, the importance of which is as a rule overrated in practice (Freud, 1888, p. 50). 

Freud’s earlier endorsement of Charcot’s genetic position on the etiology of hysteria was backed up by seemingly persuasive arguments. He stressed the fact that hysteria, while inherited, could not be attributed to anatomical abnormalities of the sexual organs. Here, he countered that the condition occurred in sexually immature individuals, women with a complete lack of genitalia, and women who have diseases of the sexual organs who nonetheless do not suffer from hysteria.

Freud’s French Connection

Before his traveling bursary stipend was awarded by the Viennese medical Society, Freud looked forward to his Parisian trip in order to familiarize himself with a broader spectrum of pediatric cerebral pathology (Freud 1886a, p. 8). Attending Charcot’s Monday and Tuesday lectures, the consultation extreme, he was privy to case presentations of challenging and puzzling clinical phenomena, including hysteria. In his 1886 summary of his experiences, Freud placed double emphasis on Charcot’s contribution to the study of hysteria, namely: (1) emphasizing the disorder as a true medical condition, rather than a factitious one, i.e., one that had come to be regarded in traditional medical circles as simulation or malingering; and (2) codifying the somatic signs and stages of hysteria, stigmata that cropped up more frequently than hitherto assumed.

Szasz (1961) has argued that the switch from “malingering” to “hysteria” or “medical disorder” was a conceptual one not based upon purely empirical considerations. True, there were characteristic features of hysterical patterns both Charcot and Freud catalogued, and the decision to classify them as “sickness” rather than “dissembling” or “malingering” may be likened to certain judicial rulings in contrast to purely empirical discoveries. Szasz concludes on this basis that the switch was illicit because it was driven by the purchasing of a newer social role commanding sympathetic treatment as “disease” at the expense of a falsehood. However, the sympathetic social role can as readily be seen as a consequence of diagnosing “disorder,” rather than as a motivation for engineering the reclassification. Furthermore, saying that hysterics should be accorded a social role more commensurate with “faking” than “being sick” was in the past also a move in a language-game requiring its own validation. (Is the original classification of “typhoid fever, and carcinomas and fractures” as “illnesses” illicit because of the essential dissimilarities among these phenomena?) According to Szsaz, what are the “scientific observations or logical arguments” for categorizing hysteria as malingering historically, and prior to Charcot’s newfangled reclassification as disorder, given the essential differences between ordinary cases of malingering (i.e., without the quasi-neurological overlay) and “hysteria”?

Freud’s attitude toward the French neurologist was one of an admiring student. He was enthralled by his instructor’s command of the subject matter and his spellbinding lectures. As a result, Freud in 1886 (Freud, 1886b) was inspired to author a German translation of Charcot’s work, Neue Vorlessungen uber die Krankheiten des Nervensystems insbesondre uber Hysterie (New Lectures On the Diseases of the Nervous System, including Hysteria), not to mention another article appearing in French in Archives de Neurologie in 1893. In his Charcot paper of 1893 (Freud, 1893), Freud draws a parallel between hysteria and cases of witchcraft and demon possession during the Middle Ages, phenomena he was later to explore in his 1922 paper A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis, as well as in letters to Fliess of January 17 and 24 (Masson, 1985, pp. 224-228).

Nothing in Freud’s Paris report of 1886 gives indication that there was more to the panegyric he accorded his teacher than meets the eye—but there was. In August of 1893, well before the publication of the ST, Freud authored another essay, Charcot, which diplomatically explored the weaknesses of his former teacher’s views on hysteria. While extolling Charcot’s restoring “dignity to the topic” (Freud, 1893, p. 19), Freud proceeds to probe the essential weakness of his teacher’s position. This for Freud consisted in Charcot’s insistence on hysteria being a form of hereditary degeneracy, a subclass of famille nèvropathique (Féré, 1884). On this theory, other pathogens are relegated to the minor category of agents provocateurs, mere triggering factors atop the real vulnerability.

Freud’s objection to Charcot’s theory is discernable in the last paragraph of Charcot. The formulation informed by genetic taint, Freud declares, “will no doubt require sifting and amending” (Freud, 1893, p.23). the reason for this is that “so greatly did Charcot overestimate heredity as a causative agent that he left no room for the acquisition of nervous illness…nor did he make a sufficiently sharp distinction between organic nervous affections and neuroses, either as regards their etiology or in other aspects” (Freud, 1893, p. 23). Then, as in all elegies in which trotting out the limitations of the deceased requires the expression of compensatory sentiments lest one be perceived as kicking the corpse, Freud appends the diplomatic:

It is inevitable that the advance of our science, as it increases our knowledge, must at the same time lessen the value of a number of things that Charcot taught us; but neither changing times nor changing views can diminish the name of the man whom—in France and elsewhere—we are mourning today (Freud, 1893, p. 23).

Charcot’s influence on Freud is discernable in the importation of ideas surfacing later in the seduction papers, especially Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses. For example, Charcot’s distinction between traumatic and organic paralysis was transformed into the Freudian distinction between the origins of hysteria and hereditary disorder. The independence of hysteria from practitioner effects mirrors the position adopted by Charcot in his controversy with Bernheim on the subject of hypnotic induction as a neurological tool versus an effect of suggestibility. Finally, the phrase agents provocateurs in The Aetiology of Hysteria was not only borrowed from the Charcot lexicon, but given a meaning that clashed with the one honored by the French neurologist. For Charcot, agents provocateurs were environmental triggers producing clinical patterns in genetically compromised organisms; for Freud, they became the accidental triggers in later chronological development betraying the existence of precocious sexual experience amounting to environmentally sourced trauma. The appropriation of concepts and terminology from Charcot in the service of a psychological theory wholly contrary to the Frenchman’s theoretical intent is not mere speculation; Freud explicitly makes such an attribution (Freud 1896a, p. 155).

In 1888 Freud reserved a minor functional role for sexuality in the origins of hysteria as a concession to the “high psychical significance” of this factor in all kinds of neurosis (Freud, 1888, pp. 50-51; Levin, 1944, pp. 123-124). The second phase of his thinking, beginning with the transitional period of 1892 to 1893, involved recognition of a less dramatic influence of heredity as a contributing factor, as when, in Draft A Freud relegated its influence to the status of a “multiplier” (Stewart, 1976). Freud referenced the potentiating effect of heredity, like that of an electrical circuit, even in the first seduction paper Heredity and the Problem of the Neuroses (Freud, 1896a, p. 147). Diminishing its role was more apparent in the last of the three papers, The Aetiology of Hysteria. This paper argues that the infantile sexual episode preempted a more dominant role for heritability. However, Freud’s final position in this paper equivocated on the issue of just how secondary a factor heredity was. For example, Freud insisted that “pseudo-heredity,” a lineage of family neuroses springing from seductions, could get masked as a biogenic transmission of traits. The actual role of the latter variable uncomplicated by psychosocial factors was left indeterminate.

The Medicalization of Race

Freud’s sojourn in Paris at the Salpêtrière from October 1885 to February 1886 coincided with a period of anti-Semitic ferment in France (Stewart, 1976; Gilman, 1993a). The failure of the Catholic bank, the Union Generale in 1882, was blamed on the Jews in general and Rothschild influence in particular (Stewart, 1976; Weber, 1986). There were several contemporaneous trials of Jews for ritual murder. Edouard Drumont’s inflammatory La France juiv, a diatribe against Jewish influence on national affairs, enjoyed popularity (Stewart, 1976). The Dreyfus affair, a scandal that drove a deep cleavage between French factions convinced that no less than the honor of the country was at stake, was fulminating. Dreyfusards like Emile Zola began clamoring for redress around the time the ST was formulated and abandoned. French intolerance in this period of ferment had a distinctly racial cast when it came to Jews, although flagrant episodes of open violence against Italian immigrants was sparked by economic motives purely (Weber, 1986, pp. 134-135). The influx of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe sparked fears of racial taint and degeneration through intermarriage with them. This social anxiety was expressed indirectly in a British literary metaphor: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Its principal character is a scourge from the Slavic (Romanian) East. He turns his victims into one of his own kind by draining their blood or exchanging it with his own. (9)

One year before Freud’s stay in Paris, in 1884, Charles Féré had developed the notion of famille névropathique (Féré, 1884), underscoring a lineage involving the hereditary predisposition to nervous disease. In 1894, two years before Freud’s ST, he traced several cases of hysteria to early sexual molestation, but with a difference: Féré did not feel repression played any role in the etiology of the condition.

The idea of hereditary predisposition in Victorian thinking was linked to the medicalization of race. High on the list of groups vulnerable to the blights of hereditary taint were Jews. Racial theorists of nineteenth century Europe, including Freud’s idol Jean-Marie Charcot, considered Jews and Asiatics particularly at risk. Latter day pundits, like Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve place them at the top—at least as far as I.Q. is concerned (Murray & Herrnstein, 1994). Consistency was never a strong card in racial theorizing.

Heated debates over degenerative gene pools were quite the rage in Victorian Europe. They captured the imagination of many medical theorists, including Charles Darwin’s cousin, Sir Frances Galton, Alsberg, Binswanger, Budul, Siebert, Pilcz, Kirchhof, Buschan, Burgle, Wulfing-Luer, Leroy-Beaulieu, Ziemssen, Löwenfeld, Erb, Krafft-Ebing, Gutmann, Kraepelin, Frigyes, and Charcot (Gilman, 1993a, pp. 93-168). While the rudimentary European sociological literature did not document a relatively greater incidence of brother-sister incest among Jews, the common Victorian assumption was that they were more susceptible to such patterns because of their degenerated blood lines. Alleging brother-sister incest among Jews was ironic. The Aryan crown-prince of racial purity, Siegfried, was himself the product of an incestuous union: Siegmund and Sieglinde. Seven cases of brother-sister incest crop up in Freud’s original caseload. Many of these patients were Jewish, while Thomas Mann’s novella Blood of the Walsungs is the story of a Jewish incestuous pair by the names of Siegmund and Sieglinde (Gilman, 1993b, p. 178).

Freud references hereditarian doctrine many times in the seduction papers of 1896. In Further Remarks On the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, and at the end of its first section, Freud declares; “How greatly the claims of hereditary disposition are diminished by the establishment in this way of [environmental] aetiological factors as a determinant needs no more than a mention” (Freud, 1896b, p. 163). The conclusion is fallacious. Freud’s view of the inconsistency between the ST and a theory of genetic predisposition was not only specious; it was promoted on the basis of data he amassed at break-neck speed. The first seduction paper relied on a cohort of thirteen patients. Since it was sent off to the publisher on February fifth, and Freud reported data on eighteen patients on April twenty-first of the same year, it appears he was able to determine the requisite etiology of five new cases in the amazing time of two and a half months, or seventy-five days. Considering the fact that he characterized his procedures as “laborious” on the first occasion he coined the term “psychoanalysis,” it is astonishing that five cases yielded up their secrets—if they did this—with such alacrity. The idea that hereditary predisposition as an etiological factor is diminished in likelihood because Freud outlined specific events in the life history of patients to account for later neurosis is a non sequitur, especially in light of his insistence that not all sexually abused children become hysterics subsequently. Cannot temperamental differences among individuals with a genetic predisposition also account for the morbidity?

In Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, Freud announces that the ST undercuts the role of heredity by recruiting the notion of “accidental factors” in the life span. By “accidental factors” he means those precocious sexual events that were environmentally induced, not an aspect of native endowment, or traits templated in the germplasm.

Why was Freud so motivated to dispute the hereditarian stance, and so eager to develop a purely psychological theory to explain neuroses? While Sulloway (1992) has argued persuasively that Freud’s system was an extension of the nineteenth century biology in which he was trained, there is another side to the story. Moreover, grounding in biological science does not account for Freud’s attraction to crackpot theories such as Fliess’s biorhythms, nasal determinism, or his preoccupation with numerology (as this relates to the occult significance of addresses and telephone numbers, not to mention intimations of his own death). Even as staunch a loyalist as Gay felt that Freud should have been more skeptical of Fliess’s “dogmatism” and “obsessions,” not to mention the latter’s “high-flying attempt to ground biology in mathematics” (Gay, 1988, p. 57).

Freud’s environmentalism may have been his version of coming to grips with nineteenth century racial theory condemning Jews to degenerative blood lines. In fact, this subtext had personal and specific meaning for him. Shortly after his endorsement of Charcot’s views on the genetic basis for hysteria, Freud had occasion to remind himself of the “neuropathic taint” among members of his own family tree, observing that such “stories are very common in Jewish families” (Freud, 1964, p. 203). In his February 11, 1897 letter to Fliess, Freud drew attention to his discovery of hysteria in several of his siblings, and in the letters of August 14 and October 3 of the same year cites the discovery of the condition in himself. To racial theorists, of course, such “discoveries” were hardly revelations when it came to Jews! McGrath notes that the increasingly anti-Semitic ambience of the late nineteenth century European French and German scene may have been the backdrop that motivated Freud to counter with an environmentalist, not hereditarian take on the neuroses (McGrath, 1986, p. 161).

Was Freud’s perception of hysteria in his nuclear family for him an alarming confirmation of Victorian racial theory—so alarming it was necessary for him to theorize it away? Some authors (Balmary, 1979; Krüll, 1979) have dwelt on the fate of the ST during the originary period as this relates to the theme of Freud’s relationship with his father. What such a focus may ignore, however, is the extent to which Jacob Freud’s imputed “perversity” may have been a forced move (and eventually a reductio ad absurdum) in a formulation originally framed as an alternative to racial doctrine. In short, an implication of the ST was that if Freud’s family members were “hysterics,” then their condition was the effect of an older sex abuser in the nuclear family configuration. Why the culprit had to be Jacob (rather than the mother, brothers, servants, or family relatives or nursemaids) probably stems from the vagaries of Freud’s finger-pointing .

Victorian theories of Jewish degeneration, as were mentioned, were driven by medical notions of hereditary taint. Considering this, it would have been impossible for Freud to have considered the idea of genetic transmission ungummed from self-incrimination. If, however, heredity was nothing but repressed sexual molestation, then neuroses were created because of what happened to people, not because of their native endowment. This theme registered in nineteenth century treatises of European Jewish physicians. In an all too apparent defensive mode, many of them argued that the presumed higher percentage of neurosis among Jews reflected their adverse social circumstances and struggles in prejudiced communities, not the biological consequences of degeneration (Fishberg, 1911). 

Politics and Paranoia

The relationship between an enduring, but often “civilized” Viennese anti-Semitism, and Freud’s presumed hypersensitivity about this is another intriguing issue. What, it may be asked, is a “normal,” not “hypersensitive” response to such a Weltanschauung? The force of the term “hypersensitive” smacks of deviancy of reaction, while the assumed boundaries of non-pathological reactivity to racial prejudice remains a murky determination. We know that Freud felt increasingly isolated from the medical establishment. If this was in part sparked by its implicit hostility to Jews, what should the proper Jewish response have been?

A critical consensus has it that despite the intolerance of Viennese society to ethnic difference—an intolerance as instanced by its tacit acceptance of fin de siecle racial theories of Jewish degeneration and extended to persons of color and Asiatic descent (Gilman, 1993a)—Freud’s personal attitude toward the establishment was uniquely stamped in the form of a personality quirk. Accordingly, critics seek to psychiatricize Freud’s attitude toward his social milieu, a textual stance they feel is confirmed by what Esterson has called Freud’s “paranoia” (Esterson, 1993, p.130). The problem here is that the trait in question was manifested in a society in which Jews were already derogated. In such an atmosphere, who establishes the permissible boundaries of antipathy or normalcy of response? When one is the target of such pressure, just what attitude is the acceptable one, and according to whose standards?

As a questionable case in point of Freud’s “paranoia” (Farrell, 1996), let us consider the 1897 episode of his belated appointment as Extraordinarius (i.e., Associate Professor) to the faculty of the University of Vienna. Freud’s candidacy was recommended by both Nothnagel and Krafft-Ebing in January of that year, and in June by the academic assembly of the university. Von Hartel, the Minister of Education, temporized on recommending appointment until February 27, 1902. It was finally endorsed by Emperor Franz Joseph on March 11, 1902, fully five years after it was received by the ministry. Moreover, it was not until the intervention of well-placed patients and after the request was renewed by sponsors that it was finally ratified. Freud was also informed by his instructor Sigmund Exner in 1902 that there was a move afoot to abort the nomination. Freud had written Fliess on February 8, 1897 he had been warned by his sponsors that there may be forces at work intent on sabotaging the appointment. The subsequent controversy over whether anti-Semitism played any role in delaying Freud’s appointment is perhaps studded with more complexities than recent critics allow.

Ellenberger (1970), Sulloway (1992), and Glicklhorn and Glicklhorn (1960) have insisted that anti-Semitism did not motivate the delay, although this was Freud’s perception. Ellenberger feels that Freud was neither “really isolated” nor “ill-treated” by colleagues (Ellenberger, 1970, p.448) while Sulloway argues that seven of the ten 1897 candidates in Freud’s group were Jewish and that von Hartel was down on record as denouncing anti-Semitism. However, as McGrath (1986) points out, the administrative quota on promotions might have been put in place explicitly to offset the number of Jews rising through the academic ranks. The possibility of some such tacit policy is suggested by the tumultuous political events occurring during this period of Austrian history. Partial support to Kasimir Badeni’s coalition government was given by the anti-Semitic Christian Socials, a party responsible for the 1895 election of the racist demagogue Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna. It is plausible to suppose that the coalition was perceived as being made more fragile by concessions to Jews at governmental levels. Quotas on academic promotions—especially in cases in which seventy per cent of candidates were Jewish—would have effectively diminished opportunities for anti-Semites to rabble-rouse around local issues.

Whatever the true picture behind Freud’s appointment delay, his alleged “paranoia” about the promotion hinges on the outcome of a political analysis of some complexity. Thus, had the quota actually been established on anti-Semitic grounds, Freud’s “paranoia” begins to look more like political astuteness. The upshot of another way of looking at such events is to query how much “paranoia” over anti-Semitism is really paranoia in an anti-Semitic environment? This in no way diminishes the possibility of personality factors entering the equation, although separating reality from paranoid distortion may not be as easy as some suppose.

Similar considerations apply to Ellenberger’s denial of “ill treatment” of Freud at the hands of his colleagues. A case in point is the Salpêtrière sojourn. Charcot’s treatment of Freud was in many respects collegial—even to the point of permitting his student to translate his works. Yet what should have been Freud’s attitude toward a mentor who believed on theory his student was at risk for being a racial degenerate? It is, of course, quite in the style of conventional wisdom everywhere to fashion its own criteria of mistreatment—to which those on the receiving end are expected to adhere.

Quashing heredity for Freud took yet another form: construing it as a farrago of fixed and acquired characteristics. Thus, Freud’s Lamarckian assumptions concerning inheritance implied that racial characteristics passed along through the germplasm themselves originated in the experiences of one’s ancestors. Translated into terms compatible with a doctrine of the susceptibility of Jews to psychological disorder, this meant that what was passed along was still in the nature of what happened to people, not what they were intrinsically. Freud’s forays into the generational transmission of traits, memories, and melodramas, as in Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1912-1913, pp. 1-161) were probably partially driven by the need to explain the origins of similar infantile fantasies. For if after 1897 he came to regard seduction fantasies as scenarios ungrounded in reality and springing from the Oedipal conflict, why was the scenario always the same, and what was the provenance of its singular thematic material? Here Lamarckianism also came to the rescue. True, the theme of killing the father and sexually possessing the mother is inherited to be sure, but not from flatfooted chromosomes. It derives from the experiences of one’s ancestors who in the distant past were caught up in real life Oedipal dramas

Freud, like so many of his contemporaries, both Jew and Gentile, was so taken with the alleged epidemiological realities upon which racial theory depended, his strategy for self-redemption developed within the constraints it imposed. The strategy became one of rescuing the vulnerability thought to be a statistically high risk for Jews, neurosis, from the purview of genetic blight. Achieving this meant showing how the blight in question was freed from an aura of inevitability by being stamped with environmentally wrought characteristics. The theoretical adjustments necessary to get out from under the depredations of racial theory amounted to quite a two-step by Freud. But his failure to fashion a plausible alternative for self-redemption must be considered in the light of his feeling downgraded.

Unlike contemporary social and biological scientists (Gould, 1981), Freud was in no position to attack racial theory directly. The latter was an intellectual tradition so ingrained in the medical thinking of his era, opposing its statistics on the prevalence of Jewish mental disorder would have been akin to bowdlerizing anatomy or reversing knowledge about infectious diseases. Racial theory had—and still has—another unique characteristic. It tends to color thinking about ethnicity by instilling attitudes that linger long after their open expression has been rendered anachronistic by updated knowledge. When current dictates of diplomacy, manners, or tact forbid the overt expression of racially inspired sentiment, the invisibly harbored doctrines can persevere as strongly as ever.

Endnotes

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(1)  The British philosopher J. L. Austin (Austin, 1960) undertook to discuss “trouser words.”  These are words like “real” whose negative usage “not real” or “unreal” give the trouser word its definite sense. It is one of the purposes of this paper to argue that Freud’s tacit preoccupation with the idea of degeneration was the trouser aspect of his seduction theory. Infantile sexual abuse, accordingly, was the manifest theme of the seduction papers, but it was degeneration that wore the pants.

 

(2)  Esterson (1993, pp. 14-15) and others fix the period at 18 months, one month less than the period between the delivery of The Aetiology of Hysteria and the letter to Fliess of September 21, 1897.

 

(3) By and large, the connection between theory and therapeutic effectiveness is nowadays played down by Freudian loyalists who have sought to unglue the psychoanalytic theoretical edifice from the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy. In line with this, Sachs (1989) disputes Grünbaum’s contention that “attribution of therapeutic success to the undoing of repressions—rather than to mere suggestion—was the foundation, both logically and historically, for the central dynamical significance that unconscious ideation acquired in psychoanalytic theory: without the reliance on the presumed dynamics of their therapeutic results, Breuer and Freud could have never propelled clinical data into repression etiologies” (Grünbaum, 1984, p. 182). Sachs faults Grünbaum for ignoring Freud’s argument that analytic assumptions are confirmed through parallels between the findings in neuroses and cases of paranoia and dementia praecox (schizophrenia), which are untreatable and impervious to the effects of suggestion.

     Sachs may be wrong on several counts. First, Grünbaum in due course discusses at least three different senses of “linkage” in which the connection between psychoanalytic theory and therapy come into play (Grünbaum, 1991). Second, when the treatment of paranoia met theoretical needs of the moment in 1896, Freud was far from pessimistic about the therapeutic outlook for psychotic cases. He even produced a paranoid “cure” in the case of Frau P.—subject, of course, to whatever claims of clinical regression in this patient he found it convenient to posit in later revisions of theory. Third, there is an incongruity between there being virtually no psychotic patients in Freud’s caseload and his maintaining that the “translation of symbols and the phantasies” of psychosis “coincides faithfully” with the data produced in neurotic cases. This conclusion, derivable only on the basis of the requisite psychoanalytic procedures in the consulting room, was evidently drawn without a sufficient enough number of psychotic patients in the caseload to establish its credibility. Fourth, there is an inconsistency between a dearth of such patients and Freud’s pronouncement that such patients are not vulnerable to suggestion.

Erwin (1993) has addressed the question of the alleged imperviousness of psychotics to suggestion, arguing that the research literature would seem to indicate otherwise. However, a share of Erwin’s evidence involves confirmation of the “suggestibility factor” in operant studies embracing verbal conditioning and instrumental behaviors (Krasner, 1958; Ayllon & Haughton, 1964; Salzinger & Pisoni, 1961). A question arises here about the relevance of operant conditioning studies to Freud’s notion of “suggestibility.” Thus, to assert that a patient’s behavior has been modified by reinforcement does not imply that the resultant patterns have been created through the effect of “suggestion,” even if the latter concept is blurry. In the experimental analysis of behavior, suggestion effects may be construed as the by-products of reinforced patterns, but the converse does not hold. A pattern is not indisputably the effect of “suggestion,” merely because it was reinforced, just as the tendency for laboratory planaria to turn right at a choice point in a maze is a result of suggestion simply because they were reinforced for doing so. Consequently, neither must human subjects reinforced in analogous ways acquire their patterns through “suggestion.” Erwin’s example of a schizophrenic woman reinforced for carrying a broom in the Ayllon, Haughton & Hughes (1965) study does not seem to capture the notion of a pattern created through suggestion; it only illustrates the case of a patient for whom a chosen psychoanalytic interpretation is doubtful when it transpires psychologists have been reinforcing broom-carrying patterns. The behavior in question did not necessarily originate because broom-carrying was suggested by experimenters. I say “not necessarily” because suggestion is not altogether ruled out either; but neither is it guaranteed. Despite the possible irrelevance of operant strategies to the issue of suggestion, Freud nonetheless had little justification for making his exclusionary remarks, especially in the light of his limited access to this patient population.

      Lastly, on what basis did Freud contend psychotics are impervious to suggestion in the context of his 1909 dismissal of “suggestibility” as a “catchword,” not to mention its lack of clear definition? Impervious to what? Evidently, the conceptual laxity Freud is permitted by loyalists is off limits to critics like Grünbaum. Sachs (1989, p. 355) takes Grünbaum to task for the latter’s fuzzy notion of “suggestion,” while Erwin (1993) is forced to grapple with several senses of the term in order to cover all the possibilities of meaning spawned by its ambiguity. Ironically, Sachs seems more impatient with Grünbaum’s failure to clarify the meaning of “suggestibility” when criticizing Freud, than he is with the latter for failing to do likewise in his critique of Berheim’s theory of suggestibility in hypnotism (Freud, 1888; Ellenberger, 1970; Sulloway, 1992).

      The theory/therapy marriage is indisputable in the seduction papers, whatever the looseness of the connection in post-1987 theorizing. Despite this, modern theorists who wish to disengage psychoanalytic theory from the support given to it by therapeutic effects must grapple with the larger issue of justifying the system. Loyalists cannot maintain there is something worthwhile about psychoanalytic theory unwed from those therapeutic effects and explanatory virtues serving to distinguish it over rival theoretical accounts. If a putative recovery of a repressed “memory” fails to ameliorate symptoms any better than alternative approaches, what is the evidential basis for contending the pathogen is a memory, whether of an actual or fantasized event? True, the theory may receive confirmation in other areas of inquiry, like experimental or epidemiological investigations. However, support for it from these quarters, while occasionally suggestive, is in the main equivocal or poor.

      The point here should not be misconstrued. It is not that psychoanalytic theory is necessarily vacuous unless psychoanalysis can be shown to be therapeutically sound or superior; it is only that in the absence of differential treatment results, what is to recommend it, given the existence of equally effective—and less lengthy or expensive!—treatment alternatives? If this is crassly pragmatic, so be it.  

 

(4) Freud’s “hysteria,” as defined in his paper Hysteria cuts across several diagnostic categories listed in the DSM-IV, the current official manual of psychiatry nosology (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). The constellation of clinical disturbances observed by Breuer and Freud in 1895 may have represented time-bound Victorian syndromes (Sulloway, 1992, p. 59) or “culture-bound syndromes” (Simons & Hughes, 1985). Webster (1966) has indicated that “hysteria” functioned as a “diagnostic dustbin,” embracing conditions that from a modern psychiatric perspective are quite distinct. For example, the patients in Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria, manifest symptoms across a range of disabilities, including conversion disorder, dissociative disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, amnestic syndrome, brief reactive psychoses, etc. Complicating the diagnosis of “hysteria” is the promotion of an illusory purview for psychogenesis, based as it may be on premature calculation. The conviction that a condition must be a purely “functional” or “non-organic” one—in the sense it lacks a physiological underpinning—may have fostered misdiagnoses. Symptoms of “hysteria” may spring from organic disorders that are unclassifiable due to the unavailability of relevant diagnostic procedures during a given era. If “hysterical” is medical shorthand for disturbances of function that cannot be readily attributed to known neuropathological processes, it does not follow that psychogenesis is the forced alternative. As Webster observes, the etiological bases for such cases still remains an open question.

In a more comprehensive sense, there is no category of pathology theoretically exempt from neurophysiological causation, since all behavior, normal or otherwise, is mediated by the central nervous system. If so, “organic” and “psychogenic” simply denote distinguishable realms of disorder that are ultimately physical: those that have (or may come to have) specifiable etiologies and those that do not (or will not). For what is the alternative? A purely “mental” etiology without causal physical underpinnings, as under Cartesian dualism? Even Freud, who surmised that all psychic processes would eventually be described in physical terms, implied that there is no such thing as a purely “psychic” disorder. Accordingly, the conjecture by Bowlby (2004) that “Breuer and Freud’s initial insight that hysterical symptoms represent not a chemical imbalance but a mental conflict” may involve a category mistake (Ryle, 1949).

In line with the foregoing, the possible problems of a diagnosis of “hysteria” are at least four in number: (1) it may cover a protean variety of symptoms as to be virtually meaningless as a classificatory tool; (2) it may refer to symptoms springing from a known neurological disorder like torsion dystonia, yet get misdiagnosed by psychiatrists overlooking an organic basis all too familiar to neurologists; (3) it may cover symptomatic pictures of physical conditions unknown to all practitioners in a given era; and (4) it may necessarily and ultimately pertain to neurophysiological anomalies in accordance with assumptions central to a philosophical position on the mind-body relationship (i.e., identity theory).      

 

(5) In referring the putatively high level of childhood sexual abuse required by the ST, Freud emphasized that it did not correspond quantitatively to the incidence of the disorder, hysteria, attributed to it. The abuse had to be greater than the prevalence of hysteria, since the latter is the delayed consequence of the abuse. Consequently, more abuse was being perpetrated than its symptomatic manifestations indicated, since the latter were only the accumulated results over time.

 

(7) Schimek (1987) was among the first to call into question whether Freud’s patients actually disclosed early sexual abuse. However, he finesses his psychoanalytic stand by attempting to diminish the significance of Freud’s switch from reality to fantasy of abuse. In this connection he writes: “…actual seduction in early childhood played only a limited, though indispensable role in the complex and lengthy process of symptom formation. This early trauma was significant only to the extent that its unconscious memory had a ‘delayed’ action at puberty…It is only when the unconscious memory has acquired a new meaning in a different context at a later age that it becomes a psychic trauma. Internal psychological processes and transformations already play a central role in the seduction theory. Thus Freud’s later shift of emphasis from reproductions of real events to fantasies (which contain fragments of actual past experience) did not represent such a radical break in the continuity of his thought” (Schimek, 1987, p.939). On the other hand, and despite Schimek’s valiant effort to establish continuity of Freud’s thought in the landmark reversal of 1897, what more important difference can you have than the one between reality and fantasy?

 

(6) Sulloway (1992) may have exaggerated the originality of key figures of Freud’s circle, like Wilhelm Fliess. In developing his thesis that the latter’s influence on Freud has been generally underestimated, Sulloway faults the editors of the Fliess correspondence for failing to recognize that Fliess “was a pioneer in the field of infantile sexuality” (Sulloway, 1991, p. 250). However, just as Fliess’s contributions to bisexuality and infant sexuality should not be obscured by attributing his views to Freud, so too should Fliess not be portrayed as scooping what had already been thematic in Victorian pediatric medicine. To correct the record, discussions of infantile sexuality were numerous, not sparse, before Freud and Fliess. They began after the middle of the nineteenth century, although they did not proliferate in the Continental literature until later on (Carter, 1983). The widespread pre-Fliessian belief that hysteria was sexual in nature inspired  investigations of sexuality in hysterical children. Accordingly, clinical reports on infant sexuality—a majority of which focused on masturbation—were authored by Behrend in 1860, Jacobi in 1876, Fleischmann in 1878, Lindner in 1879, Smith in 1880, Scherpf in 1884, and Herz in 1885 (Carter, 1983). As for Freud’s objection in The Aetiology of Hysteria to the argument that the infantile sexual episode cannot be the cause of hysteria because such episodes were more common than its later clinical picture, he was only responding to conjectures about the relationship between the two as discussed in the pediatric literature of his day (Carter, 1983, p. 194). In an eye-opening monograph, Kern (1973) details the way in which many of the alleged Freudian discoveries, from infantile sexuality to psychosexual stages of fixation and their impact on later character traits, made a prior debut in the nineteenth century pediatric literature. Such studies were conducted shortly after the midpoint of the century. The conviction that it was Freud alone who originated this intellectual tradition is undoubtedly due to the promotional efforts of psychoanalysts to advertise the revolutionary nature of his discoveries. More often than not, this was at the expense of ignoring the more extensive literature that preceded him. As a case in point, we find Freud in his 1905 Three Essays declaring the uniqueness of his contribution to the understanding of sexuality in children: “So far as I know, not a single author has clearly recognized the regular existence of a sexual instinct in childhood” (Kern, 1973, p. 118). This pronouncement is astonishing in light of the depth of understanding about the subject detailed in the pre-Freudian work of Maudsley in 1867, Perez in 1886, Groos in 1899, Bell in 1902, Ellis in 1903, Sollier in 1891, Barnes in 1892, Dessoir in 1894, Dallemagne in 1894, and probably numerous others.

 

(8) It was Cioffi (1988) who first questioned whether all sexual games—like doctor and nurse games—initiated by children should be characterized as abusive. Were enemas, decades ago thought to be a home remedy for assorted gastrointestinal ailments, sexually abusive when administered to children on a more frequent basis than nowadays considered medically advisable? Lastly, is sexual abusiveness toward children definitionally linked to the legal notion of mens rea in the mind of the perpetrator? In other words, can adults sexually abuse children if the episode in question is accidental or non-purposeful? Under the looser Freudian definition of “trauma” in the originary period, accidental frottage during the sexually precocious phase might have met criteria for a pathogenic event, although perpetrator intentionality would have been lacking. Are enemas abusive if the parent mistakenly believes irrigation of the bowels on a regular basis is feasible as a health measure? Perhaps it is necessary to distinguish between what is traumatic and what is abusive.

 

(9) It was not only the foreboding aspect of the landscape at the foothills of the Carpathians, nor the sinister demeanor of Count Dracula that caught Jonathan Harker’s attention in his travels to Eastern Europe. As if to set the stage for the terrifying drama that was to unfold, Harker’s racially tinged remarks about the peasants and villagers he met along the way to Castle Dracula are also noteworthy. He finds them fearful, superstitious, strange-looking, and sickly despite their gay attire. Their food is good, although it makes him “thirsty.” The women are pretty, except when you draw close to find “how clumsy they are about the waist.” The Slovaks are the most “barbaric”: while “picturesque,” they are not “prepossessing,” and on stage they would be mistaken for an “Oriental band of brigands.” They are, he reassures himself, quite harmless and “rather wanting in self-assertion.” Harker’s reaction to Eastern Europeans is the initial nicety or expression of wonderment, followed by the patronizing remark. He is quintessentially the western European, oblivious to his sense of racial superiority. On the other hand, Count Dracula’s litany of virtues about his own “race,” harkening back to Attila the Hun, betrays his conviction that his lineage is moribund. Indeed, the literal and lineal notions of “blood” shift imperceptibly back and forth at the beginning of the novel—authored in the auspicious year of 1897! 

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Film Review: “A Dangerous Method”: Blowing the Cover on the Shrinks

David Begelman

You’re tempted to think that the producers of the 2011 film, “A Dangerous Method” were ignoring much of the commentary on psychoanalysis down through the years. There’s a spin to this film that betokens a backdoor reediting of history by those intent on gilding the lily. 

 The movie is in part inspired by psychologist John Kerr’s definitive account of the early association of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung entitled, “A Most Dangerous Method.” Despite his eye-opening recapitulation of the relationship between the two celebrated figures, Canadian director David Cronenberg’s film paints a lopsided contest between an ingenuous Jung (Michael Fassbender), his sexual attraction to a patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), and a supremely avuncular Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

While the film reenacts some actual events in the relationship between the two psychiatrists, it omits a good deal of the nitty-gritty of their saga, as though they were always flying high on the wings of sagacity and integrity. Real history turns in a different verdict than Cronenberg’s manicured version of things.

Jung, a darling of the New Age set, was given to other dalliances outside of his marriage to his wife Emma (played by Sarah Gadon in the film), including one with Toni Wolff—when he wasn’t battling psychotic episodes, or giving vent to anti-Semitic palaver as an enthusiast for the superiority of the “Aryan unconscious” over the Jewish version of same.

And Freud was hardly one to point the finger at Jung’s sexual improprieties, as Cronenberg’s film portrays. He had a thing for his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who lived with him and his family for long stretches. The smoking gun in his affair with her was an entry in a hotel registry when the pair were on holiday together in the Swiss Alps. (His wife Martha was at that time at home, tending to the children.) Before contemporary scholars like Peter Swales got the goods on him, allegations of Freud’s infidelity were dismissed by his followers as a Jungian smear campaign.

Contrary to what is implied in the film, Freud’s supposed record of “cure” was dismal rather than stellar, while his disciples slavishly attempted to curry favor with him as though he was, as one critic has averred, “a petty generalissimo,” rather than a scientist.

There’s little in “A Dangerous Method” that rises above a sugar-coated view of the early Freud-Jung relationship. It’s also largely a transparent attempt to mystify the Jung-Spielrein affair with highfalutin “insights” over a liaison that boiled down to an escapade between an ambitious woman of sadomasochistic bent and her randy psychoanalyst. While Jung is depicted in “A Dangerous Method” as experiencing remorse over the professional boundary-violation, his encounter with Sabina was probably the same kind thing it is for most husbands with a wandering eye, international reputations notwithstanding. Except he called his fling “poetry,” a euphemism to die for, since in his case “the talking cure” involved more than talking or poetry.

Fassbender as Jung puts his best foot forward in a script that is, alas, pretty thin material from a narrative standpoint. Mortensen, one of the most capable Hollywood actors if his performances in “Eastern Promises” (2007), and “History of Violence” (2008)—both also directed by Cronenberg—are any indication, was a polished and insinuating Freud.  Keira Knightly’s characterization as Sabina was on the overdrawn, spastic side, even given her diagnosis as “hysteric.” The classification, ever popular in Victorian theorizing, is currently an obsolete one, saturated as it is with ambiguity and culture-bound intrusions that make it virtually worthless as a psychiatric category.

“A Dangerous Method” is now available on DVD, having had a mercifully short run in neighborhood movie theaters.

Does Shakespeare Need Freud?

 

D. A. Begelman  

I’d like to speak today about the psychoanalytic spin on Shakespeare. Some of you may be familiar with this kind of glossing of his plays. There are, to be sure, countless examples of the approach, although for present purposes let’s focus on one, perhaps the most notable of the genre. It was authored by Dr. Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, who was also a member of his six-person secret “Committee.” Formed in 1912, it comprised a group of close associates charged with maintaining the integrity of the psychoanalytic movement. The membership feared revisionism from within by those like Jung, Adler, Stekel, and others perceived as deviating from a party line. 

Jones’s 1949 monograph (originally published in the January 1910 issue of The American Journal of Psychology) was entitled, Hamlet and Oedipus: A Classic Study in the Psychoanalysis of Literature. (1) It intended to show why the melancholy prince delayed avenging his dead father, a sovereign by the same name, Hamlet. The intellectual hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy learns that his uncle Claudius murdered his own brother, the former king. Hamlet takes upon himself the task of avenging his father’s death by resolving to dispatch Claudius with the encouragement (if not occasional hectoring) of his father’s seeming ghost. I say “seeming” because in one famous soliloquy Hamlet registers doubts about whether the ghost was real or the Devil in disguise.

In order to erase his lingering doubt—and one that comports well with the early modern belief in the shape-shifting powers of the Devil—Hamlet contrives to stage a play, a doctored version of The Murder of Gonzago. The drama portrays the poisoning of a monarch by his brother, and Claudius’s agitated reaction to its enactment convinces Hamlet it betrays his uncle’s guilt. Yet Hamlet does not kill his uncle until the end of the play. Jones’s interpretation of this “procrastination” is a boilerplate spin on the drama, and one shared by Freud himself: Hamlet’s Oedipus Complex. The complex, according to Freud, involves a repressed wish to kill the father in order to sexually possess the mother. According to Jones, killing Claudius so resonates with Hamlet’s unconscious Oedipal wish, murdering his uncle would bring the wish too close to the surface of consciousness. Jones felt that Hamlet’s delay could be thus understood in the light of this inner conflict.

I have always been troubled about this formulation, although to be fair to psychoanalysts, reliance on the Oedipus Complex among their ranks has declined sharply in recent years (2). On the way to downsizing this formative concept of their theory, psychoanalysts came to distinguish between the “Oedipus Complex” and the “Oedipal phase,” a distinction some might construe to be a bit on the precious side.

What human patterns reveal or otherwise confirm an Oedipus Complex? In other words, what is its purported data-base, or those observations that make the complex a reasonable theoretical conjecture? This turns out to be a challenge weightier than we might imagine. For if the complex is an unconscious one, how do we get from ordinary patterns of behavior—normal or abnormal—to what may strike us at first blush as a counterintuitive, if not outlandish, scenario supposedly behind them? Those who say that they never had incestuous thoughts about their mothers or fears of castration by their fathers are reminded by psychoanalysts that such wishes are not consciously entertained ideas. But the nagging question still remains: why choose that unconscious scenario, rather than some other we might select from numberless possibilities?

It also may strike us as implausible that the evidence for the theory comes from observations of patients in the consulting room. If the complex is unconscious, neither do practitioners observe it in the raw. What they observe are ongoing patterns of behavior we would never ordinarily attribute to anything like an Oedipally-saturated scenario—never, that is, until a view of things becomes colored by professionals in the thrall of such a notion. No one before Freud thought of an Oedipus conflict. And that should come as something of a surprise to us all. After all, if the complex is a compelling explanation of a bewildering variety of behavioral patterns, what was keeping theorists from cottoning onto it long before the end of the 19^th century?

To reemphasize the point, Freud originally posited the complex as a universal unconscious scenario: everyone harbors it. He deemed it to be such an ingredient aspect of human development that personality as we know it would be impossible without it. Accordingly, we would be hard pressed to come up with a specimen of ongoing behavior exempt from its effects. Presumably then, there are no naturally occurring personality styles or actions without the inevitable stamp of the complex, despite the enormous range of personality patterns that exist. If that is true, it seems paradoxical to characterize a particular pattern like that of Hamlet as evidence of the complex when there are no counterexamples against which it can be meaningfully contrasted (3).

Let’s highlight this point by an analogy. If, during the course of a regular medical examination, your physician declares that you show signs of mental illness, you would be understandably perplexed by such a diagnosis if the doctor insisted that any possible way you behaved was a sign of, or consistent with, having the condition. You’d certainly be within your rights to wonder what he could possibly mean by “mental illness” if any conceivable pattern that you present to him was a presumptive symptom of the condition.  

Suppose someone authored a play very much unlike Shakespeare’s, in which our hero, so dismayed by the two months interval between his father’s death and the remarriage of his mother to his uncle Claudius, impulsively kills the latter before the end of the first act. Literary scholars might protest we don’t have much of a play at that point, and they’re probably right. But what would a psychoanalyst say in the grip of the Freud/Jones idea of the complex in question? Not that a swift and early murder contradicts the provisions of psychoanalytic theory. He couldn’t say this, for the simple reason that as he understands his formulation, all types of behavior either betray the stamp of the repressed Oedipal wish, or else are consistent with having it. After all, and in order to bring this newer scenario in line with the theory in question, it is only necessary to assume that the murder of Claudius with dispatch mirrors precisely the central theme of the Oedipus Complex, namely, killing the paternal competitor for mother love. All that is needed for this alternative scenario to represent a “deduction” from psychoanalytic theory (or at least an action consistent with it) is to hold that murdering Claudius early on discloses an Oedipal conflict in which thematic material for some reason does not reach the level of consciousness so that the final act of regicide need not be postponed!

On the other hand, we might surmise that the unconscious material does invade consciousness, the explanation for why Hamlet behaves the way he does before the end of our hack drama, or, indeed, why any of his ongoing behavior has the features it exhibits after the murder. Whatever they turn out to be, the hypothesized Oedipal drama is confirmed. The conclusion is inescapable: Hamlet’s procrastination can hardly be considered evidence of an Oedipal problem when there is no way he could have possibly behaved in relation to Claudius that could not likewise be attributed to it, given the configuration of mother, father, sex, and murder as ingredients of a dramatic scenario. He delays killing Claudius because of an Oedipal conflict, but if he summarily kills him, it’s still the Oedipal thing in operation—only with a different upshot.  

To summarize: we have reason to question why Shakespeare’s Hamlet procrastinates out of Oedipal motives if precisely the same motives explain why he wouldn’t procrastinate at all in a revised—and considerably inferior—play. Ernest Jones, it appears, seemed oblivious to the fact that if the Oedipus Complex explains everything, it really explains nothing, since its grid fits all behaviors, all traits, all styles, all comers, with—as they say in my trade—no contraindications.

Dr. Jones’s treatise seems to contain other telltale signs of fudging. If he believed that Hamlet’s delay in discharging his filial obligation to kill his uncle was prompted by unconscious Oedipal fantasies, what then do we make of his slaying Polonius behind the arras in Queen Gertrude’s bedchamber? I quote the melancholy prince:                                               

    How now!  a rat?

                        Dead! for a ducat, dead!

                        Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!...

                        I took thee for thy better!

“I took thee for thy better” (Italics mine). Whom did Hamlet think he was killing in Act III, scene IV, if not Claudius—as another psychoanalyst, Dr. Theodore Lidz, acknowledges in his book, Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet? (4) 

Ernest Jones, sensing that the killing of Polonius contradicts his formulation about Hamlet’s continuing delay in killing Claudius—if that is whom he thought he was stabbing through the curtain—had this to say in a footnote: “I find Loening’s detailed argument quite conclusive that Hamlet did not have the king in mind when he struck this blow” (1949, p. 37). Jones’s argument here is strained, and obviously in the service of seeing Hamlet consistently delay finishing off his uncle. Yet, and in line with what we have been saying, why Jones feels there is some inconsistency between having an Oedipal conflict and killing someone Hamlet identified with his father remains obscure. If no behavior we might imagine refutes having the complex, then certainly killing a father substitute before the end of Act I doesn’t refute it either. Maybe in light of this, Jones should have revisited his assumption that Hamlet didn’t think Polonius was Claudius.   

The Jones/Lidz discrepancy is intriguing from another standpoint. Two eminent psychoanalysts derive inconsistent views about Hamlet’s mind-set from the same construct, and moreover, consider them straightforward deductions from theory! Since there are no specific features of behavior that uniquely represent consequences of harboring an Oedipus Complex or, alternatively, represent evidence against having it, the incongruity is not that all surprising. Indeed, Lidz’s opinion that Hamlet thought he was killing Claudius when he was dispatching Polonius was for this psychoanalyst not contrary to the Oedipally-saturated spin on Shakespeare’s hero.  Accordingly, if the commentary by both psychoanalysts is a model of psychoanalytic inference in general, the system is less a scientific theory than it is a sieve through which any potential observation can be filtered.

Going on to reinforce his point that Hamlet did not think he was killing Claudius, Jones declares: “After all, he had just left the king engrossed in prayer, and the latter could hardly have rushed in front of him to [Gertrude’s] bedroom” (1949, p.37). Jones’s remarks are careless; there are no Shakespearean clues concerning Castle Elsinore time schedules for separate characters. Claudius rises and exits from praying at the close of Act III, scene III, while scene IV of the same act opens in the queen’s bedroom without any indication of the time elapsing between Hamlet’s taking leave of the King in prayer, and the imagined entrances of him and Claudius into the queen’s chamber. Consequently, the assumption that Hamlet could not have believed that Claudius was hiding in Gertrude’s bedchamber—and who else might it have been in such a compromising situation?—is gratuitous.

At the end of the play, Hamlet does assassinate Claudius, an act that on the face of it in conflict with Jones’s theory of Oedipally-derived dilatory action. His explanation of this is instructive about how psychoanalytic theorizing always comes up smiling: “Only when [Hamlet] has made the final sacrifice and brought himself to the door of death is he free to fulfil his duty, to avenge his father, and to slay his other self—his uncle…The second [moment] is when he actually kills the King, when the Queen is already dead and lost to him for ever, so that his conscience is free of an ulterior motive for the murder” (1949, p. 100).

Another bit of fudging? Jones feels it’s a theoretical given that Oedipal fantasies do not survive the actual death of the mother figure to maintain their hold on whatever ongoing action is taken to spring from them. From whence does this assumption derive? In another hypothetical drama, what if Hamlet, after dispatching Laertes in the duel and coming to realize he is also poisoned, still could not bring himself to kill Claudius, as he intended? What would a psychoanalyst say here? That the same unconscious conflict still prevents our hero from slaying his uncle due to its hold upon him? If so, the actual death of Gertrude means little one way or the other in confirming the existence of a certain mental conflict during the course of final events in the play. Yet it is used by Jones to salvage an otherwise arbitrary formulation about why Hamlet is able to commit an act he was supposedly resistant to committing for five Acts.

In addition, if Gertrude’s death by poison frees Hamlet from delaying killing Claudius as Jones insists, why shouldn’t the death of his own father, the former king of Denmark, likewise free him from the unconscious need to temporize for five acts? The murdered king from the outset of the drama is no longer a paternal figure who is either alive or who because of this can retaliate with a castration threat on the son who harbors incestuous feelings for the mother figure. Should the objection to this be that the father figure is nonetheless haunting Hamlet’s imagination as the ghost of a living presence, we are moved to ask where in psychoanalytic theory is it specified that a ghost is the functional equivalent of a living father in the Oedipal drama? Even if Freud were right about the existence of an Oedipus Complex, his and Jones’s spin on Hamlet’s alleged procrastination strains to ensure foregone conclusions, arbitrary even from the standpoint of their own formulation!    

It may come as no surprise to you that when it comes to psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, I happen to be a contrarian with a capital “C.” I don’t see this as especially unique, since I am not alone. Whistleblowers on Freud have been accumulating steadily in recent decades, and their critiques are instructive. If nothing else, they force us to review time-honored ideas more critically—whatever final judgment on them is turned in by history.

Long after Freudolatry is relegated to the dustbin of scientific history—as in my opinion I think it inevitably will be—remnants of its cultural impact will survive to infiltrate ordinary language. We’ll still continue to characterize the relationship between dependent children and their mothers as “Oedipal,” and we’ll still call persons who are compulsive or stingy “anal.” But such idioms will represent, even as they do much of the time these days, little more than an exchange of one group of synonyms for another: “Anal” thus becomes merely an adjective for “stingy” or “compulsive” on the linguistic exchange. And I dare say that many of us who characterize others as “anal” haven’t the foggiest notion about the original provenance of the term within classical psychoanalytic theory. Allow me now an extended sidebar on Freud.

There are countless books, journal articles, and other literary excursions into how psychoanalytic theory illuminates great literature, its contributions to the Shakespearean canon being only a case in point. Then there is an enormous clinical literature devoted to the psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of psychological disorders.

Those of us who feel that Freud has little to contribute to understanding Shakespeare—or, indeed, any other literary master—believe that his is a flawed psychology. Our skepticism springs from theoretical concerns shared by a widening constituency of critics whose ranks in the humanities and the social sciences have been burgeoning steadily in recent years. Because of this, it’s a mistake to assume that recent criticism of Freud’s system or its present day incarnations represents nothing more than the murmurings of a disgruntled and uncomprehending few, an insubstantial minority of backbiters. Quite the opposite is true.

The newer criticicism concedes that psychoanalytic theory in its older, orthodox form or in any of its later evolutionary guises has been of historical importance. With its acknowledged influence on modern thought, we cannot reasonably view it as otherwise. By the same token, Ptolemy’s geocentric theory of the universe was important, as were the demythologized cosmologies of Anaximander, Xenophanes and Pythagoras, theories of trait transmission formulated by Lamarck and Lysenko; systems of astrology, homeopathy, magic, sorcery and witchcraft, and more recently, New Age folderol about indigo children and Creation Science and Intelligent Design as so-called “alternatives” to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. These schemes have been unquestionably important because they have all been influential, although skeptics among us might intimate, as did one philosopher, that importance is not important—truth is (5).

Of course, truth in some circles these days seems to be less of a popular commodity, given industrious attempts to deconstruct it in some quarters of the humanities. In the turgid prose of the poststructuralists, the quest for objective “truth” is foolhardy, a chimera. Many of them have it that the proper focus should be something called the “text,” a foundational cornerstone of their new religion. And if you have the temerity to ask why one textual interpretation is better than any other, poststructuralists—congregating principally in literature departments of the academy—might inform you your question is symptomatic of the “positivism” of a scientific age. For them, it’s not that the truth is hard to uncover; it’s not even out there to be unearthed, diligently or otherwise.

Likewise, asking why one psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream is better than any other might get you sized up as a troublemaker whose ulterior motive is an unconscious wish to kill the father—Freud being the father figure in question. Yet dwelling on the unconscious motivation for why a question is posed only sidetracks obtaining an answer to it. More than this, it steeps discourse in a ploy not uncommon among psychoanalysts: the genetic fallacy, or confusing the truth-value of an answer with the motivation for raising a question. My reasons for asking something may well be perverse, but this tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any answer supplied.

We can summarize the groundswell of recent criticism of the house that Freud built by enumerating several of its salient points:

---------Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, far from blazing a trail of insights into our mental apparatus, has a hard time getting corroborated by experimental psychology, contrary to the commentary of humanities scholars, playwrights, philosophers, novelists, movie directors like Alfred Hitchcock, and consulting room gurus. For what it’s worth, experimental science is the only crucible capable of testing the mettle of a behavioral science theory. Moreover, while psychoanalysis has left its mark on scholars in a wide range of disciplines, it has for decades been pretty much a joke in the austere corridors of experimental psychology.

---------Such cornerstones of psychoanalytic method as dream interpretation and free association have no probative value in any established scientific crucible, nor do psychoanalysts provide any rigorous basis for why they should. The route to pathogens, or the psychic causes of “neurosis” (a currently defunct term in psychiatric  nomenclature) through free association can be likened to an exploratory voyage of note across the Atlantic. Columbus might manage to cross it with his navigational skills to be sure, but why should he have assumed that where he landed was India? Had he landed in India, what made him believe he would find there the gold to enrich Spain’s economy? Or if he found it, that there was a sufficient supply to mine? Or, if a sufficient supply, not tucked away in inaccessible hills?

---------The root assumption that our dream life abounds in images that have symbolic value or are drenched in wish-fulfillment is a leap of faith with little empirical grounding. The method of free association, devised as it was to root out the causal origins of neurosis, has been advertised by psychoanalysts as one royal road to the unconscious, while the documented effects of such factors as situational variables and suggestibility have been blithely ignored in the rush to sanctify the technique. Even absenting the role of suggestion or derailment from a proper mental spoor, what guarantees that the factor unearthed by free association is actually a pathogen at all?

---------Despite the promotional campaigns of its propagandists, there is currently no research evidence to support the claim that psychoanalysis is any more effective than any other therapeutic approach, while its track record on such disabilities as panic disorder,  obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance abuse disorders, and certain sexual disorders, is dismal. Psychoanalysts themselves have long acknowledged that disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or the autism spectrum disorders are beyond the reach of their methods. Freud himself conceded this early in his career.

When it comes to treatment in general, psychoanalytic practitioners often turn in a less than stellar performance. Decades ago, the prestigious New York Psychoanalytic Institute undertook a comparative study of the effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatment on patients for whom its practices were considered appropriate—a rather selective group of troubled persons, anyhow. The results were so disappointing, they were summarily suppressed by the bigwigs at the Institute.

As far as Freud’s original caseload goes, so-called “cures,” are either non-existent, as in the cases of the “hysteric” Dora (Ida Bauer) and the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff), are misrepresented as delivering up disclosures of sexual abuse that turn out to be scenarios Freud himself may have foisted upon his female patients—as in the pioneering days of his 1896 Seduction Theory, or else are concocted tales pasted together from the facts of his own life, not those of actual patients he was treating.

In the case of the Ratman (Ernst Lanzer), one for which Freud famously claimed a cure, and for this reason showcased it in his 1908 address to the First International Psychoanalytic Congress, incongruities between his progress notes and his final presentation, not to mention its implausible reconstructions, stare one in the face. The failure of serious follow-up after three months of treatment make Freud’s prognostications about successful outcome dubious in the extreme. The case of “Little Hans,” supposedly a pioneering study of childhood phobia, is a stunning example of how a patient’s disclosures can be twisted to fit preordained theoretical biases. And the patient in question, Herbert Graf, was treated by his father under the sway of a long-distance Freud!    

---------Psychoanalytic theory has been notoriously resistant to an essential feature of scientific formulations worthy of the mantle, namely, falsifiability. As we have seen in the case of Hamlet, its practitioners are hard put to specify unambiguously the specific behavioral data or patterns that would decisively falsify its central concepts. The theory functions more like a conceptual funnel through which any fact produces confirmation of a master template. The psychoanalyst’s view of the world can be likened to a passing parade in conceptual lock-step, as if in the face of any clinical disorder the incessant rallying cry is: “We know the drill.” Creaking attempts to specify hypothetically falsifying data for central concepts may from time to time surface (as in Freud’s attempt to give them lip service in his 1937 essay, “Constructions in Analysis”), but they ring hollow when one considers the assumptive flavor of overriding notions in ongoing psychoanalytic practice. It is one thing to broadcast the possibility of falsification, and quite another to operate as if such public reassurances were little more than empty promises. Routinely, everyone has an Oedipus complex, or a stockpile of repressions, and there is no conceivable observation that would refute this.

---------Psychoanalytic theory foists a view of explanation with what I would call an imperial outreach. It amounts to casting the net of a strictly motivational psychology over behavior, and quite prematurely, given the state of our present knowledge. It is not at all apparent that aberrant behavior is always driven by invisible motives, and it is premature to insist that there are always underlying unconscious reasons, rather than simply causes, for certain patterns.

---------The central concept of psychoanalytic theory, that of repression, has received increased critical scrutiny in recent years, possibly because of its central role in such acrimonious debates as the one over recovered memories of early sexual abuse. It should be noted that the debate runs a gamut of opinion from researchers who find no support for a concept of repression in over sixty years of laboratory studies, to clinicians who are convinced of its operation as an incontrovertible truth. The latter find experimental studies to be wanting for the reason that they are viewed as artificially contrived laboratory exercises lacking the dynamic aspect of real life drama. The posture is ironic for historical reasons. When earlier laboratory studies seemed to suggest a basis for the notion of repression, psychoanalysts were eager to reference this as the scientific backup for a cherished concept. When later, more rigorous studies cast doubt on the virtual existence of repression, the same constituency pooh-poohed the findings as irrelevant to real life problems (6). Freud himself did not harbor such contradictory sentiments. He was dismissive of all laboratory research on psychoanalytic concepts, whether confirmatory or discouraging, from the outset. In 1934, five years before his death, he said as much to a psychologist, Saul Rosenzweig, who felt he had data that confirmed Freud’s concept of repression.

--------In the face of the disconcerting results of outcome studies, fresh spin on psychoanalytic theory has evolved. Gone is the older emphasis on therapeutic effectiveness, to be replaced by a newer focus on the vagaries of so-called transference and countertransference, as if such rarefied concerns have anything to do with the reasons for which patients seek treatment. In my own clinical career in the trenches, patients enter treatment in order to find relief from such things as marital discord, mood disorder, anxiety, psychosis, substance-abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or aggression, etc. They do not usually come for esoteric or speculative excursions into the realm of “self-understanding” brokered by analysts.  Nor is any such venture necessary in order to resolve their personal difficulties.

--------Given the time and cost a psychoanalytic course of treatment takes (or used to take), it is premature to assume that psychological changes introduced during its course can be attributed to it. The tendency to do so blithely ignores ongoing effects that are introduced over time in untreated control groups, against which any therapeutic effect must be measured. In addition, if therapeutic success is to any extent measured by verbal reports of patients, the time, expense, and commitment to treatment may well contribute to positive judgments predicted by Cognitive Dissonance Theory (7). That is, verbal appraisals of their own treatment by patients swing in the direction of their behavioral commitment to psychotherapy, whatever its form or actual reality of improvement. If you want an untarnished report about whether a parishioner has been saved by God, make sure first he or she hasn’t spent a lifetime proselytizing for the faith.

--------A number of contemporary psychoanalysts, reeling from the fancied depredations of biological psychiatry, the success of short-term treatment like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and the financial strait-jacket of insurance industry policies, have maintained that psychoanalysis, unlike other nostrums, is the last frontier of deeper self-understanding. The stance is gratuitous. The alleged self-truths unearthed by any therapeutic method remain to be evaluated by independent scientific criteria. It is far from apparent that a treatment procedure based on such question-begging techniques as dream interpretation, free association, or the exotic surmises yielded up by so-called “transference” analyses has a proprietary claim to truths no other method can achieve.

--------The relationship of psychoanalytic theory to historiography is a topsy-turvy one. History is reconstructed by the special methods of historians, not by psychologists like Freud, indulging their versions of “psychohistory.” The latter can at best only aspire to be a dilatory end game that spruces up knowledge already established through the methodology of the other discipline. To lose sight of the primacy of the historian in reconstructing the past results in such extravagant conjectures as Freud’s insistence in his treatise Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian who was murdered by Jews who later sanctified him due to the guilt they experienced over his death (8). This is a concocted yarn, just like the theory propounded in Freud’s Totem and Taboo that real life Oedipal dramas of murdering the father were actually enacted in the infancy of our species, and their “repressed” memories passed on as a genetic lineage. Such a formulation defies any current acceptable theory about the way human traits are developed and inherited.

---------The progressive whittling away of theories and assumptions that were once an ingredient aspect of Freud’s psychoanalysis is as much a legacy of the system as anything else (9). What survives are institutional vehicles equivocating between the imagined virtues of analyzability and treatability. Accordingly, when a track record on therapeutic efficacy is shown to be poor or lackluster, damage control involves resorting to a default theoretical stance that insists symptoms can still be effectively “analyzed”—as though the validity of the interpretive scheme in question can be taken for granted.

----------That psychoanalytic case studies have an appeal for the literary imagination goes without saying. But so do the stories manufactured by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Georges Simenon, or, on a less somber note, Damon Runyon or Raymond Chandler. The detour into psychoanalytic story-telling is not without appeal. Part of the fascination of this type of theorizing is its beguiling way of combining a purportedly scientific mission with an abundance of quasi-literary narrative resembling detective-story sleuthing. As early as 1895, we find the father of psychoanalysis admitting that, “It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.” Of course, literary comparisons can be pushed too far. When it comes to prose style itself, it’s a safe bet you’d never confuse a published psychoanalyst or his poststructuralist incarnations like Jacques Lacan (10) with Ernest Hemingway!

----------We need not harbor any illusions about the newer criticism convincing Freudolators that there is something seriously amiss in psychoanalytic theory and treatment—from its outset. Fostering skepticism about a system of thought that has a tide of historical enthusiasm on its side is not an easy task. Similarly, we need have no illusions about convincing believers in Intelligent Design that the Bacterial Flagellum, the Blood Clotting Cascade, or the eye are not “irreducibly complex,” or that fancied gaps in the fossil record are evidence of absence when they are only absence of evidence (11). Similarly, it’s hard to convince a bamboozled laity that psychoanalytic theory is without explanatory virtue when its widespread popularity seems to suggest otherwise (12).

----------The insularity of psychoanalytic practice, an in-house pattern acknowledged even by its own membership (13), has more serious implications than imagined. Aside from this aspect of practice in relation to outside investigators, what about the knowledge the clan possesses about specific patterns of treatment within the fold? It is conceivable that commonalities among the behaviors of practitioners are artifacts of an illusory consistency generated by published writings. How can we be certain that abstract theoretical ideas are fleshed out in similar ways in the consulting room in the absence of institutional vehicles that ensure transparency?

A famous philosopher and contemporary of Freud felt the latter was less the originator of a scientific psychology than the creator of a new mythology wrapped in a novel vocabulary of metaphors about people (14). Freud, of course, thought otherwise, and unlike current poststructuralists indulging the “text” or the freewheeling extravagance called “hermeneutics,” believed his brainchild was a true science of the mind, a psychology that laid bare the actual causal determinants of our behavior. In my opinion, history will turn in a rather different verdict.

There is more—much more—to be said about the psychoanalytic approach to Shakespeare. Iago’s supposed unconscious homosexuality in relation to Othello? Don’t get me started. As for postmodern attempts to salvage the musty system, when the ocean liner is sinking, you head for the lifeboats, not the scotch tape.

I admit that my remarks have been on the extremely negative side. For those who feel that they can be dismissed precisely for this reason, I have only these words of my favorite Shakespearean hero: I must be cruel, only to be kind; this bad begins and worse remains behind.

                

 

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

 

(1)  Jones, E. (1949). Hamlet and Oedipus: A classic study in the psychoanalysis of literature. Garden City: New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc.

(2) The shifting character of the complex even during Freud’s career is documented in Simon, B. and Blass, R. B., The development and vicissitudes of Freud’s ideas on the Oedipus Complex. In Neu, J. (Ed.) 1991. The Cambridge companion to Freud, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161-174. 

(3) The case of children growing up in one-parent homes since birth would seem to represent a decisive test of the theory in question. If such children for the most part mature into normal personalities, this refutes the contention that “normalcy” is an outgrowth of a successfully resolved Oedipus Complex. You can’t resolve a conflict predicated upon a family configuration that is absent in the case of one-parent households!

 

(4) Lidz T. (1975) Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet, New York: Basic Books. This psychoanalyst’s interpretation is: “Hamlet kills Polonius more or less in the belief that he is killing Claudius: ‘I took thee for thy better’ (III, iv, 32).”

(5) J. L. Austin, Pretending (1961). Philosophical Papers. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 201-219. 

(6) Holmes, D. S. (1990). The evidence for repression: An examination of sixty years of research. In Singer, J. L. (Ed.) Repression and dissociation: Implications for personality theory, psychopathology, and health. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 85-102. 

(7) Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.  

(8) Freud, S. (1939).  Moses and Monotheism. New York: New York: Alfred A. Knopf. In the book, Freud’s foray into considering Moses an Egyptian, not a Jew, makes note of the fact that “Moses” was an Egyptian name. But in Exodus Moses was the son of a Hebrew woman who set her infant adrift in order to avoid his being put to death by the then reigning pharaoh. He was discovered among the reeds and raised by pharaoh’s daughter, who named him. Given this, we hardly could have expected him to be called “Melvin.” (Of course, Finkelstein and Silberman, in their 2001 study of biblical origins, find no evidence for the migration of a Semitic people out of Egypt across the Sinai peninsula, casting into doubt events around the Mosaic legend—from start to finish. Cf. Finkelstein, I. & Silberman, N. A. (2001) The Bible Unearthed: Archeology’s New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press.)

(9) cf. Mitchell, S. A. (1993) Hope and Dread In Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. Mitchell undertakes a intrepid attempt to reconcile “theories” that are a shambles of splintered sensibility within contemporary psychoanalytic circles. He purports to show how, like blind men touching different parts of the elephant, they cling to separate, but equally warranted formulations. In so doing, he deconstructs the classical Freudian goal of a “science of behavior,” while maintaining a clubhouse nostalgia for this tradition. It’s an engineering feat worthy of any poststructuralist who assures you the “truth” is elusive—except, of course, the truth that the truth is elusive. Were this not enough, Mitchell’s descriptions of differences among these groups pulsates with ecumenical fervor: “These are all good theories. (Others could be added as well.) They are all interesting, complex, and work within their own terms. It is precisely this rich heterogeneity of our psychoanalytic world that makes it no longer compelling to think of psychoanalysis as a method for uncovering a singular truth. Rather, this rich heterogeneity that has evolved from Freud’s monolithic system makes it much more compelling to view psychoanalytic theory as a group of interpretive systems, each with its own principles, laws, and criteria of verifiability. Object relations theory, self psychology, interpersonal analysis, Kleinian theory: each of these fully psychoanalytic systems is a monolith unto itself. But our community of many orthodoxies is a different world from Freud’s community of one orthodoxy and several splinter movements (such as Adlerian or Jungian theory).” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 47).

Despite Mitchell’s encomium for family togetherness, it would be timely to specify precisely what the “differences” among approaches in his community of True Believers supposedly amounts to—if this is even possible. To be sure, their published work abounds in seeming theoretical contrasts. But how do these relate to actual practices that are its alleged derivatives? No clear answer to this has been forthcoming—for two reasons: In vivo transactions between analysts and analysands are routinely drenched in parochial vocabularies casting a shroud of mystery over the nature of the  data inspiring them. Second, psychoanalytic homage to the privacy of therapeutic encounters derails searching attempts to investigate connections between them and the verbiage used to describe them. When Hamlet observed, “Words, words, words,” he was taking a dim view of the tools we use to convey external realities.

 (10) For a critique of Jacques Lacan’s lucubrations about mathematics, especially topology, cf. Sokal, A. & Bricmont, J. (1998). Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals’ abuse of science. New York: Picador USA. 

(11) When new fossil links are discovered—as they have been in profusion in recent years—the battle cry on the other side suddenly becomes drawing attention to the missing link between the newly discovered species and the one immediately preceding it! But these are minor skirmishes in warring mind-sets that betray what is really at stake: the fancied threat to religious fundamentalism posed by naturalistic explanation. When the holiest of one’s beliefs is perceived as embattled, you’ve got a real fight on your hands convincing the other side that it’s not possible for Darwinian evolution to threaten something that’s not science to begin with. Cf. Miller, K. R. (2008) Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. New York: Penguin Books.

(12) The popularity of psychoanalysis in the United States, rivaled only by the enthusiasm for it in Argentina, was given a booster shot by Hollywood. Aside from the promotional campaigns for the practice hawked in such films as Spellbound, The Snake Pit, The Lady in the Dark, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, David and Lisa, Freud, Tender Is the Night, An Unmarried Woman, Pressure Point, High Anxiety, and numerous others, tinseltown has for decades wallowed in chumminess between movie stars and their “analysts.” Writers who documented the dalliance were prescient about the sordid sociology underlying the connection: “…the journalist Bruce Bliven visited Los Angeles and told his readers back east, ‘Here is the world’s prize collection of cranks, semi-cranks…angry or ecstatic exponents of food fads, sun-bathing, ancient Greek costumes, diaphragm breathing, and the imminent second coming of Christ…If psychoanalysis appeared to be little more than another of these crackpot creeds, that may have had something to do with its less than auspicious origins in ‘cuckoo land.’” Farber, S. and Green, M. (1993) Hollywood on the couch: A candid look at the overheated love affair between psychiatrists and moviemakers, New York: William Morrow and Company, p. 23. On a clinical note, the hope on the part of many Hollywood stars that their  personality disorders or substance-abuse careers can be spun as “neurotic” in the technical, albeit currently retired meaning of this term, is a brazen example of wishful thinking. Assuming such conditions can be remediated by a treatment approach utilizing dream interpretation or free association has to be a stunning example of hype marketed for entertainment kingpins. 

(13) Bornstein, M. (2004) The problem of narcissism in psychoanalytic organizations: The insularity of power. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 24, 71-85. Summers, F. (2008) Theoretical insularity and the crisis of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 25, 413-424.      

(14) Wittgenstein had this to say about Freud:

“…he is full of fishy thinking & his charm & the charm of his subject is so great that you may be easily fooled. He always stresses what great forces in the mind, what strong prejudices work against the idea of psycho-analysis. But he never says what enormous charm that idea has for people…There may be strong prejudices against uncovering something nasty, but sometimes it is infinitely more attractive than it is repulsive. Unless you think very clearly, psycho-analysis is a dangerous & foul practice, & it’s done no end of harm & comparatively little good…So hold on to your brains.”

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