On 28 November Stephen Black wrote: >"Young Dr. Freud", which I caught on PBS (US TV) > last night thanks to the alert by Charles Harris is, as > predicted by Charles, the standard admiring view as > seen through the eyes of uncritical supporters. It > offers no unpleasantness, no doubts, no dissenting opinions.
I am judging “Young Dr Freud” from the extensive material on the PBS website, which appears to be a transcript of the whole program. The best way to get an idea of the nature of “Young Dr Freud” is to imagine a documentary on the early history of Lenin’s political career produced by members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. All the consultant historians and contributors are psychoanalysts and/or psychoanalytic academics. Morris Eagle has published articles critical of certain aspects of Freud’s work, but you would not know this from the program. I’ve no knowledge of Sophie Freud’s views on the controversies about Freud, but the others are Freud loyalists who can be relied upon not to deviate from the Party line. I outline below the more important errors, misrepresentations and misunderstandings in the program. On the seduction theory: The commentary stated the seduction theory postulated that “the prime cause of hysteria was the sexual abuse of an innocent child by an adult, most often a father”. This is false in several crucial respects. 1. The theory was about an *essential* precondition, not a “prime” cause. 2. The postulated cause was not the event itself, but an *unconscious memory* of an event. 3. The event had to occur in very early childhood. To refer to the sexual abuse of “an innocent child” is seriously misleading. 4. The identity of the putative culprit was immaterial, and was not mentioned in Freud’s expositions of the theory in letters to Fliess in October 1895 or in the 1896 seduction theory papers. In fact Freud never mentioned a father as the putative culprit before a letter to Fliess in December 1896, many months after he had published his seduction theory papers. 5. It is not the case that the abuse had to be “by an adult”. All that was necessary was an unconscious memory of sexual excitation in early childhood. In the first two seduction theory papers (completed by early February 1896) Freud claimed that in seven of thirteen cases diagnosed as “hysterical”, the culprits were very young boys only slightly older than the infant victim. I think the level of ignorance shown here about the seduction theory gives an indication of how unreliable are the notions of these eminent psychoanalysts about the history of psychoanalysis. It is also an indication that they have paid little attention (if any) to the critical literature on the seduction theory published in recent times. There was no indication of the nature of Freud’s evidence for the unconscious ideas and memories, namely, that it relied heavily on his new technique of analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, not on ‘memories’ reported by the patients. As Freud stated in “The Aetiology of Hysteria”, the patients assured him “emphatically of their unbelief” in the infantile “sexual scenes” he was endeavouring to foist on them (1896, SE 3, p. 204). Nor did anyone on the program point out (no doubt because of ignorance of the facts) that prior to alighting on the seduction theory Freud had not claimed a single uncovering of infantile sexual abuse, yet within four months he was claiming one hundred percent corroboration of the theory with sixteen patients (13 hysterical, 3 pure obsessionals). The story that “Freud’s patients… had been reporting fantasies” [or genuine memories, for that matter] is based on Freud’s utterly misleading retrospective reports of the episode, and its virtually universal acceptance notwithstanding, this story is no more accurate than an urban legend. N.B. The accounts given in the literature give no idea that the putative ‘fantasies’ [*Phantasies* in German, translated as ‘phantasy’ by James Strachey in the Hogarth Standard Edition] were supposedly *unconscious* ideas or memories in the patients’ minds that Freud supposedly uncovered (i.e., reconstructed) by his analytic technique of interpretation. The account on the program alluding to the collapse of the seduction theory was both totally inadequate and incoherent: “But, when [Freud] could find no evidence of such behavior [sexual abuse by his father] and no clear memory of abuse among his brothers and sisters, his seduction theory collapsed.” I can’t go into the complicated reasons for Freud’s loss of faith in the seduction theory, but the quoted words again indicate the ignorance displayed in this program. By Freud’s theory, the memories of infantile sexual abuse were deeply repressed, so Freud’s siblings would not have remembered any such events had they occurred. In fact, contrary to Bergmann’s statement, if they had had a “clear memory” of such an event it would have *refuted* the seduction theory! (Because it was essential that the memory be unconscious for it to have been pathogenic.) Some more general observations: The case of ‘Anna O.’ (Bertha Pappenheim) was discussed in traditional simplistic terms, without any mention that she retained some of her symptoms at the termination of the treatment, and that she was hospitalized for short periods on three occasions in the immediately succeeding years, each time with a diagnosis of “hysteria”. The commentary stated: “Freud kept noting the sexual material peeping out behind the symptoms of his patients.” This is grossly misleading. Since Freud’s methodology involved the *presumption* that symptoms were symbolic representations of sexual experiences (1896, SE 3, pp. 192-193), he inevitably ‘found’ sexual material behind the symptoms. This is exemplified by his inferring on the basis of a facial tic and eczema around the mouth that Miss G. de B. had been forced to engage in fellatio when she was an infant (Letter to Fliess, 3 January 1897). The commentary gave an erroneous statement of the Oedipus complex (bowdlerizing it at the same time), by describing it as “the desire of a young boy to replace his father as the sole recipient of his mother’s affections…” This omits the very heart of Freud’s notion, that “[infant] boys concentrate their sexual wishes upon their mother”, i.e., “a child’s first [libidinal] object choice is an *incestuous* one” (1925, S.E. 20, pp. 36-37). As he expressed it elsewhere, around the age of three or four infant boys experience impulses that “extend uninhibited into a straightforward sexual desire” for their mother (1925, SE 19, p. 220). Young-Bruehl told us that we “would be amazed” how helpful it can be for someone to tell someone about a disturbing experience, as if we owe this knowledge to the development of the talking cure. This has been common knowledge for so long that we find it expressed by Shakespeare in Macbeth: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak/Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break”. (Cited in Cioffi 1998 [1973], p. 165) Peter Gay stated that “Doctors in Freud’s day dismissed dreams as irrelevant nonsense.” As a generalisation this is highly misleading. Henri Ellenberger (1970) gave the lie to this kind of assertion, and Rosemarie Sand (1992) has shown that before Freud wrote on the subject, Charcot, Janet and Krafft-Ebing published many ideas about the nature and meaning of dreams that are now associated with Freud. Bergmann stated: “Freud believed that… we are not masters in our own house. Much of our life is determined by unconscious forces that we don’t know about.” We don’t owe this notion to Freud, as the context implies. It was a commonplace at the time Freud started writing on this subject. Bryan Magee documents that, long before Freud, “Schopenhauer argued at length… that empirical evidence points to the conclusion not only that most of our thoughts and feelings are unknown to us but that, the reason for this is a process of repression which is itself unconscious, that it is unconscious because our most primitive and powerful emotions and wishes cannot he accommodated by the conception of ourselves which we wish to preserve; and that it is upward from these depths that the emotions, wishes and so on of which we are aware emerge into consciousness, suitably cleaned up so as not to offend our self-esteem, but nevertheless pushed from below by hidden, primitive and exceedingly powerful drives in terms of which most of what we think, say and do would have to be fully understood.” (Magee, 1983, pp. 132-133) I think that should be enough to show that the program put out by PBS was a travesty of what a documentary on Freud’s early psychoanalytic career should have been. I will be happy to supply full references for everything I have written above should anyone require them. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Dept Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html Selected Bibliography Cioffi, F. (1998). Freud and the Idea of a Pseudoscience. Chicago: Open Court. Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books. Magee, B. (1983). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford University Press. Sand, R. (1992). “Pre-Freudian Discovery of Dream Meaning.” In Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis, eds. T. Gelfand and J. Kerr. Hillsdale, NJ: Atlantic Press. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
