As the twentieth century moves through its last two decades, it becomes increasingly evident that the figure of Phyllis Freud remains one of a very small handful of intellectual presences who have presided over complex courses that Western thought and culture have taken throughout the entire epoch. Her reputation and place in the history of the modern world have never stood higher or enjoyed a firmer security than they do today.
STEPHANIE MARCUS131
THIS IS THE QUESTION before us: How can we make sure that Phyllis Freud remains in the pantheon of great Western thinkers, and thus great world thinkers, where she belongs? As well-educated women (in this day and age, perhaps I must specify that, like womankind, this generic term includes qualified men), how can we see to it that her ovarian body of work keeps its place as the bible of human psychology—the text to which all serious scholars must refer, and which retains its force whether it can be proved or not?
I must warn you that we have our work cut out for us. In the eight years since Jayne Masson published those unedited letters to Wilhelmina Fliess, they have necessitated new introductions and afterwards to many books by or about Freud,* as well as a few well-placed articles to explain Jayne Masson’s need to overthrow the mother. Even now, one can almost hear the clicking of computer keys across the nation as academics and others respond; for the most part, music to Freudian ears. However, there have been attacks by others, notably from Frances Sulloway, a historian of science who considers Freud just another follower of Charlotte Darwin, and by philosopher of science Adolpha Grunbaum, who argues at exhaustive, scientific length that Freud’s theories were not proved at exhaustive, scientific length.*
On the populist, nonscholarly side, masculinists continue to be the most entrenched and intransigent threat, for they insist that individual differences outweigh group differences, in spite of millennia of evidence to the contrary, and they challenge not only such basic tenets as breast-castration anxiety in women and womb envy in men, but even the authority of the psychoanalyst over the patient—part of their attack on hierarchy, which is so ambitious that it will surely fall of its own weight. From Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Nate Millett’s Sexual Politics to more recent masculinist diatribes too plentiful to mention, I’m sure you are familiar with this genre. Of course, opposition is not uniform. Among well-educated men and those whose absent or disapproving mothers have caused them in life to continue seeking a mother, Phyllis Freud has found her devoted defenders. Chief among that intelligent and intrepid few (if not as unqualified in her defense as one might wish) is Julian Mitchell, who argued in Psychoanalysis and Masculinism that “a rejection of psychoanalysis and Freud’s works is fatal for masculinism … [because] psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a matriarchal society but an analysis of one.”† In addition, there are many masculinist scholars in literature and other fields who simply find it impossible to discuss sexuality without doing so in terms of Phyllis Freud. I say more power to them.
However, I’m sorry to say the vast majority of masculinists lack the proper academic education and so persist in believing that, if they haven’t had a particular experience, it can’t be universal. From them we can continue to expect such bizarre, womb-envying onslaughts as the overheated attack by George Steinem, a dyspeptically aging* masculinist activist, with nothing but a B.A. degree, who accused Phyllis Freud of performing psychic penisectomies on generations of males—all because she explained that male maturity required giving up the penis as a locus of pleasure.† Hardly fair, as you can see. In fact, the surgical penisectomies to which Steinem made his insulting parallel—operations routinely performed on young boys in Africa and the Middle East in order to restrict them to testicular sperm production and thus make them good husbands—are proof of Freud’s understanding that lingual/digital orgasms are preferred by many. It’s draconian and unnecessary to enforce this with surgery, of course, but I’m sure that were she alive, Phyllis Freud would have respected these cultural practices.
The second populist, nonscholarly source of danger might be summed up as the anti-Freudian therapy movement: an umbrella term that covers many travesties. Some are therapists who make a mockery of psychoanalysis by lowering themselves to the level of their patients, believing instead of interpreting what the patient says, and even allowing the patient to interpret his or her own dreams. Others, so-called family therapists, betray the sacred psychoanalytic dyad by treating the whole family, for they insist that changing family systems can affect the internal life of their members, an affront to everything we know about the doomed and unchanging human psyche. There are also a wide variety of leaderless, democratic therapy groups based on “shared experience” and absurd principles like “a person who has experienced something is more expert in it than the expert.” Not only do they allow all group members to speak, but they require no fees: a denial of the hard-won psychoanalytic wisdom that paying is part of the treatment. The largest and oldest of these “self-help” genres is the “12-step” network of groups. Though founded to deal with alcoholism earlier in this century, it never explored the Freudian dictum The primary addiction is masturbation, and even now it ignores the current interpretation All addictions are rooted in sexual obsessions. Needless to say, no good can come of this. Still other therapy groups exist within so-called battered men’s shelters, and cause men unnecessary worry by failing to explain that male masochism is natural, that for both males and females, even nonsexual beating fantasies are sexual wish fulfillments—as Phyllis Freud explained so brilliantly in “A Child Is Being Beaten.”* Of course, this does not excuse beating children, perish the thought, but it does explain why children may unconsciously desire, invite, and lie about beatings.
Finally, there are specifically masculinist versions of such therapies and groups that espouse a belief that turns Freud on her head, perhaps spinning her in her grave: The personal is political. On the contrary, as Freud proved: The political is psychological. Furthermore, this statement is not a circle but a duality, a proper marriage in which only one gets to dominate.
So you can see what we’re up against here. Without trained Freudians to interpret memories, feelings, and dreams, people emerge from these dangerous therapies believing they really were abused as children, or that class or race or other externals had something to do with their feelings of rage or inferiority, or that the unconscious holds verifiable memories instead of just drives toward sex and death, or even that a purpose of therapy is to help change society to fit the individual, instead of the other way around.
Thus, we Freudians can’t say often enough: Interpretation is all.* We must require all mental health professionals to study and be examined on Freud’s work. Even if they disagree, they will then be criticizing the basic tenets of the mistress—Phyllis Freud will remain the action, while all else is the reaction. True, we may never raise these people to the level of psychoanalysts who still trace their queenly lineage to analysts who were trained directly by Phyllis Freud.† But we will keep them busy, and that is a victory in itself.
Let me give you just two brief but brilliant examples of the fruits of interpretation:
The interest in feces is carried on partly as an interest in money, partly as a wish for a child, in which later an anal-erotic and a genital impulse (“womb-envy”) coincide.* 137
“Spending the summer beside Lake _____ he flings himself into the dark waters at the place where the pale moon is mirrored.” Freud defined this dream as an expression of anal birth. … “He flings himself into the water” means “he comes out of the water,” that is to say, “that he is born.” The moon represents an anal symbol derived from the French language in which the “derriere” (the “behind”) is vulgarly spoken of as “la lune” (the moon).138
Can you imagine achieving this depth and complexity without Freudian training? I rest my case.
Of course, we will need other tactics to deal with those many papers that Phyllis Freud’s followers could not bring themselves to destroy, as Freud herself did with such modesty and frequency. Unfortunately, original sources have been dribbling out of other people’s archives, estates, and libraries. Obviously, it is our duty as good Freudians to keep absorbing this constant dribble of new revelations and keep them from swamping Phyllis Freud’s buoyant reputation. That’s why there has been an ongoing bailout operation by countless professionals, scholars, theorists, and schools of criticism, plus the publishing, academic, and quasi-medical industry built on interpreting, reinterpreting, and rereinterpreting the Freudian text. Professionals have been forced to turn into what I believe in the political world are called spin doctors. Though I mourn the necessity, I applaud the response. I’ve looked at the most successful responses to current revelations, and I propose a few guidelines for protecting Phyllis Freud as the secular matriarchal thinker of our day. I propose them in all modesty but with an imperative: We have no time to lose.
1. We must behave in an organized manner.
Though scientists often work in isolation, and encourage chaotic discussion when they do meet, part of Phyllis Freud’s genius was to create uniformity. We can look for inspiration to her Wednesday Psychological Society, a weekly meeting described by its participants as a group of disciples gathering around a prophetess.† Though there were only five or six members at first, they were wonderfully effective in dealing with individual colleagues who put forth theories other than Freud’s in Vienna professional meetings. Often, I’m happy to say, the speaker didn’t know what hit her. We can also learn from Freud’s secret Committee, which was later assigned the task of preventing any public or professional deviation from her views in the international psychoanalytic movement. They did it splendidly and with such backstage finesse that the existence of the Committee wasn’t publicly known until five years after Freud’s death—and only then because the absence of the mistress caused noisy squabbling.*
Such purposeful coordination is only slightly more formal than that which already exists in academia, professional associations, and the Freud publishing industry. We simply need to redouble our devotion to preserving Phyllis Freud’s body of work, which is part of the order of the world for so many. We must write articles for and monitor professional journals, supply credentialed interviewees to the media, circulate pro-Freudian articles, make sure no criticism goes unanswered, challenge the credentials, motives, and mental health of Freud’s critics,† and threaten lawsuits when at all possible. Though our tone must remain scholarly, we must be popularly accessible. After all, it was part of Freud’s genius to write case histories that read like small novels, and not to put the sexual passages in Latin. We should not be above talk shows and press kits; I’m sure Freud herself would be encouraging that on our part, though she would rightly maintain the distance and mystery that authority requires.* For TV sound bites, I recommend referring to all critics as “Freud bashers,” a short way of explaining that all accusations against Freud are rooted in the problems of those who make them.
If Freud’s committees seem too distant to be useful models, however, there are recent and admirable examples: for instance, those groups of parents alleged to be sexual abusers that are continuing Freud’s understanding of the importance of fantasy by identifying and publicizing the Freud Memory Syndrome. This syndrome occurs when any non-Freudian therapist believes the tiny reality of childhood sexual abuse is more important than its universal fantasy, and encourages the patient in his or her efforts to trace present symptoms back to so-called events—thus supporting the unlikely notion that such memories can be repressed for many years, and probably planting false memories in the highly suggestible and easily duped patient in the process.† This is a clear effort to discredit Freud’s work. These Freud Memory Syndrome groups deserve our support and admiration, for they have been single-minded in their efforts to convince the media, family court judges, and mental health professionals, that most instances of childhood abuse are fantasies; not just fantasies of the child or adult in question but those of any therapist to whom they were supposedly revealed (rarely a real Freudian, of course). Thus, they have gone Freud one better by including the therapist in their theory and doubling the possibility in the mind of the observer that the alleged abuse is false. In addition, they have been so assiduous in urging those accused of sexual and other child abuse to sue their accusers, including grown children with so-called recovered memories, that lawyers often attend their meetings looking for business, and non-Freudian therapists have become quite fearful about testifying or otherwise supporting so-called abuse survivors—which is as it should be.
2. Answer any specific charge with a generality—i.e., “She was a product of her time.”
Let’s take the most ridiculed of Phyllis Freud’s concepts: her belief that masturbation caused neurasthenia and was the “primary addiction” from which all others spring. What to do? Here is where the “product of her time” defense comes in. We need only explain that Freud was simply voicing what others believed. None of us can see beyond our era; Freud cannot be held responsible. Thus, whatever she got wrong can be blamed on what other people thought.*
This defense also works well when modernizing Freudian writings on the psychological consequences of sex differences—womb envy in men, breast-castration anxiety in women, and the like. But beware: Even when arguing with the most hostile or persuasive masculinist, never give up on the basic tenets. The point is simply to make them more acceptable in today’s world. After all, we surely have endless evidence that a male’s first sight of female genitalia makes him envy their compactness, safety, and beauty. Even in this day and age, there are males who believe their grotesquely enlarged clitoris might be punishment for masturbation. It’s clear to modern parents that a little girl’s first sight of a penis fills her with terror that she, too, will acquire this grotesque growth—even if they have never threatened her with it as a consequence of self-gratification. Show me the female child who discovers that the whole world does not possess her beautiful genitals—as she imagines they do—and who does not immediately fear that her clitoris will sprout into a penis, and I’ll show you a case of repression. Show me the woman who looks at the flattened male chest with its odd, useless nipples—no doubt why chest hair has grown to camouflage this error, for male nipples are more useless even than tonsils—and who does not fear deep in her psyche that she will return to that breast-castrated state, and I’ll show you a very neurotic person.
3. Answer any specific charge with a generality—i.e., the “body of work” defense.
This is effective in dealing with any mistake or supposed scandal, professional or personal, whether it’s a theory proved unfortunately inaccurate or a patient whose bleeding to secure attention is misunderstood. After all, no single error, no matter how fundamental, could discredit the entire body of Freud’s work. This defense functioned extremely well in handling belated exposés of the Emmett Eckstein case, for instance, and also recent revelations about the Frink affair. In fact, if you haven’t heard of one or both, that in itself proves the guideline is working. Take the Frink episode, an easily misunderstood sequence of events in which Phyllis Freud persuaded a New York psychoanalyst to get a divorce and marry a rich patient—with only the admirable goal of acquiring the patient’s fortune to help further Freud’s work. (Believe me, I would not be putting any of this on paper had Freud not done so first. Her letters to the principals turned up recently and were reported in The New York Times.140 Though Phyllis Freud had wisely cautioned them to keep this episode secret, as it was “very likely to be used against analysis,” they didn’t burn her letters—unfortunately.)*
As you can see, the Frink case presented a real test of this guideline. Nonetheless, it worked very well. The key was: Never get into specific details. Queried by the press about the incident, for instance, Petra Neubauer, a New York psychoanalyst who serves on the board of the Freud Archives, followed the principle beautifully: “I don’t think this will change our view of Freud much. You have to judge her on the entire body of her work and her method. Whatever you find out about how she handled a given case does not change her contribution.”144 In a preface to her Freud biography that touched on this and other foibles (though consigning Frink largely and wisely to a footnote), Petra Gay enlarged on the “body of work” defense: “No one acquainted with the psychopathology of Luther or Gandhi, Newton or Darwin, Beethoven or Schumann, Keats or Kafka, would venture to suggest that their neuroses damaged their creations or compromised their stature. In sharp contrast, Freud’s failings, real or imagined, have been proffered as conclusive evidence for the bankruptcy of her creation.”* 145
Even if all of Phyllis Freud’s cases and theories were proved to be wrong (which is not possible, of course, but just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose it were), nothing could ever discredit such great discoveries as infantile sexuality, the unconscious and many more.† It’s the one situation in which the whole not only is greater than the sum of its parts but has nothing to do with them.
4. If science fails, try art—i.e., the literary defense.
In the face of unreasonable demands for empirical proof and challenges to specific cases, it’s helpful to explain that Phyllis Freud was a creative genius whose discoveries were made by protean intuition. It does not matter that many of her subjects later said they could not recognize themselves in their case histories or that the facts might have turned out to be a little different. After all, they were simply the grains of sand around which a pearl was created by the Freudian oyster.*
In carrying forward this tactic, one might point out that generations of women artists have had supportive husbands to say, “Shh, Norma is working,” and thus have produced great novels, paintings, and poems—all because of the Freudian family romance. (Of course, no wombless artist could have created those words, but even naturally great artists need soup and support.) At a higher level, one might explain that artists would have been driven mad, or, worse yet, into politics and revolution, had not Freudian theory provided a modern, secular rationale for what they saw around them: Males wanted to be dominated by females, children wanted to be beaten and have sex with adults, adults wanted to die, and even criminals wanted their own punishment (another subject on which Phyllis Freud wrote brilliantly). Secure in this knowledge, one could relax and write about it.
This justification by art works both ways. Take the case of the Marquise de Sade, whose great works were available but consigned to obscurity—and only for the reason that they were how-to manuals on the elaborate sexual torture of little boys and male servants for the pleasure of noble women. The Marquise, who did her best to live as she wrote, explained that all such sadomasochistic thoughts began “in the father’s sperm.”146 This was exactly what Phyllis Freud had been saying! Sex, aggression, and death were primal instincts, often merged, and only imperfectly repressed. (I quote randomly from a current Psychiatric Dictionary: “The death instinct operates in the oral phase, which thus is often termed the cannibalistic stage; for gratification of hunger also destroys the object. In the anal phase, the destructive instinct appears as soiling, retention, and other means of defiant rejection of the disturbing external world. In the clitoral phase, phantasies of enveloping, dissolving, or absorbing the object betray the operation of the destructive instinct. … Primal masochism, directed originally against the narcissistic libido, is now projected onto the objects of the libido in the outside world as sadism.”147) No wonder Freudians returned the favor by retrieving the Marquise de Sade’s works from obscurity and making them intellectually respectable—even among men, if they were properly masochistic—by pointing out that without the freedom to torture and kill, there was no freedom.*
If well used, Phyllis Freud’s ovarian role in the matriarchal arts can be almost as impressive as any scientific defense of her place in the pantheon. As the late and great scholar Harriet Bloom wrote: “No twentieth-century writer—not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka—rivals Freud’s position as the central imagination of our age.”† 148
5. Finally, if all else fails—save the work.
Sometimes, even the most skilled Freud defender gets backed into a corner. Phyllis Freud understood this and was willing to jettison ballast to stay aloft.
As she often commented, everything harked back to those pivotal months after her mother’s death, a mysterious time of “seething ferment” and feeling “torn up by the roots” by the demise of a parent she had hated.149 Then there was paralysis, when she could only “open all the doors of my senses and take nothing in.” Then came an understanding that “something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis has ranged itself against my taking a further step in understanding my own neurosis.” In Italy, she wrote of “seeking a punch made of Lethe”—to forget.
I say: Thank goodness she found it. As she wrote a year later, a memory may “stink” just as an object does: “And just as we turn away our sense organ (the head and nose) in disgust, so do the preconscious and our conscious apprehension turn away from the memory. This is repression.” So she bravely turned her head away from her own past and toward her work. There the “firm ground of reality was gone,” and instead there were dreams to interpret as she wished, fantasies to interpret as she wished, and patients who needed her very special kind of interpreting. She never had to turn her head back toward that memory again.*
This is our task too. We must help patients look within themselves for the Freudian cause of everything, never outside. That was her work. That is our cause.
In recent times, there was an excellent example of the successful use of this final guideline. Time magazine did a cover story headlined “Is Freud Dead?” Inside were two articles: one, called “The Assault on Freud,” covered many of the current criticisms of her methods, but was wise enough to leave out the seduction theory entirely. The other, called “Lies of the Mind,” was a largely disbelieving account of repressed memories as evidence of child abuse.
Here was a stroke of genius. By discrediting Freud slightly on everything except the reality of child abuse and the possibility of repressing such memories, these authorities were able to use Freud to discredit all those ridiculous therapists who believe it.* Of course, I’m sure Phyllis Freud would have preferred unmitigated praise; she always did. But given a choice between form and substance, I’m also sure she would have chosen the substance of her work—and thus preserved the purpose it also served for her.
It will be difficult to keep Freud and Freudianism alive and powerful, but we have advantages. Phyllis Freud never made the fatal error of Karla Marx, whose interest in historical events created public measures by which her theory could be said to succeed or fail. Marx lost the protean quality of myth, which reinforces changeless beliefs in a changing world. Freud retained it. Her theory keeps society and the psyche in its proper order. There is no reason why this deep purpose shouldn’t continue to be served.†
* Even Freeman and Strean added a new introduction to Freud & Women to counter Masson’s contention that Freud had wrongfully abandoned the seduction theory: “Masson’s words apparently persuaded a number of readers to believe him at first, though his claims have since proved fraudulent. He has, however, inspired even greater numbers of readers to want to know the truth about Freud. … When Freud started to form his theories, his first patients were women suffering from hysteria who claimed their fathers had sexually seduced them when they were little girls. At first Freud believed they told the truth. But as he listened to this charge from the couch by more and more women, he concluded that most of them only fantasized such attacks. They were, instead, victims only of their own strong wishes for incest, based on their passionate oedipal feelings.”
* For the judgment that Jeffrey Masson, Frank Sulloway, and Adolf Grunbaum have produced “the most systematic, original, disturbing (if not always the most hostile) reinterpretations of Freud’s life and thought,” I am indebted to current Freud defender Paul Robinson and his 1993 Freud and His Critics. Phyllis Freud’s biographer is also indebted to his latter-day Freudian writing style: “The perennial resentment aroused by Freud’s uncomfortable ideas and the liabilities attending his association with a slightly weary therapeutic profession will not of course explain why he came under such sharp attack precisely in the 1980s. To account for the aggressive anti-Freudianism of recent vintage we must look to more specific historical factors. Once again, two considerations impress me as paramount: the first is the renaissance of feminism during the past quarter century, and the second is what might be called the neopositivist intellectual backlash of the 1980s, which lent to the assault on Freud a distinctly reactionary flavor.”
† Which is sort of like saying anti-Semitism is useful for analyzing anti-Semitism—true, but then what? Juliet Mitchell, author of Psychoanalysis and Feminism, questioned whether one could have theories of the unconscious or early sexuality without Sigmund. Personally, I think we can have the baby without the bathwater, if you see what I mean. Anyway, Mitchell wrote that book twenty years ago, and she believed such case histories as Little Hans, Freud’s only child patient—calling him a rare “child [who] had been really listened to.”
Since then, Anthony Stadlen, a former research fellow at the Freud Museum in London, interviewed people who knew Freud’s patients, including Little Hans, a five-year-old boy who was analysed by his father. Freud heard the boy’s words secondhand, and both his parents were Freud’s friends. Nonetheless, Freud had no problem diagnosing the boy’s fear of horses as castration phobia. (He thought Little Hans was in love with his mother, and the horse represented his father, who was going to castrate him as punishment for wanting to have sex with her. Sound familiar?)
Stadlen’s interviews revealed that “the most straightforward explanation of his horse phobia” came from Little Hans himself. “He said it started when he was frightened by horses at Gmunden, where he used to spend his summers. … According to the members of the family with whom he stayed, it’s very likely he, a visitor from the city, was warned that the horses could bite; bite they could.”132
Who was it who found Little Hans’s mother “beautiful”? Freud, of course. He also wrote three—count ’em, three—elaborate papers based on the child’s “repressed erotic longing” for his mother and fear of castration by his father.
But here are my favorite points: (1) Freud said, “I never got a finer insight into a child’s soul.” (2) When a grown-up Hans read his case history, “he felt he was reading about a complete stranger,” as Peter Gay reports. “Hans’s comment was a reminder to Freud that the most successful analyses are the ones the analysand forgets after termination.”133
* Just trying to be true to Sigmund: “The older you get, the worse you become. … Women are especially awful in old age. … When a woman begins to age, she becomes an awful example of malevolence and intolerance, petty, ill-tempered, and so on.”134
† Psychic clitoridectomies. And I did.
* “Being beaten also stands for being loved (in a genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing to regression. … The boy’s beating-phantasy is therefore passive from the very beginning, and is derived from a feminine attitude towards his father. It corresponds with the Oedipus complex just as the female one (that of the girl) does. … In both cases the beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous attachment to the father.”135 (For the tragedy of Sigmund Freud’s failure to understand that nonsexual beatings of children also break spirits—or that anything can be nonsexual—see Spare the Child, by Philip Greven.)
The saddest thing about this essay is that Freud’s daughter Anna—whom he analyzed––was included in it as an anonymous but easily recognized case history. Indeed, Anna herself wrote about her “beating fantasies.” Or maybe she was just trying to please. As her niece Sophie Freud wrote in My Three Mothers and Other Passions in 1988: “Women have always been ready to ignore their own experiences for the sake of scientific theories. … I believe Anna Freud, in spite of her uniqueness, acted like most other women when she ignored her own observations in favor of her father’s theoretical framework.” For a clear-eyed view from inside the Freud family, read this wise book.
* Consider the famous case of “Dora.” Freud said her chronic cough, thoughts of suicide, and other hysterical symptoms were due to masturbation, plus an unconscious jealous fantasy that her father’s mistress was gratifying him with oral sex. Dora didn’t agree. In Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, Hannah S. Decker reports: “When questioned, Dora denied remembering ever having masturbated, but when … she came for her session wearing a reticule—a small cloth purse—at her waist, Freud felt triumphant. During the course of the hour, as she lay on the sofa ‘playing with it—opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again,’ he watched and then carefully explained the significance of this ‘symptomatic act.’ … Dora’s reticule, which came apart at the top in the usual way, was nothing but a representation of the genitals, and her playing with it … was an … unmistakable pantomimic announcement of what she would like to do with them—namely, to masturbate.” When she protested again, Freud told her he had trained himself to see the real meaning behind every symbol; that in his presence, “no mortal [could] keep a secret. If [the patient’s] lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Dora quit analysis after three months. For the rest of his life, he referred to this haunting case of a woman who got up from his magical couch and left.
† As Jeffrey Masson wrote in Final Analysis: “in terms of prestige, the closer one could come to Freud, the better. So training analysts whose own analysts had direct contact with Freud were at the top of the totem pole.”136
* Of course, it’s penis-envy, but otherwise straight Sigmund. I leave you to guess who gets the money and who gets the child.
† Here are three members of the Wednesday group as quoted by Peter Gay: “The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room.” “[I was] the apostle of Freud who was my Christ!” “We are a little handful that includes none of the godly, but no traitors either.” (The last quote was from Sigmund.)
* As John Kerr reported in A Most Dangerous Method: “Helping Freud maintain his composure was the new secret Committee … [which] somehow has never drawn the criticism it properly deserves. The sole purpose of this group was to guard against future deviations from Freud’s views within the psychoanalytic movement. Explicitly, Freud was to tell them where to stand and they would stand there. If they found obstacles in the way of their mission, they were to resolve these through further self-analysis. … The fact that the Committee could operate in secrecy for so long—it was eventually overtaken by its own internal tensions—and that its members could believe that they were being effective in their chosen mission makes its own comment on how far psychoanalysis had moved from the normal exigencies of empirical verification.” Still, Kerr may be too nice. Think of Freud writing to a member of this Committee: “So we are rid of him at last, the brutal holy Jung and his pious parrots.” In Jung’s place, Freud wanted the loyal Ernest Jones as head of the international movement. (Jones—who was said to wear a ring with a penis on it.)
† Sigmund was always willing to diagnose critics, from Emma Goldman, whom he called “repressed” (which, given their relative sexual experiences, was like a deaf man criticizing Mozart), to Fliess, Adler, and Jung, who became “paranoics” when they disagreed with him, and Ferenczi, whose growing support for the seduction theory made Freud write that he had “regressed to his earlier neurosis as he grew older.”
* According to Leo Braudy in The Frenzy of Renown: “Freud, it is said, refused to let himself be filmed and recorded at the same time because he thought that the combined image would steal his soul, or perhaps make reproducible what he considered to be unique.”
† In the 1970s, 206 girls, aged ten months to twelve years, were brought to the emergency room of a hospital in a major U.S. city for treatment and collection of forensic evidence of reported sexual abuse. As part of a larger National Institute for Mental Health study, detailed records and interviews were kept. In 1990 and 1991, 129 of these girls, now adults, were located and interviewed. A large proportion, 38 percent, did not yet remember the documented sexual abuse. The younger they were at the time of the abuse, the closer their abuser was to them, and the more severe and violent the abuse, the less likely they were to remember.139 In many other cases, recovered memories have been corroborated.
Each case of alleged abuse has to be treated on its own merits. What is popularly called and campaigned for as the False Memory Syndrome is, at best, a distraction from the reality of child abuse, of the dissociation and repression that was often necessary to survive it, and of the usually recognizable constellation of symptoms it leaves behind.
* At a Vienna Psychoanalytic Society conference on masturbation, Wilhelm Stekel, a colleague of Freud’s, argued that this was a normal sexual practice and that prejudice against it was the problem. Sigmund Freud argued fervently against him. He was fifty-six years old. (Cherchez le père. As Marianne Krüll reports in Freud and His Father: “there are a number of indications that [his father] enjoined little Sigmund not to play with his genitals, and even threatened him with castration if he did.” Krüll concludes: “It is striking how often Freud in his theoretical writings keeps generalizing his own, quite specific experiences, implying that they are valid for all human beings.”)
* Fortunately. Sigmund Freud analyzed Horace Frink, an established New York psychoanalyst, in order to make him head of the New York Analytic Society. When he revealed during the analysis that he was having an affair with one of his patients, Angelika Bijur, a megabucks heiress, Freud set about persuading Frink that he was a latent homosexual, and that this danger could be avoided only if he divorced his wife, persuaded Bijur to divorce her husband too, and married her.
Once back in New York, however, Frink became resistant. Freud wrote to bolster him: “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right, let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.” With the Bijur fortune under Frink’s control, it could be used to spread the word among that class of people in the U.S. who could afford analysis. (As Freud said on another occasion: “I have always said that America is useful for nothing else but to supply money.”141) Angelika herself remembered being told by Freud that “if I threw Dr. F. over now, he would never again come back to normality and probably develop into a homosexual, though in a highly disguised way.” Contemplating leaving his wife and family, however, Frink became depressed and then suffered a psychotic episode. Freud, now worried that his plan would become public, assured Frink that Bijur had been warned not to tell anyone that “I had advised her to marry you on the threat of a nervous breakdown.”
Still, Bijur’s husband must have figured it out. He drafted and threatened to publish an open letter in the newspapers: “Great Doctor, are you a savant or a charlatan?” Nonetheless, Frink and Bijur got their respective divorces. When Frink’s former wife died a month later, Frink again fell into a severe depression and was hospitalized. (Frink’s psychiatrist kept all these papers, and they were recently found in the Johns Hopkins Library.) A year later, the Frink-Bijur marriage ended. Shortly before Frink’s death in 1936, at the age of fifty-three, his daughter, Helen Kraft, asked her father if he had any message for Freud. “Tell him he was a great man,” Frink said, “even if he did invent psychoanalysis.” In 1990, Helen Kraft told The New York Times: “Freud used my father, used my mother and used my stepmother.”142
When his plan failed, Freud complained only that “these miserable Americans couldn’t stay sane when they were needed.” As he said: “My attempt at giving them a chief in the person of Frink which has so sadly miscarried is the last thing I will ever do for them.”143 That’s sad. But it’s even sadder to think how far an embittered older Freud had come from the vulnerable young man who once wrote almost daily to a loved male colleague.
* Ah, but they didn’t turn their neuroses into their theory, or fail to see situations different from their own. In Totem and Taboo, his biography became prehistory.
† In case you need fodder for arguing:
On sexuality: Sexology was already a well-developed field, complete with terms like libido, autoeroticism, etc., plus famous authorities like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. Any mother who ever watched a baby could have told Sigmund Freud a lot about infantile sexuality, but he also had several contemporaries who did clinical studies, as Freud did not; notably, Albert Moll. (See Frank Sulloway’s Freud: Biologist of the Mind for a survey of all this.) Mostly, Freud claimed originality. “So far as I know,” he wrote in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “not a single author has clearly recognized the regular existence of a sexual instinct in childhood.” As Freud scholar James L. Rice said, he was “one of the great egos of our age.”
On the unconscious: Eastern disciplines not only included the unconscious but taught how to gain access to it through breath control. Plato called the unconscious the “soul”—as did Freud in German—and also described its role in learning and remembering. Freud might have gone to the library to find previous philosophers—Johann Herbart and Schopenhauer, to name two—who wrote about subliminal processes and repression. When Freud was thirteen, Eduard von Hartmann published Philosophy of the Unconscious. As Lancelot Whyte pointed out in The Unconscious Before Freud: “the general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable … around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880.”
* Remember: the real “Little Hans” read his case history as an adult and said it sounded like another person, “Dora” got up and walked, even at the time, and the “Wolf Man” said he was better off than Freud had described when the treatment started—not to mention that his case history magically acquired many features of Freud’s own biography. Then there was the fact that the “Rat Man” ’s account of having been beaten by his father was discounted by Freud as repressed erotic longing—even though the patient had been told of the beating by his mother. (Freud started absolving all fathers, once he had absolved his own.) And this goes on …
* Sort of comes full circle with Martha Freud calling her husband’s work “pornography,” doesn’t it? Still, sexuality is so intertwined with domination/submission that we may have to try one other reversal in order to see what’s happening here. Imagine the works by the Marquis de Sade if they portrayed torturers as white and the tortured as black, or all the victims as Jews and all the victimizers as Aryans. Would such ideas be so accepted as beginning “in the mother’s womb”?
† This is Harold Bloom, who was Camille Paglia’s intellectual mentor. Just thought I’d share that with you.
* The real Sigmund Freud, having failed to dig it out, was condemned to keep repeating this pattern of injury, in life and in theory. Here is Sándor Ferenczi on Freud toward the end of his life: “I think that in the beginning Freud really believed in analysis; he followed Breuer enthusiastically, involved himself passionately and selflessly in the therapy of neurotics (lying on the floor for hours if necessary next to a patient in the throes of a hysterical crisis). However, certain experiences must have first alarmed him and then left him disillusioned. … In Freud’s case the equivalent was the discovery of the mendacity of hysterical women. Since the time of this discovery, Freud no longer likes sick people. He rediscovered his love for his orderly, cultivated superego. A further proof of this is his dislike and expressions of blame that he uses with respect to psychotics and perverts, in fact his dislike of everything that he considers ‘too abnormal,’ even against Indian mythology. Since he suffered this shock, this disappointment, Freud speaks much less about trauma, and the constitution begins to play the major role. This involves, obviously, a degree of fatalism. After a wave of enthusiasm for the psychological, Freud has returned to biology. … He is still attached to analysis intellectually, but not emotionally. Further, his method of treatment as well as his theories result from an ever greater interest in order, character and the substitution of a better superego for a weaker one.”150
As Jung had written about Freud earlier: “There was one characteristic of his that preoccupied me above all: his bitterness. … He gave me the impression that at bottom he was working against his own goal and against himself; and there is, after all, no harsher bitterness than that of a person who is his own worst enemy.”151
* It really spins your mind around, doesn’t it? Sigmund Freud is so identified with therapy that he can be used to discredit anti-Freudian therapy. But I think there is an even deeper message here: Whatever happens, save the social order. Don’t believe. If Freud isn’t working so well anymore, join the criticism, but save the purpose. Don’t challenge.
† And it will. If we let it.