Sigmund Freud

[Sol]

ENTP(?)

[Pookie]

Static Rational

[Bardia]

α-rational. Probably ESFj.

Interestingly, his falling out w/ Jung (INFp) was a reasonably textbook case of Supervision.

I don't know all of the specifics for their falling out, but I do know Freud kicked a lot of people out of his little psychology bubble for disagreeing with his theory or trying to add onto it. What makes you think supervision over just plain Freud being a selfish ass?

[ArchonAlarion]

I'm not entirely sure, but I thought I read somewhere that Jung typed Freud as a thinking type fwiw. I could be wrong though. Judging by Jung's writings I'd say Freud would be an extravert and a rational type.

[ClownsandEntropy]

I'm curious as to how you manage to type Freud without seeing how he acts and behaves. Is it all based around his theories?

[Gilly]

I'm curious as to how you manage to type Freud without seeing how he acts and behaves. Is it all based around his theories?

There are videos of Freud, you know. Lots of pictures too. Picture's worth a thousand words, and we have lots of those, too. Evidence is evidence.

[Beautiful sky]

Look what Freud does, he combines two ideas into expression of one process...hence Ne, just like Hkkmr...that's not hard to see.

[Gilly]

SHUT

[Gilly]

[ArchonAlarion]

LAUGHING MY ASS OFF.

[glam]

dammit Gilly

[Gilly]

JUST FUCKING MAKE IT STOP

I'M GOING TO DIE

PLEASE FUCKING KILL HER

YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE

ME OR HER

BECAUSE I CANNOT LIVE IN A WORLD

WHERE

THIS

HAPPENS

[ClownsandEntropy]

There are videos of Freud, you know. Lots of pictures too. Picture's worth a thousand words, and we have lots of those, too. Evidence is evidence.

Ah, see, I hadn't done enough research, I didn't know there were videos . Also a good point on pictures, though I'm rubbish at VI.

[JWC3]

Ah, see, I hadn't done enough research, I didn't know there were videos . Also a good point on pictures, though I'm rubbish at VI.

Well Yeah. But I don't think in the cases of great thinkers that you really need to see how they behave or what they look like. It can help sure, but generally the ideas they espouse and how they come about those ideas and what those ideas mean to them and how they apply them are more than enough.

Plus people type each other here all the time without seeing a video or picture of how the other person acts/looks like.

[Gilly]

I like Ashton's ESE typing of Freud, I'm very tempted to agree.

[strrrng]

writing style and idea structuring points to Ti-base imo. clearly VIs Ti/Fe rational, can't really see EIE though. not sure how Si-ego makes sense, though I may just be expecting an ESE's writings to be less immediately decipherable.

[Nowisthetime]

I like Ashton's ESE typing of Freud, I'm very tempted to agree.

ok, but this is a joke, right? Something you're throwing in for the fun of it. Freud is not ESE and has never been ESE.

[Gilly]

I don't think its unreasonable. Why would you rule out ESE?

[Gilly]

Oh dear...nick could he be LSI-Ti? With Jung as IEI...

[Gilly]

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html

The way he formulates concepts is reminiscent of other Betas, especially this psychoanalytic approach to perceptual states, like Camus and the absurd.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Didn't freud and jung like psychoanalyzing each other? (and I agree on jung being IEI) I'm trying to think what types I don't mind psychoanalyzing me, and the following choices came up:

ISTj
ESFp
ENTp
INTj

Those are the top 4 people where their insights into my personal character feel pleasant, and not annoying or invasive. So far, ISTj makes the most sense... although I do think there is a possibility that Freud was gamma ESFp. He had the gamma arrogance mixed in with their political control over social groups.

[Absurd]

I don't have an opinion yet, didn't follow much of Freud but if my memory serves me right, Jung took quite a few things from Freud and "expanded" on it, that is, he made a maze out of Freud's concepts(?) on ego and so forth. Divided it more. Not to mention he was quite prejudiced towards Freud in the end commenting heavily on his Jewish ancestry during the NSDAP "era."

[strrrng]

could be, though I did detect a similar counter-phobic mania to tcaud. the N/S axis is still vague, given the formulaic approach.

http://psychoanalyse.narod.ru/english/lothschr.htm

[Gilly]

[Gilly]

He reminds me a bit of Rand in facial expressions and the kind of attitude they convey.

[strrrng]

yeah I can definitely see that in the first few pics. overall I lean Ti-LII > Ti-LSI. he has a removed ambivalence and clumsy weight that is distinctly Ti-IJ, but more so to the Ne/Si axis imo. gonna have to watch some interviews. jung as a benefactor in an implicitly inferior position, both paternally and in terms of Ti-Fe in any analytic field, could make some sense.

[Gilly]

I could see LII-Ti. He's more gruff than most of them, but I've known others who had a similar kind of "introverted LSEishness" to them, and it seems to be the only type that might give such a vibe while still sharing the characteristic phenomenological approach to psychology/philosophy.

[Gilly]

The one "before leaving Vienna" seems Rand-ish. Idk though...LII does make sense, it came to mind when looking at the photos; he does seem rational, but there is something kind of harsh or gritty about him for LII...I am keeping my mind open about ESE-Si for now.

[strrrng]

yeah, either way asymmetric relations seem pretty likely after reading that article. the way jung honed in on his behavioral mechanisms without ever fully getting him to concede could be more suggestive of ESE; especially if said things held true across the board, being a self-appointed jove wizard and whatnot, as I would expect an Fe-EJ to be most prone to using such a field as an arena for indoctrination and others as pedestals for their projections.

In his valuable study Vandermeersch (31) has also argued that the bone of contention between Freud and Jung was the differences between their respective libido theories. Freud’s libido theory envisaged a process of coalescing of sexually-toned infantile component drives into adult forms of sexual aim and love-object choice and was the basis of a theory of pathogenesis of neuroses and psychoses according to which symptoms represented a return to fixation points created in the course of libidinal development. By contrast, Jung argued for a genetic, or evolutionary, conception of a holistic, vital drive, or primordial libido, which at a later stage became differentiated into sexuality. Jung’s theory of pathogenesis stressed the role of a real, actual conflict in the patient’s adult life as a result of which, and especially in psychosis, “libido became introverted and regressively formed the fantasies which Freud has mistakenly considered to be the origin of the neurosis” (31, p. 241). For Freud, the two theories represented an irreconcilable collision course.

obvious Ne/Si~Ni/Se point of departure

I found that my version of [psychoanalysis] won over many people who until now have been put off by the problem of sexuality in neurosis. As soon as I have an offprint, I shall take pleasure in sending you a copy of my lectures in the hope that you will gradually come to accept certain innovations already hinted at in my libido paper. ... I regret it very much if you think that the modifications in question have prompted solely by resistances to you. Your Kreuzlingen gesture has dealt me a lasting wound. ... I do not identify you with a point of doctrine. ... Obviously I would prefer to be on friendly terms with you, to whom I owe so much, but I want your objective judgment and no feelings of resentment. I think I deserve this much: I have done more to promote the psychoanalytic movement than Rank, Stekel, Adler, etc. put together (4:515-516; emphasis added).

completely understandable from an aristocratic pov; wanting to separate personal feelings from the doctrine itself, while appealing to the latter in a personal statement.

your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies (Adler-Stekel and the whole insolent gang now throwing their weight about in Vienna). I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and enquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him: “Who’s got the neurosis?” (4:534-535; emphasis Jung’s).

Fe dissection.

freud's blithe rejection of jung's 'premise' and everything else apparently entailed by it, at least in the quality of expression, is redolent of the way Si/Ne types react to Ni/Se types in conflict (more so Fe/Ti-valuers); the bluntness of the latter is occluded, often there are claims of 'missing the context,' or 'failing to address my real basis' (a favorite of LIIs), while the Ni/Se type (especially the Fe-egos) becomes more heated, loses composure, and ultimately has to repulse the situation, which is exactly how it played out.

[Gilly]

Yeah, all seems reasonable to me, but I'm unsure about attributing the conflict to Si/Ne vs Se/Ni. I think ILE is the easy typing of Freud, but I think it ignores a lot, including his relations to Jung. Alpha Rational makes more sense, but tbh Freud's major shortcomings seem characteristic of Causal-Determinist style thinking. LSI seems to fit well by VI, too; better than LII, IMO. I am considering both but I want to ruminate on some texts before making a call.

[Gilly]

I dunno...LII seems to fit in bits and pieces, but he seems more outer-directed in the pictures, especially the younger ones, than LIIs.

[silke]

LII-Ti sx/sp 6w5 or 5w6

Judging from his statements Freud had a proclivity to state his own thoughts as if they were universal all-evident maxims, which implies Ji in mental ring, making IJ type be more plausible than an EJ one.

All of the left/result benefit and supervision rings are subject to something called reverse benefit/supervision, which doesn't quite work the same way as the classical descriptions of benefit and supervision. Freud's patronizing relationship with Jung, the way he referred to Jung's research into paranormal events as "spook-complex" and tried to reform him into his "appointed son" all fall in line with this type of "reverse" relations. By experience I know that Ti-LIIs are especially prone to it in relation to IEIs.

So I'd go with Ti-LII Freud and e6 by enneagram, assuming Jung was 9 and that 9 serves as both the point of integration and the point of bafflement for a 6.

[strrrng]

yeah I've gotten that feeling from LIIs in the past; it's always this softened paternal dissonance, eased mainly by Fe spurts. also I've never found myself taking as much issue with their concave theoretical attitude, like I almost expect and somewhat appreciate this kind of unwavering solidity; this seems to hold true for jung, as his main issues with freud were interpersonal, a critique of style almost.

jung was either a 9 or a 5. the latter seems a bit more likely, given his archetypal uncanniness as far as IEIs go, essentially 'that one,' the true vortex. this could work with 9 if he wasn't so clearly impassioned and single-minded in his mystic pursuits, especially considering he's probably sx/sp.

[Gilly]

IEI 5...could make sense of his self-type as a thinker. I would have guessed 9 first personally.

[strrrng]

yeah, I just don't see any compelling evidence for gut triad primary, especially since neither wing seems to fit especially well (though I do think his gut fix is definitely 9). there's just too much rigor and obsession, a kind of depersonalized frenzy that's pretty naturally aligned with ideas like synchronicity and the collective unconscious; and he never reached out to people on some 'we're all connected' spiel, that's more heart triad territory.

[Gilly]

Yeah you're right. I would lean 5w6, I feel like there has to be attachment somewhere in there, and his presence seems light/casual for a twice withdrawn introvert...he's a bit nervy and kind of unconstrained for an Fe ego with heart in the main type, too.

He does fit the picture of a 5...

[strrrng]

yeah that works, especially considering he's definitely 4w5 heart fix.

[HERO]

- from Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller; pp. 54-59 [HUMANITY’S FATEFUL SLEEP

(THEORIES AS A PROTECTIVE SHIELD)]: The opinions most hotly defended are the very

ones that are not correct yet conform to our childrearing system. The dogmatizing of these false

claims protects the abused individual from a painful awakening. The same function is also

fulfilled by the Freudian theories of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and the death

instinct. Freud originally discovered, in the treatments partially conducted under hypnosis, that

all his patients, both female and male, had been abused children and recounted their histories in

the language of symptoms. After reporting his discovery in psychiatric circles, he found himself

completely shunned because none of his fellow psychiatrists was prepared to share the findings

with him. Freud could not bear this isolation for long. A few months later, in 1897, he described

his patients’ reports on sexual abuse as sheer fantasies attributable to their instinctual wishes.

Humanity’s briefly disturbed sleep could now be resumed.

Everyone who is confronted with child abuse and observes in others the extent to which

experiences of abuse are repressed and denied must feel profoundly shaken, for he is bound to

wonder: What was it like in my case? If obvious victims of the worst kind of abuse can deny

their experiences so completely, how can I be sure that my memory doesn’t deceive me? This

question also arose for Freud, when he was still open to questions and not armed against them

with theories. A number of hypotheses emerged, among others a massive accusation of his

father, as appears in one of his letters to Fliess:


Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my

brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters. The

frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder. [Freud, Complete Letters, pp. 230-31.]


Everyone can discover for himself what fears such accusations against his own father

would arouse in him. How much more dangerous such thoughts must have been a hundred years

ago. Yet perhaps Freud would have found the strength to test his hypothesis about his father if

there had been one single person to support him. But his closest confidant, Wilhelm Fliess, had

no idea what to make of Freud’s discovery. Fliess’s son, Robert Fliess, however, later became a

psychiatrist and analyst and published three books containing some very revealing material on

sexual abuse by parents of their own children. It took Robert Fliess many decades to find out

that, at the age of two, he had been sexually abused by his father and that this incident coincided

with Freud’s renunciation of the truth. In his book Robert Fliess made his personal history public

because he was convinced that his father had deterred Freud from further developing the trauma

theory. That theory would have inevitably caused Wilhelm Fliess guilt feelings, so his son

believes. How far this assumption is correct is difficult for an outsider to judge.

Apart from this explanation of Freud’s betrayal of the truth in 1897, there are several

others. What they all have in common is that individual aspects of Freud’s private life are made

responsible for his fateful step.

It may be that all these factors played a role of greater or lesser significance and that they

even support one another. But their potency is based on the commandment “Thou shalt not be

aware,” which to this day forbids us to see what parents inflict on their children. Despite the

effectiveness of this commandment, there have already been some therapists, such as Sandor

Ferenczi and Robert Fliess, who tried to free themselves. But without casting doubt on one’s

own parents, without the intense pain caused by an abandonment of illusions, without the help

and support of others who would also like to overcome their blindness or have already succeeded

in doing so, this independence and clarity of vision are almost impossible to achieve. So it is

really not surprising (although it is disastrous) that [a century +] ago Sigmund Freud should have

yielded to that commandment, to his fear, and to his repression.

Wilhelm Reich later did the same thing when he developed a theory intended to help him

ward off the very young child he once was who had constantly been sexually exploited. Instead

of feeling the hurt of being victimized by trusted adults and of having to accept his victimization

submissively, Wilhelm Reich maintained throughout his life, to the point of becoming psychotic:

I wanted that myself, I needed that, every child needs that!

Yet our sympathy for Reich and Freud must not prevent us from seeing that with his

drive theory Freud has inflicted great harm on humanity. Instead of taking his personal plight

seriously, he sought shelter from it behind theories. By going even further, by founding a school

and dogmatizing his theses, he institutionalized the denial that endowed the lies of pedagogy

with alleged scientific legitimacy. For the Freudian dogmas corresponded to the widespread

notion that the child is by nature wicked and bad and must be trained by adults to be good. This

perfect consensus with pedagogy in turn bestowed on psychoanalysis society’s high esteem, and

for a long time the falsity of its dogmas went unnoticed.

The pedagogic protection of these theories is so great that even the feminist movement

failed to see through it. Thus it became possible for the drive theory to be regarded even by

committed women as progress rather than denial of child abuse.

Many people still believe that Freud is not to be blamed if certain psychoanalysts are

blind to reality, are imprecise, and disclaim responsibility, for after all Freud was a brilliant

discoverer, wasn’t he? Similar claims are made for C. G. Jung—the fathers are idealized at the

expense of the “sons” and “daughters.” But it is not current practitioners who invented

psychoanalysis—it was invented by the “father,” and by dogmatizing the denial of the truth

Freud made it difficult for the “sons” and “daughters” to use their eyes and ears. They had little

chance of refuting his claims on the basis of their experiences, since a dogma cannot be refuted.

A dogma lives on its followers’ fear of losing their group affiliation. It is from this fear that the

dogma derives its power, and it is due to this power that people “work” every day, for thirty or

forty years, with victims of child abuse without even being aware that they are working with

such victims, with the result that even the patients cannot penetrate to their own truth. Since the

game of words, associations, and speculations takes its orientation from the patients’ “fantasies”

and not from the actual childhood background, the results lack the necessary accuracy and

cannot be tested.

In my opinion, the founder of psychoanalysis himself must be held responsible for the

dogmatizing of the drive theory. If someone describes the renunciation of reality as a great

scientific advance and founds a school that supports its students in their blindness, this ceases to

be a private matter. It amounts to a violation of the interests of humanity, even when performed

unconsciously. But that, after all, is the precondition for violations: They would not exist if

people were fully aware of their situation, their history, and their responsibility.

In the last few years I have learned more than ever about the situation of the child in our

society and about the blockages in the thinking and feeling of psychoanalytically trained persons.

These blockages often result in patients being subjected to lengthy treatments that cement the

blame that had been leveled at them as children, a process that can scarcely lead to anything but

depressions. The most successful means of escaping such chronic depressions is to enter the

profession of psychoanalysis oneself; this permits a continuation of the cementing process by

using theories that protect one from the truth—but now, of course, at the expense of others.

Psychoanalysis is wrongly termed “progressive” and “revolutionary,” terms to which it

clings as it does to its dogmas. A young person today is not likely to allow a [110]-year-old

great-grandfather to tell him what is progressive; but he will accept this from his analyst in

Freud’s name, without realizing that the ideas he is accepting are at least [110] years old and

have never been modified, given that a dogma cannot be modified. And through the influence of

analysts on their patients, the effects of these dogmas are spread even beyond professional

circles, preventing access to reality.

I often hear it said that we owe the discovery of child abuse to psychoanalysis. Errors like

this point to the confusion reigning in this field, for in fact it is precisely psychoanalysis that has

held back and continues to hold back knowledge of child abuse. I am not surprised at this

confusion, for I myself failed for so long to perceive it. Although I didn’t believe in dogmas, I

did not notice the function they perform: that of forbidding new facts from being taken seriously

and old failures from being recognized.


- pp. 187-188: It is possible for a child to protect himself all through life from the tragic,

unbearable truth by “passionate thinking” about “the nature of truth,” and, as long as his

symptoms do not sound the alarm, there the matter rests. However, psychoanalysis is a system

that offers the very people who have symptoms an escape from their plight. That is why such

people must be told that they can expect no solution in psychoanalysis. The most they can expect

is a maze of well-tended paths but with no exit into freedom. It is a prison built with the theories

of a man who a century ago found himself in the same quandary as most patients do today. To

escape insight into the martyrdom of his childhood, he fled into the garden of thought constructs,

and for a while his symptoms disappeared. But they came back despite increasing efforts to keep

the artificial structure from collapsing.

Galileo went blind after being forced by the Church to repudiate the truth against his

better knowledge. Sigmund Freud forbade himself to voice the truth he had discovered about

child abuse and its effects on the psyche of the adult. He betrayed his own discovery after his

father’s death. When I read that he later suffered from cancer of the jaw and that after many

operations he finally died of it, I have to ask myself whether his jaw was not rebelling on behalf

of the truth on which he chose to turn his back. Although my question is to be regarded merely as

a hypothesis which, in the absence of the person involved, I cannot put to the test, I have noticed

that, among the innumerable analysts who are so fond of handing out interpretations to their

dependent patients, not one of them, as far as I know, has yet published an interpretation of

Freud’s illness. Are the disciples not permitted even to wonder why a venerated father figure

contracted cancer of the jaw? May interpretations be given only to dependent persons—children

and patients? Doesn’t this amount to admitting that interpretations are weapons used against the

helpless but not against an authority held in awe? Patients are fed all kinds of constructs by the

old man and believe that this is genuine nourishment. They believe everything because they need

someone who will at last listen to them. And they do not see through the abuse because someone

who in childhood experienced nothing but abuse is unable later in life to see through it.

The man who was no longer allowed to utter the truth instead wrote volume after volume

whose style was universally admired and whose contents led humanity into utter confusion. So

“passionate thinking” is by no means as harmless as it appears. In my opinion, everything that

suppresses the truth is destructive, even if the consequences cannot be fully recognized until

much later.


- pp. 63-64: Freud’s argumentation would never have been so successful if most people had not

grown up in the same tradition. His successors might soon have noticed that what looks like a

reasoned argument isn’t one at all. When Freud writes that it is unlikely that there are so many

perverted fathers, and he therefore describes the accounts of his female patients as fantasies, that

is not an argument but a childish denial of reality culminating in effect in the statement: “My

papa, whom I love, is great and good and can never have done anything bad, because I couldn’t

imagine such a thing, because in order to live I need to believe that he loves me, protects me,

doesn’t abuse me, and lives up to his responsibility.”

Anyone with a little insight into families with sexually abused children knows that the

fathers who sexually abuse their children don’t necessarily show any outward signs of being

perverted. Their perversion is often restricted exclusively to their own family. Since one’s own

child is regarded as a chattel, most deviant, absurd, or perverted behavior by a parent toward the

child can destroy the life of the child with impunity and go unnoticed. If the abused daughter

does eventually arrive at a clinic suffering from schizophrenia and is treated by her psychiatrist

with massive doses of medication, with the result that she will know even less than she did

before, she will never find out that actually it was her father’s behavior that drove her into

madness. For to salvage his image, to see at least something good in her childhood, she must not

know the truth. She would rather “lose” her mind.

Before publishing my first book, I gave a lecture on the mental adjustment of

psychoanalysts and their presumed childhood history. After that lecture I was asked: “But you

can’t seriously mean that all psychoanalysts were abused children?” I replied: “I can’t be sure, I

can only assume it. But I would say that no one can be a psychoanalyst who has experienced

abuse—widespread as it is—in his own childhood and no longer needs to deny it. For in that case

psychoanalytic theories cease to make sense.”

Later I found my assumption reinforced when I learned that some analysts have no

recollection whatsoever of the first seventeen years of their lives and see nothing strange in that.

The result is that, with such a massive repression of his own childhood and puberty, a person will

do anything, must do anything, to prevent being reminded by his patients of his own suffering.

Freud provided the necessary means for that procedure, and analysts in their extremity reach for

such means as an addict reaches for his drug. They pay for this drug with their blindness.

A women journalist told me that a retired psychiatrist, formerly in charge of a large

clinic, said to her: “You needn’t get so worked up about child abuse; what you call abuse is

something the child can survive without any great difficulty. Children are experts in survival.” In

this statement the doctor was doubtless correct, but the tragedy is that he obviously didn’t know

the price of this survival, any more than he knew that he had also paid the price himself and had

made others pay. For forty years he had treated female and male patients, prescribed medication

for them, talked encouragingly to them, and never once grasped that the grave psychotic

conditions he was observing every day were nothing but attempts to describe, in the language of

symptoms, the mistreatments and confusion of their childhood.


- pp. 72-74: In the therapy I personally underwent, I discovered that, with every inner

confrontation with my parents, the guilt feelings that had been instilled in me reinforced my

repression, barred my access to reality, and blocked my experiencing of pain. It was only when I

could query my supposed guilt that those feelings surfaced. And only when I could feel that,

without any guilt on my part, I had been ignored, not taken seriously, scarcely even noticed by

my parents, did I realize what had happened. It became clear that it had not been up to me to

teach my parents a sense of responsibility, that it had not been in my power as a babe in arms to

render them capable of loving. The only thing I had been able to do was show them that I was

useful, that I could be exploited, and that I would never respond with reproaches. At the time,

life offered me no other option.

As soon as I had become aware of the blocking function of those guilt feelings, I noticed

that they always occurred and disturbed my sleep when a fragment of some traumatic memory

emerged. The next day I would want to negate everything I had discovered for myself the day

before. I either forgot my newfound knowledge, or felt compelled to deny it, or was miserable

because I had been capable of such appalling thoughts about my parents. Here again the same

inevitable sequence was at work that had compelled Freud to betray his discovery.

Many therapists often observe this resistance in their patients and mistakenly interpret it

as proof that reality does, after all, elude our grasp. And eventually the patient himself is

uncertain whether he was describing actual memories or mere fantasies. The child’s inner

struggle for the image of the good father or the good mother can be so intense that not only the

patient but everyone around him succumbs to the confusion. Freud’s view that it is possible to

invent something worse than the reality experienced did a great deal of harm in my own case,

too. How I longed to believe that all signals were deceiving me, that things weren’t really that

bad, and that only my suspicion was wicked and unfair. How I wished that psychoanalysis might

be right, because of my longing to cling to the illusion of loving parents.

As time went on it became clear to me that the idea of children inventing traumas is

absurd. Anyone is free to check on the natural law that human beings will avoid pain rather than

seek it. They seek pleasure, joy, reassurance. Masochism is no exception to this rule: It is a

compulsion to inflict new suffering on oneself to keep former suffering repressed. The masochist

who at great expense has himself whipped by a prostitute and insists on sitting on a chamber pot

during the procedure is obeying a compulsion to reproduce the trauma of his toilet training and to

keep the memory repressed at all costs. Another law of life is that the idealization of the parents

with the aid of fantasy and repression helps the child to survive; thus to attribute bad things to

one’s nearest and dearest would run counter to natural defenses and the law of life. It follows that

a child will never invent traumas. On the contrary, to survive the child must resort to fantasy to

make the pain bearable.

Thus, for example, sexually mistreated children often claim to have killed a baby, but

because their stories cannot be substantiated they are called liars. If they come to court, all their

statements can then be deemed invalid. It never occurs to the judges that these children are

experiencing their mistreatment as a murder of the baby each of them had once been and that

they are describing their own inner situation. The fantasy of the murdered baby is a way of

expressing what really happened—a way that serves to mitigate the actual trauma. For it is

easier to see oneself as a criminal than to know and feel that one was, and is, an innocent

victim who must be prepared at all times for torture and persecution. Every patient clings to

fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless

and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.

The remembered and documented facts often reveal only a small part of the fate a child

has had to suffer. The larger part consists of the repressed experiences that cannot be told

because they were never consciously experienced.


- from Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child by Alice Miller; pp. 107-118

(The Loneliness of the Explorer): In his lecture “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” published in 1896,

Freud reports with great clarity, directness, and persuasiveness (at least for the reader of today)

that in all eighteen cases of hysterical illness treated by him (six men and twelve women) he

discovered in the course of the analytic work repression of sexual abuse by an adult or by an

older sibling who had in turn previously been abused by adults. None of the eighteen patients

was aware of this fact when treatment began, and Freud contends that their symptoms would not

have appeared if these early memories had remained conscious. He is describing facts whose

emergence came as a surprise even to him, and as a curious scientist of integrity he could hardly

ignore this evidence; he seeks his audience’s understanding in spite of the moral indignation he

feels himself. Sometimes one has the impression that he is trying to convince himself as well as

his audience, because the facts in question strike him as monstrous. How was someone at the

turn of the century who had learned to regard all adults as respected authority figures and who

could not yet have any inkling of the knowledge we have today of ambivalence, the crucial

importance of early childhood experiences, and the power of the repetition compulsion in the

adult’s unconscious [to] come to terms with such a discovery? Understandably, he was horrified and

was inclined to pass moral judgment, something we as analysts of adults who abuse their

children can perhaps not avoid until we have been able to experience with them the inner distress

that goes with these acts. But Freud obviously had no knowledge at that point of the later

ramifications of his finding, and he therefore had no choice but to consider these adults perverse.

Since they were parents and therefore had to be respected at any cost, Freud was continually

tempted not to believe what he discovered about his patients.

One can sense in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” the brilliant explorer’s struggle to free

himself from the commandments that dominated his upbringing. The audience Freud is

addressing, with which he partly identified, might want to say, “What must not be, cannot be.”

And the researcher replies, “But I have found it to be so.” He knows that every possible

objection will be raised to what he is saying. Some will say sexual seduction of children is so

rare that it cannot possibly be the cause of hysterical illnesses, which occur so frequently. Others

will claim the opposite, saying that sexual abuse, particularly among the lower classes, is found

so frequently that there would have to be a much greater incidence of hysteria than there is,

especially in that milieu; but it is known to be the case that a much higher percentage of this kind

of illness occurs among the privileged classes. Freud answers this potential objection with a

point that strikes me as still valid today: that the upper classes, thanks to their level of education

and their often one-sided intellectual development, are better able to generate defenses against

their traumas, and it is precisely these defenses (repression, splitting off of the feeling connected

with the recollected content, and denial by means of idealization) that cause neurosis. The

objections to his trauma theory adduced by Freud in 1896 can still be encountered in the same

contradictory form today, although the narcissistic cathexis of the child by the adult, in which

sexual and aggressive abuse play a major role, can no longer be denied in view of all we know

now. Before Freud felt compelled to conceal his finding behind the drive theory, he wrote the

following passage:


All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations—on the

one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed

by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish,

and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on

the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is

prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment,

and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his

imperfect control of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal

themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, in

countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail. Where the relation

is between two children, the character of the sexual scenes is none the less of the same repulsive

sort, since every such relationship between children postulates a previous seduction of one of

them by an adult. The psychical consequences of these child-relations are quite extraordinarily

far-reaching; the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond through the whole of their

lives.

Sometimes it is the accidental circumstances of these infantile sexual scenes which in

later years acquire a determining power over the symptoms of the neurosis. Thus, in one of my

cases the circumstance that the child was required to stimulate the genitals of a grown-up woman

with his foot was enough to fixate his neurotic attention for years on to his legs and to their

function, and finally to produce a hysterical paraplegia. [The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works, III, 215]


In these few words Freud sums up the situation of the child as it has existed unchanged

for millennia, at least in our culture. The link between parents’ need for erotic fulfillment and

their right to use and punish the child is such an inherent feature of our culture that until recently

its legitimacy had been questioned by very few.

Now, however, the psychoanalytic method has brought us face to face with the

consequences of this phenomenon—with repression and the related loss of vitality that occurs in

neurosis. This revelation has apparently severely strained the limits of what people can accept.

The shock, confusion, and dismay it caused could be mastered (warded off) only by denying the

facts or, if this was no longer possible, by constructing various theories. The more complicated,

incomprehensible, and rigid these theories, the better guarantee they provided that the actually

very obvious but painful situation remained concealed.

There is a striking divergence in the ways the public reacts to news and information. In a

single evening readers can find all manner of shocking events reported in the newspaper without

being shaken out of their accustomed tranquility . . . The . . . newspaper may carry a report about

the trial of a terrorist, during which the young man, accused of multiple homicide, delivered an

hour-long ideological speech. There is also an interview with his mother, who claims

convincingly that her son had never caused any trouble all through his childhood and

adolescence, until he went to college. Then readers come to the “obvious” conclusion that the

“bad influence” of the other students, who were raised too permissively, made this man become

a terrorist . . . Explanations such as these comfort readers and reinforce their value system . . .

They would basically rather not know . . . how an obedient son can so easily turn into a terrorist .

. . For who can guarantee that their form of adjustment, successful thus far, does not have its

dangerous shadow side, too, and that they will always manage to keep it at a distance?

Understanding for someone else’s unconscious presupposes a familiarity with our own. How can

we understand drug addiction, delinquency, or the outbreak of mental illness if the unconscious

portion of our own and the other person’s psyche is ignored?

In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” Freud is struggling with this resistance on the part of the

public. He knows that he has hit upon a truth that concerns everyone, i.e., the consequences of

childhood trauma for later life (which is not to be equated with causal determinism), and at the

same time he knows that the overwhelming majority of people will oppose him precisely because

he is telling the truth.

The content of Freud’s discoveries can be so widely denied because most people ignore

their unconscious, all the more so if they are dominated by it in some fateful way. After all, we

all have a perfect right to consider our dreams insignificant and to deny the existence of our

unconscious. This gives rise to the paradoxical situation in which the newspaper readers

described above can react to even the most incomprehensible, bizarre human behavior without

amazement and are willing to accept the most absurd reasons given for this behavior without any

sign of emotion as long as they personally are left out of the picture. Yet they will react with

anger or scorn if someone points out the unconscious motives for the incomprehensible behavior,

for if they took these explanations seriously, the complicated defense mechanisms so essential to

them would be threatened.

Freud’s drive theory accommodates these defense mechanisms by locating the origins of

neurosis in infantile sexual fantasies and conflicts, thus preserving the required idealization of

the parents. This was something one could understand and—in view of the dominance of

“poisonous pedagogy” in 1897—even accept. But the empirical findings that led Freud to his

trauma theory could not be made to fit the drive theory, even though he seems to have tried to do

so for the rest of his life. The sexually (and non-sexually) abused child, whom Freud described in

1896 and then abandoned in 1897, is quite logically no longer to be found in his later drive

theory, for the vocabulary of “poisonous pedagogy” and an eye for the reality of the victimized

child are mutually exclusive. An analyst who knows the harm that can unconsciously be done to

children will not, like most parents or educators, attempt to cover up the abuse of power by

dismissing his or her patient’s vague, halting recollections as infantile fantasies. Of course, a

child may have a rich fantasy life, but this always serves the purpose of helping him cope with

reality. For the sake of survival he will usually make beloved attachment figures seem better than

they are and never denigrate them.

The man who went down in history as the discoverer of the Oedipus complex wrote these

words in 1896:


The general doubt about the reliability of the psycho-analytic method can be appraised and

removed only when a complete presentation of its technique and results is available. Doubts

about the genuineness of the infantile sexual scenes can, however, be deprived of their force

here and now by more than one argument. In the first place, the behavior of patients while they

are reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption

that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced

with the greatest reluctance. Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these

scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only

the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.

While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most

violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they

have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold

belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten

material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes.

This latter piece of behavior seems to provide conclusive proof. Why should patients

assure me so emphatically of their unbelief, if what they want to discredit is something which—

from whatever motive—they themselves have invented?

It is less easy to refute the idea that the doctor forces reminiscences of this sort on the

patient, that he influences him by suggestion to imagine and reproduce them. Nevertheless it

appears to me equally untenable. I have never yet succeeded in forcing on a patient a scene I was

expecting to find, in such a way that he seemed to be living through it with all the appropriate

feelings. Perhaps others may be more successful in this.

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. In the second place, patients sometimes describe as harmless events

whose significance they obviously do not understand, since they would be bound otherwise to be

horrified by them. Or again, they mention details, without laying any stress on them, which only

someone of experience in life can understand and appreciate as subtle traits of reality. [pp. 204-

5]


Was it Freud’s “naïveté,” as he himself later thought, or was it brilliant intuition that led him to

write a passage like this, whose meaning is so unmistakable?


Every religion has its taboos, which must be accepted by its followers if they do not want

to be rejected by the community of believers. This excludes any further development within the

body of the faithful, but it cannot prevent individuals from attacking specific taboos from time to

time; in so doing they abandon familiar ground and become the founders of new creeds, having

been unable to change or enrich the old one. Others are now able to choose among different

faiths, providing they were not too strictly conditioned to believe only in their own as a child.

But what happens when a great scientific discovery, relevant for everyone, is made the

exclusive property of one school of thought and is surrounded by dogmas and taboos? A

paradoxical situation then arises in which the original discovery, which might have been the

starting point for further findings and for a substantial heightening of consciousness stagnates

because the dogmas that have become entrenched in the meantime would be threatened by new

findings.

It seems to me that this is the situation in which psychoanalysis finds itself today. The

ramifications of Freud’s recognition that early childhood suffering is preserved in the adult’s

unconscious have by no means been fully explored. Even the first obvious conclusion to be

drawn from it represented a dangerous threat to an established taboo. What Freud learned about

his patients through hypnosis and his subsequent use of the method of free association seemed to

point inescapably to the fact that as children they had been sexually abused by their parents or

other family members or by their care givers. In order for Freud to take his patient’s accounts

seriously in the face of resistance from the public, he would have had to be free from the

strictures of the patriarchal family, from the demands of the Fourth Commandment, and from the

guilt feelings caused by his introjected parents. Since that kind of freedom was totally impossible

at the time, perhaps Freud had no choice but to interpret what his patients told him as fantasies

and to construct a theory that would spare adults from reproach and would allow him to trace his

patients’ symptoms back to the repression of their own infantile sexual wishes.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated September 21, 1897, Freud gives the reasons that led

him to renounce his trauma theory. He refers to the

realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in every case of which the same thing

applied, though it was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general.

(Perversion would have to be immeasurably more frequent than hysteria, as the illness can only

arise where the events have accumulated and one of the factors which weaken defence is

present.) [The Origins of Psychoanalysis, pp. 215-16]


As fate would have it, the methods Freud developed and handed on to future generations

as a heuristic tool enable us to recognize a multitude of facts that seemed highly improbable to

him in his day. [More than] a century has passed since he wrote the lines just cited. During this

time, very different types of patients from many countries have been analyzed and have had the

opportunity to express openly in analysis their desires, fantasies, and thoughts. On the basis of

these analyses, we know how frequently one’s own children can be the cause of sexual arousal;

we also know that in those cases where such desires can be acknowledged and openly expressed,

sexual abuse does not occur. The tendency for adults to use their children as best they can to

meet all their needs is so widespread and so taken for granted in world history that most people

do not refer to this form of sexual abuse as a perversion; it is simply one of the many ways adults

exercise power over their children.

There were several motives, personal ones among them, that moved Freud to abandon his

trauma theory. In the above letter to Fliess he enumerated all those he was conscious of, and he

subsequently replaced the earlier theory with that of the Oedipus complex, thus enabling people

to close their eyes to or minimize what was no doubt an unwelcome and offensive truth for them,

much in the same way the Church for a long time treated the discoveries of Galileo and

Copernicus. But once a truth has been stated, it cannot disappear from sight entirely; sooner or

later it will prevail, even if it is retracted by the person who discovered it.

Freud tried all his life to salvage his theory pertaining to the sexual origin of the neuroses

of his day—by camouflaging the real situation with theories that diverted attention from the

actions of the adult to the fantasies of the child, thus making his findings acceptable to a

generation molded by “poisonous pedagogy,” i.e., also to himself. It goes without saying that I

do not regard sexual trauma as the only possible origin of neurosis, as claimed by Freud’s trauma

theory of 1896, for there are, as we know, countless other ways children can be mistreated and at

the same time deprived of their voice and their awareness. But sexual abuse, with its role in the

formation of psychic disturbances, needs our special attention because it has been silenced,

ignored, or denied for so long.

In spite of the high price he paid, Freud still could not prevent those people who have

applied his psychoanalytic methods . . . from seeing connections (in such areas as family therapy,

analysis of children, treatment of schizophrenia, and psychohistory) that confirm at least partially

the validity of his original insights—even if, or perhaps because, no theory has yet been

developed to explain them. Freud wrote in 1896:


. . . the findings of my analysis are in a position to speak for themselves. In all eighteen cases

(cases of pure hysteria and hysteria combined with obsessions, and comprising six men and

twelve women) I have, as I have said, come to learn of sexual experiences of this kind in

childhood. I can divide my cases into three groups, according to the origin of the sexual

stimulation. In the first group it is a question of assaults—of single, or at any rate isolated,

instances of abuse, mostly practised on female children, by adults who were strangers, and who,

incidentally, knew how to avoid inflicting gross, mechanical injury. In these assaults there was

no question of the child’s consent, and the first effect of the experience was preponderantly one

of fright. The second group consists of the much more numerous cases in which some adult

looking after the child—a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, unhappily all too often, a close

relative—has initiated the child into sexual intercourse and has maintained a regular love

relationship with it—a love relationship, moreover, with its mental side developed—which has

often lasted for years. The third group, finally, contains child-relationships proper—sexual

relations between two children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister, which are often

prolonged beyond puberty and which have the most far-reaching consequences for the pair. In

most of my cases I found that two or more of these etiologies were in operation together; in a

few instances the accumulation of sexual experiences coming from different quarters was truly

amazing. You will easily understand this peculiar feature of my observations, however, when

you consider that the patients I was treating were all cases of severe neurotic illness which

threatened to make life impossible.

Where there had been a relation between two children I was sometimes able to prove that

the boy—who, here too, played the part of the aggressor—had previously been seduced by an

adult of the female sex, and that afterwards, under the pressure of his prematurely awakened

libido and compelled by his memory, he tried to repeat with the little girl exactly the same

practices that he had learned from the adult woman, without making any modifications of his

own in the character of the sexual activity.

In view of this, I am inclined to suppose that children cannot find their way to acts of

sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis

would accordingly always be laid in childhood by adults, and the children themselves would

transfer to one another the disposition to fall ill of hysteria later. [pp. 207-9]


What might it have meant in practical terms if Freud had remained true to this insight? If

we picture his readers, the women of the bourgeoisie of that day, with their elegant long dresses

that hid their ankles, and the men with their stiff white collars and faultlessly cut suits (for it can

hardly be supposed that his books were read by the working class), it is not hard to imagine the

outrage and indignation that would have greeted the facts presented above. The indignation

would not have been directed against this form of child abuse per se but against the man who

dared to speak about it. For most of these refined people were firmly convinced from an early

age that only fine, noble, valiant, and edifying deeds (subjects) ought to be talked about publicly

and that what they as adults did behind closed doors in their elegant bedrooms very definitely

had no place in print. Satisfying sexual desires with children was nothing bad in their eyes as

long as silence was preserved, for they were convinced that no harm would be done to the

children unless the matter was discussed with them. Therefore, the acts they performed were

shrouded in silence, as if children were dolls, for they firmly believed a doll would never know

or tell what had been done to it. In order to ensure discretion, children were not sexually

enlightened; their erotic activities—such as touching their genitals or masturbating—and any

show of interest in sexual matters were forbidden. At the same time, they were raised in the spirit

of the Fourth Commandment, and their entire life was dominated by the principle of respect for

their parents. Children thus had to come to terms, without anyone to help them, with the

irreconcilable contradiction that it was filthy and depraved to touch their own genitals but that it

was also wrong of them not to allow an adult to play with their body. Even to ask questions

about this was dangerous. Freud’s case history of Dora shows the endless obstacles a woman

who has grown up in this atmosphere has to contend with if she wants to resolve the discrepancy

between what has been passed on to her on a conscious level and what she has perceived half-

consciously, for she can no longer live with this discrepancy. The earliest traumas cannot be

consciously recalled but are manifested in destructive and self-destructive behavior, symptoms,

fantasies, and dreams; they contradict the idealized image of the parents, which must be

preserved for many reasons. Accordingly, people like Dora do everything in their power to avoid

pain by preventing their trauma from becoming conscious. In a letter to Fliess dated April 28,

1897, Freud describes how one of his new patients deals with this conflict:


Yesterday I started treatment of a new case, a young woman, whom for lack of time I should

have liked to have frightened off . . . Today she came and said she had been thinking over the

treatment and had found an obstacle. “What is it?” “I can paint myself as black as necessary, but

I must spare other people. You must allow me to mention no names.” “Names don’t matter.

What you mean is your relationship with the people concerned. We can’t draw a veil over that.”

“What I mean is that earlier the treatment would have been easier for me than now. Earlier I

didn’t suspect it, but now the criminal nature of certain things has become clear to me, and I

can’t make up my mind to talk about them.” “On the contrary, I should say that a mature woman

becomes more tolerant in sexual matters.” “Yes, there you’re right. When I consider that the

most excellent and high-principled men are guilty of these things, I’m compelled to think it’s an

illness, a kind of madness, and I have to excuse them.” “Then let us speak plainly. In my

analyses I find it’s the closest relatives, fathers or brothers, who are the guilty men.” “It has

nothing to do with my brother.” “So it was your father, then.”

Then it came out that when she was between the ages of eight and twelve her allegedly

otherwise admirable and high-principled father used regularly to take her into his bed and

practise external ejaculation (making wet) with her. Even at the time she felt anxiety. A six-year-

older sister to whom she talked about it later admitted that she had had the same experiences

with her father. A cousin told her that at the age of fifteen she had had to resist the advances of

her grandfather. Naturally she did not find it incredible when I told her that similar and worse

things must have happened to her in infancy. In other respects hers is a quite ordinary hysteria

with usual symptoms. [The Origins of Psychoanalysis, pp. 195-96]


Just a few months later, in September 1897, Freud distanced himself from his trauma

theory, which no one, not even his collaborator Josef Breuer, was able to accept, and then found

the “solution” in infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex—in other words, in his drive

theory.


- pp. 158-161 (Why Is the Truth So Scandalous?): The general public tends to doubt the

prevalence of sexual abuse of children by older siblings and adults and to deny its lasting effects,

because the necessary repression of what one knew as a young child blocks any later insight into

this subject. Furthermore, it is not in the best interest of adults, once they are in a position to take

over the active role themselves, to uncover the motives behind their actions. But most important,

the principles of “poisonous pedagogy” insist that parents’ actions toward their children be

regarded exclusively as loving and beneficial and that children be denied the right to protest.

Freud’s case history of the Wolf-Man, entitled “From the History of an Infantile

Neurosis,” demonstrates to the reader who is sensitive to the language of “poisonous pedagogy”

the way a great innovator, laboring under the burden of pedagogical principles he has

internalized, pits his own intellect against what he knows to be true. Even though the

implications of his knowledge are buried, they do not disappear from sight entirely; since there

are tombstones with names written on them, it is impossible to withhold the whole story from

future generations. For example, Freud does not dispute the “seduction” of the Wolf-Man by his

sister, although he greatly minimizes its significance.

In this chapter, I shall present the story of the Wolf-Man in order to show how my

hypothesis about the crucial importance of a trauma repressed at a very early age—which here,

as in most cases, remains hidden behind a screen memory—can be verified with the aid of later

biographical data. The nature of the enactments produced by the Wolf-Man’s repetition

compulsion tells us that it was not his witnessing of the primal scene or his drive conflicts that

made him ill but rather the abuse he suffered at a very early age and was unable to articulate all

his life because he had no one he could confide in. In order to make this clear, I must first make a

digression here.

Freud describes the Wolf-Man’s problematic attitude toward money as follows:


He had become very rich through legacies from his father and uncle; it was obvious that he

attached great importance to being taken for rich, and he was liable to feel very much hurt if he

was undervalued in this respect. But he had no idea how much he possessed, what his

expenditure was, or what balance was left over. It was hard to say whether he ought to be called

a miser or a spendthrift. He behaved now in this way and now in that, but never in a way that

seemed to show any consistent intention. Some striking traits, which I shall further discuss

below, might have led one to regard him as a hardened plutocrat, who considered his wealth as

his greatest personal advantage, and who would never for a moment allow emotional interests to

weigh against pecuniary ones. Yet he did not value other people by their wealth, and, on the

contrary, showed himself on many occasions unassuming, helpful, and charitable. Money, in

fact, had been withdrawn from his conscious control, and meant for him something quite

different. . . .

He himself was puzzled by his behavior in another connection. After his father’s death the

property that was left was divided between him and his mother. His mother administered it, and,

as he himself admitted, met his pecuniary claims irreproachably and liberally. Yet every

discussion of money matters that took place between them used to end with the most violent

reproaches on his side, to the effect that she did not love him, that she was trying to economize at

his expense, and that she would probably rather see him dead so as to have sole control over the

money. His mother used then to protest her disinterestedness with tears, and he would thereupon

grow ashamed of himself and declare with justice that he thought nothing of the sort of her. But

he was sure to repeat the same scene at the first opportunity.


It should be obvious that a child who was abused at a very early age in order to fulfill an

adult’s or older sibling’s needs will be left for the rest of his life with the feeling that he had to

give too much of himself. Naturally, this will also express itself in the person’s attitude toward

money . . . Even though his underlying feeling is a message concerning a real event, he is not

able to make the proper connection unless someone helps him to experience the emotional

content of this event and its significance for him. Since, on the contrary, he is repeatedly told

that, according to the expectations of those who are raising him, he is not giving enough, is not

emptying his bowels at the right time or in the right quantity, the feeling that too much is being

demanded of him combines with a bad conscience and eventually results in the unbearable

conviction that he is a bad person for always feeling exploited “without cause” and for not being

glad to give away all that he had and is. The average layperson will surely have no trouble

believing that sexual abuse of a child will lead to problems in his or her later sex life. This

connection is not so obvious, however, to an orthodox analyst who has become practiced in

tracing all the patient’s difficulties back to infantile sexual desires.

The consequences of sexual abuse, however, are not restricted to problems in one’s

sexual life; they impair the development of the self and of an autonomous personality. There are

several reasons why this is so:

1. To have one’s helplessness and total dependency taken advantage of by the person

one loves, by one’s mother or father, at a very early age soon produces an interlinking of love

and hate.

2. Because anger toward the loved person cannot be expressed for fear of losing that

person and therefore cannot be lived out, ambivalence, the interlinking of love and hate, remains

an important characteristic of later object relationships. Many people, for instance, cannot even

imagine that love is possible at all without suffering and sacrifice, without fear of being abused,

without being hurt and humiliated.

3. Since the fact of abuse must be repressed for the sake of survival, all knowledge that

would threaten to undo this repression must be warded off by every possible means, which

ultimately results in an impoverishment of the personality and a loss of vital roots, manifested,

for example, in depression.

4. The consequences of a trauma are not eliminated by repressing it but are actually

reinforced. The inability to remember the trauma, to articulate it (i.e., to be able to communicate

these earlier feelings to a supportive person who believes you), creates the need to articulate it in

the repetition compulsion.

5. The unremembered plight of being at someone else’s mercy and being abused by a

loved object is perpetuated either in a passive or an active role, or alternately in each.

6. One of the simplest and completely unnoticed forms of perpetuation of the active

role is abuse of one’s children for one’s own needs, which are all the more urgent and

uncontrollable the more deeply repressed the original trauma.


- pp. 166-172: We know that the pseudonym of Freud’s famous patient comes from a dream he

had as a child, which is recorded by Freud as follows:


“I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot

towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was

winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord,

and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of

the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more

like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like

dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eat up by the

wolves, I screamed and woke up.”


In the picture the patient drew of the wolves in the tree he shows five wolves, not “six or seven,”

staring at the child.

In his analysis many determinants of this dream emerge: the frightening story of the tailor

and the wolves, told him by his maternal grandfather; the very real danger of wolves in the

Russian countryside in those days; the fairy tales “Little Red Riding-Hood” and “The Wolf and

the Seven Kids”; the terror his sister was always able to awaken in her little brother by showing

him the picture of a wolf walking on its hind legs, etc. It seems to me that we can find another

determinant of this dream if we consider the child’s specific, individual situation more carefully.

The grandfather (“Father Karamasov”) and his four sons were all father figures who, the boy felt,

were keeping their eye on him, i.e., constantly staring at him in the dream. Was the unwavering,

uncanny gaze of the five wolves actually the mysterious, incomprehensible, and possibly

homosexually tinged gaze of his own father, multiplied by five? (The cruel legendary

grandfather and his four sons also add up to the number five.) This question can never be

satisfactorily answered, lacking the analytic setting. I have presented these ideas here to

demonstrate, with the use of material familiar to many analysts, how the drive theory in my

opinion obscures obvious connections and how this obfuscation prevents the patient’s key

traumatic experiences from coming to the surface during analysis.

As a training analyst, I often had occasion to read the case presentations of colleagues

who were applying for membership in the Psychoanalytic Association. I noticed that their

attempts to meet the demands of the psychoanalytic institutes—that is, to concentrate

exclusively on what occurred in the transference and countertransference and to explain this in

terms of whatever theory happened to be in fashion at the moment (e.g., drive theory, structural

model, ego psychology, the concepts of Melanie Klein, Kohut, Kernberg, etc.)—were claiming

so much of the authors’ attention that in many cases their patients’ childhood was virtually

ignored. What happened in the transference was interpreted in each case in terms of one

particular concept. In the discussions, various alternative views were presented, depending on the

theory being defended. Thus, the patient’s behavior—his protracted silence, for instance—could

be interpreted as defiant aggression, as “passive homosexual seductiveness,” as “the desire to be

penetrated by the analyst” (with interpretations), as “the need to spoil the analyst’s pleasure in

his work,” as distrust, rivalry, etc. In these discussions I often had the impression that much of

what was being said might be true, but since it did not take the patient’s early childhood into

consideration, it had no biographical relevance. To be sure, whether the patient is regarded as

passively homosexual or as openly defiant depends not only on the analyst’s theory but also on

the feelings arising in the transference and countertransference. But these feelings cannot be put

to productive use in working with the patient if they appear in a vacuum; they must be

understood in the context of the patient’s childhood. Then, everything the patient says or does

will no longer be seen simply as part of the here and now but—to the extent this information is

taken seriously—as links in a chain of compulsive repetitions, the logic of which can often be

grasped with the aid of a few facts about the patient’s early history. When it is discovered, for

example, that the silent patient mentioned above grew up with a mother who was interned in a

concentration camp as a child and never spoke of it or with a father who committed atrocities in

the Vietnam War and, similarly, never spoke of it, then the analyst is in a position to realize that

his patient’s silence is the only way he can convey an earlier situation he has not yet been able to

express in words. It is a situation to which he has been subjected all his life and to which he must

first subject his analyst before he himself can consciously confront this feeling of standing before

a wall of silence.

I hope this example of the silent patient makes it clear that nothing is to be gained by

quizzing patients. What is important is to ask questions along with them, to encourage them to

ask and not be deaf and blind to the verbal and nonverbal information they have already given.

A well-trained child who later enters analysis will be able to communicate only a very small part,

perhaps as little as ten percent, of his trauma. If we are intent on playing the judge by trying to

determine the legitimacy of his complaints and to point out his exaggerations (“But your father

wasn’t always cruel”), then we will deprive him of even that ten percent. For then the patient will

be just as afraid of us as he is of his internalized object or of his so-called superego. If we permit

him instead to see in us an advocate, whose concern is not to defend and protect the father but to

stand by the patient, then our imagination and empathy will help him experience his early

feelings of abandonment, loneliness, anxiety, powerlessness, and rage without having to protect

his parents from them, because with our aid he will realize that feelings do not kill.

Perhaps he will never be able to give voice to the remaining ninety percent of his

complaints, because a child’s suffering surpasses the imagination of any adult. But at least he

will be more likely to get closer to the unconscious trauma if the analyst relinquishes his or her

judgmental role.

In Freud’s presentation of the Wolf-Man’s case history we find the following passage:


When the news of his sister’s death arrived, so the patient told me, he felt hardly a trace of grief.

He had to force himself to show signs of sorrow, and was able quite coolly to rejoice at having

now become the sole heir to the property. He had already been suffering from his recent illness

for several years when this occurred. But I must confess that this one piece of information made

me for a long time uncertain in my diagnostic judgment of the case. It was to be assumed, no

doubt, that his grief over the loss of the most dearly loved member of his family would meet with

an inhibition in its expression, as a result of the continued operation of his jealousy of her and of

the added presence of his incestuous love for her which had now become unconscious. But I

could not do without some substitute for the missing outbursts of grief. And this was at last

found in another expression of feeling which had remained inexplicable to the patient. A few

months after his sister’s death he himself made a journey in the neighborhood in which she had

died. There he sought out the burial-place of a great poet, who was at that time his ideal, and

shed bitter tears upon his grave. This reaction seemed strange to him himself, for he knew that

more than two generations had passed by since the death of the poet he admired. He only

understood it when he remembered that his father had been in the habit of comparing his dead

sister’s works with the great poet’s. He gave me another indication of the correct way of

interpreting the homage which he ostensibly paid to the poet, by a mistake in his story which I

was able to detect at this point. He had repeatedly specified before that his sister had shot

herself; but he was now obliged to make a correction and say that she had taken poison. The

poet, however, had been shot in a duel.


Since the patient had been sexually abused, tormented, threatened, and dominated by his

older sister from earliest childhood and later learned that his beloved father preferred her to him,

perhaps his lack of grief at her suicide was the expression of his true self. He was glad that he

was now the “sole heir” to the fortune, i.e., to his parents’ love as well. The fact that this feeling

was ambivalent, since the Wolf-Man was also attached to his sister in some respects, does not

mean it did not exist. Yet the passage indicates, among other things, how greatly Freud’s

interpretive work was influenced by his pedagogical way of thinking and by his own childhood

(he had five sisters before his brother Alexander, his junior by ten years, was born). To

substantiate this thesis fully would require writing a new book about the Wolf-Man that would

point out in some detail the traces of “poisonous pedagogy” in Freud’s approach. I do not see this

as my task, even though it might be educationally useful to investigate Freud’s pedagogical

attitudes, which mirrored the values of his society.

All I wanted to do here was to use a well-known example to show how someone can

spend all his life reenacting a severe childhood trauma (sexual abuse) in all kinds of situations

and can even unconsciously lead several analysts of high repute to misuse him repeatedly for

their own purposes. In his case history of the Wolf-Man, Freud reports:


The patient suddenly called to mind the fact that, when he was still very small, “on the first

estate,” his sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First came a recollection that in the

lavatory, which the children used frequently to visit together, she had made this proposal: “Let’s

show our bottoms,” and had proceeded from words to deeds. Subsequently the more essential

part of the seduction came to light, with full particulars as to time and place. It was in spring, at

a time when his father was away; the children were in one room playing on the floor, while their

mother was working in the next. His sister had taken hold of his penis and played with it, at the

same time telling him incomprehensible stories about his Nanya, as though by way of

explanation. His Nanya, she said, used to do the same thing with all kinds of people—for

instance, with the gardener: she used to stand him on his head, and then take hold of his

genitals.


When we keep in mind that the boy actually didn’t spend much time with his parents but

grew up with his sister and their nurse and that he was afraid of the English governess, we can

understand that his sister’s behavior, along with the story she made up about the nurse, robbed

him with a single blow of the one and only person to whom he could have communicated his

feelings of fear and powerlessness. He might have dealt successfully with his sister’s power over

him if his relationship with the nurse had been left intact. But the idea that the person closest to

him did “even worse things” with men than his sister did with him led to the child’s sudden

psychic loneliness (in the midst of people who “loved” him but had no understanding of his

fears) and to the eruption of his infantile neurosis.

The Wolf-Man found himself in the same situation later when he became the object of

the needs of his analysts and his analytic sister and again, finally, as a man of nearly ninety,

when he gave the young journalist Karin Obholzer the opportunity to use him as a witness

against psychoanalysis. The fact that he had been victimized by his sister was still influencing his

relationships with women when he was an old man. In his conversations with Obholzer he

mentions several times that he is trying in vain to stop seeing a woman whose friendship he finds

he cannot do without. As a result, he is putting up with a number of things he actually doesn’t

like at all. We can also assume that it never occurred to him to refuse Muriel Gardiner’s wish to

make public his memoirs together with the case histories because he was grateful to her for her

long years of selfless support. Similarly, he felt obliged to answer Obholzer’s questions because

in his loneliness he didn’t want to lose the concern and interest the young woman showed him.

The Wolf-Man never learned, either in childhood or in his analyses, that one can resist the

demands made by a person one loves without perishing as a result. Moreover, a child who has

been abused at an all too early age will not even be fully aware of being abused in later life. He

may suspect it but will quickly doubt his own suspicions and feel guilty for having them. Still,

we can assume that the Wolf-Man’s harmful training did not begin in infancy, for he had an

affectionate nurse and therefore as a child was probably able to become aware of a number of

things. This is why his memory of being abused by his sister remained conscious, but he couldn’t

know, on the other hand, in what way his nurse, previous to this, had in all probability abused

him in infancy for her own needs. Presumably he later had to reenact unconsciously this portion

of his repressed trauma in his repetition compulsion by repeatedly allowing himself to be

manipulated by other people, being suspicious of these people, and developing symptoms; yet it

was impossible for him ever to see through the symptoms or make a break with those who were

manipulating him. This is just the way it is for an infant, who is also unable to forbid adults to

abuse his body; he cannot even perceive in himself the wish to do so, for he loves the person who

is doing it to him and is totally dependent on him or her.

Taking the Wolf-Man’s entire life history into account, I would therefore surmise that his

sister’s so-called seduction of him, which was not repressed, was preceded by earlier sexual

manipulation by his nurse, unremembered by the patient and therefore reenacted with numerous

people throughout his life. This hypothesis is by no means intended to disparage the Wolf-Man’s

benefactors. He probably did not make it at all easy for them to see through the reenactments

produced by his repetition compulsion.


- pp. 184-189 [The Father of Psychoanalysis]: If children are always led by the hand and thus

prevented from finding their own way, they will gradually stop making discoveries for

themselves. There are fathers who in their own way love their children very much, protect them,

and would like to introduce them to their intellectual world, becoming so obsessed with this idea

that they can scarcely imagine that their children, whom they regard as an extension of

themselves, could see the world any differently than they do. This overly protective atmosphere

severely jeopardizes a child’s vitality and capacity for development. He is grateful to his father

for so much (for life, for love, for the knowledge imparted to him) and at first gladly refrains

from doing anything that might hurt him. But if his urge to express himself is great enough, he

will either become mentally ill or be forced to hurt his father. The consequences of the latter step

will depend on the father’s degree of maturity.

We cannot hold it against Sigmund Freud that he tried to bestow so much on his

wonderful, beloved child, psychoanalysis: his theories about psychic mechanisms, the Oedipus

complex, his drive theory, and, finally, his structural model. The child, however, has long since

grown up, has made discoveries of his own, and can no longer go through life holding his

father’s or grandfather’s hand and seeing the world with their eyes. Freud might not have

impeded the development of psychoanalysis by overloading it with content relevant

predominantly to his own day if he had bequeathed his followers the freedom to make use of his

instruments to discover what was true for their patients and their time. But as we know, Freud

was no exception as a father. Like most fathers of his day, he imposed severe restrictions on his

“sons,” with the result that the most gifted of them were left with the choice of allowing

themselves to be constricted by the contents of his theories or – if, like Jung and Adler, they were

unwilling to do this – of making a complete break with the master. By doing the latter, they

sacrificed in their own systems the advantages afforded by Freud to explore a patient’s early

childhood with the aid of transference and countertransference. In Freud’s lifetime, then, there

were either loyal followers or renegades. Not until after his death did analysts like Balint,

Winnicot, Kohut, and others make discoveries of their own by using his methods and yet remain

within the fold. Without the psychoanalytic method, their new insights about early childhood

would not have been possible. But could these insights have been reached while Freud was still

alive?

If my analogy is of some value, then one could also say that a father cannot both sire a

brilliant child and try to guide his every footstep without detriment to the child’s creative powers.

No one can bestow on humankind a method with the vision and explosive force of

psychoanalysis and at the same time prescribe what use is to be made of it. Once brought into the

world, it leads a life of its own and has unlimited possibilities for development if no longer held

back by its father.

The psychoanalytic approach cannot renounce its attempt to unmask dishonesty without

renouncing itself. But if it remains true to its central task and refuses to stop uncovering,

understanding, and making visible the way things really are, it will never content itself with a

rigid system for the very reason that such systems are hiding places for dishonesty in its various

guises.

We cannot reproach Freud for not knowing what we know today or for giving up his

trauma theory in favor of the Oedipus complex, although I personally am sorry he did the latter,

for I have found confirmation of his earlier findings in nearly all the cases I have analyzed or

supervised. The effects of the abuse of power can easily be identified in the childhood of every

patient, and its narcissistic significance is being recognized increasingly. Yet the sexual

components of abuse still are the most difficult to uncover, and we know it is the fact of

concealment that isolates the child, leaving him alone with his secret and thus making him ill.

But without being analyzed himself, how could Freud have lived with the consequences of his

original discovery?

It would be interesting to try to imagine what attitude Freud would have toward his

various teachings if he were alive now. Perhaps he would choose not to reissue some of his

works, in particular the case study of Schreber. If he were a young man today, possibly he would

no longer be happy with his structural theory, which he developed in later life. We might wonder

if it wouldn’t seem strange to him that drive interpretations he considered appropriate eighty

years ago are sometimes being passed on in the very same form, or if it wouldn’t surprise him

that after half a century the truths of his day (for example, regarding male and female sexuality)

are being handed down unexamined as though we had not learned a great deal to add to them.

But all this is pure speculation, mixed with hope and idealization. Many analysts would still like

to see in Freud the farsighted, tolerant—in short, perfect—father, not subject to historical

limitations, and would prefer to deny the fact that even a genius is a child of his times. But

perfection would not be human and would therefore certainly not provide the right soil for

psychoanalytic discoveries. Wouldn’t it be an unavoidable step in an analyst’s maturation

process to give up the strong idealization of Freud and work through the ensuing grief? How are

we to develop the ability to make discoveries of our own if we retain our deeply concealed,

childlike obedience toward him?

My speculations about Freud’s willingness to revise his position are probably purely

illusory. It is possible that the father of psychoanalysis, like most fathers, would not be able to

transcend his own situation; perhaps he would adhere to his drive theory and the Oedipus

complex today the same way he did then and consider all those who didn’t go along with him as

renegades or enemies. This would be painful but it would not alter the fact that some of us are

not willing to live and work with blinders on for the sake of being regarded as our father’s loyal

children. The father has a right to see the world as he must see it, but the child will hold it against

him unless he or she exercises the same right (which the father rarely grants), namely, to see the

world through his or her own eyes and not be deterred by any paternal prohibitions. The potential

richness of life bestowed by the father can unfold fully only if the damage caused by the well-

intentioned upbringing he has given his child is undone. A growing number of today’s young

people have a more open relationship with their parents than many analysts of the older

generation and than Sigmund Freud himself.

Although Freud courageously uncovered the hypocrisy in sexual matters typical of his

time, if he were to hear the open way adolescents or children are permitted to speak about their

parents nowadays, he would probably find it hard to accept. He himself reported that every

Sunday before his customary visit to his mother, he had stomach pains, but it wouldn’t have

occurred to him to discontinue these visits, which he obviously rebelled against inwardly. He

took it for granted that certain feelings had to be suppressed. In this connection, Freud wrote a

great deal about women’s penis envy but never a word about his envy of his five younger sisters.

We know that he was his mother’s first-born child. After him, over the next ten years, she gave

birth to a second son—who died at the age of eight months when Sigmund was nineteen months

old—and then to five daughters, followed by another son, Alexander. On page 59 of the

biography Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, there is a reproduction of an oil

painting showing the twelve-year-old Sigmund standing to the left of his five sisters and with

little two-year-old Alexander in their midst. Alexander later reported that when Sigmund was

sixteen he said to him: “Look, Alexander, our family is like a book. You and I are the last and

the first of the children, so we are like the strong covers that have to support and protect the weak

girls, who were born after me and before you.” On p. 55 of the same volume there is another

picture, this one a photograph taken in 1864: the mother is sitting with her youngest daughter on

her lap, to her right an older one. Sigmund is sitting beside them, not looking at the camera like

the others. His intelligent, alert face is turned toward his mother’s “pet” on her lap and has an

expression somewhere between dislike and scorn.

It is inconceivable that a child in Freud’s situation would not have strong feelings of

jealousy for the five girls, especially since the family lived in very small quarters at first, and

throughout his childhood Sigmund could not escape the fact that his mother often had to devote

her time and attention to his sisters. In his remark to Alexander just quoted, there is no sign of

this jealousy, with the possible exception of the reaction formation expressed in his role of

protector. Yet this analogy to a book is peculiar, for the most important part of a book is its

contents, the printed pages, which have value even without a cover, whereas the cover alone

would be meaningless without the contents. The sixteen-year-old Sigmund, who had lived with

books since childhood, knew this very well. Since an analogy like this occurred to him all the

same, it must have reflected an only too understandable but deeply repressed jealousy of his five

sisters, who were forever depriving him of the mother he loved, even though they were not so

clever and perhaps not so considerate as he. It must have seemed to the little boy that these

eternal “mother’s pets” were in some mysterious way he could not fathom superior to him. But

how could such a clever boy, whose young mother took so much pleasure in his fine qualities, be

envious or jealous? Ignoble feelings of that nature had to be left to women. How often scorn

protects older siblings from bitter feelings of jealousy! Be that as it may, the striking oil painting

and Sigmund’s words to Alexander shed light on the origin of the theory of penis envy and can

perhaps give women who justifiably resent this concept a more human impression of Freud: not

of the stern, bearded patriarch, but of the brave little protector – defender of his mother and her

five girls – who didn’t have a chance to express consciously his anger at the houseful of females,

to say nothing of expressing it openly.

In his essay “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit,” Freud analyzed

Goethe’s sibling situation very compellingly and sympathetically; yet, as a result of his own

psychological blindness, the genius who discovered the mechanism of repression could write:

“Goethe’s next youngest sister, Cornelia Friederica Christina, was born on December 7, 1750,

when he was fifteen months old. This slight difference in age almost excludes the possibility of

her having been an object of jealousy”. We need only observe young children

to see the strong and unmistakable envy and jealousy they are capable of if they are free to show

these emotions.

Sigmund Freud showed this indirectly as a little boy too, only no one was there who

could understand his behavior and his distress. Ernest Jones writes in his biography of Freud:


An incident which he could not recollect was of slipping from a stool when he was two years old,

and receiving a violent blow on the lower jaw from the edge of the table he was exploring for

some delicacy. It was a severe cut which necessitated sewing up, and it bled profusely; he

retained the scar throughout his life.

A more important occurrence, just before this, was his young brother’s death when Freud was

nineteen months old and the little Julius only eight months. Before the newcomer’s birth the

infant Freud had had sole access to his mother’s love and milk, and he had to learn from the

experience how strong the jealousy of a young child can be. In a letter to Fliess (1897) he admits

the evil wishes he had against his rival and adds that their fulfilment in his death had aroused

self-reproaches, a tendency which had remained ever since. [pp. 7-8]


Freud was eleven months old when Julius was born. He reacted to his brother’s death by

having a serious accident. The early traumatization may explain in large part why he was willing

to concede the jealousy Goethe felt when he was older but not that which he felt as a small child

toward his sister Cornelia, who was just a little over a year younger than he. The likelihood of

experiencing jealousy of his five sisters and coming to terms with it without reaction formations

was greatly reduced because of the wish-fulfillment represented by his brother’s death and the

accompanying guilt he must have felt.


- pp. 3-4 [ (1998) Preface (by Lloyd deMause)]: Before there was Alice Miller, there were few voices

telling the truth about our betrayal of our children.

As she points out in this book, Freud and most psychoanalysts were little different from others

in blaming children for their own abuse. Freud once called a girl patient “hysterical” who was molested

by her father (the father was a friend of Freud’s) because she complained about her molestation. It was

children’s sensuousness that was to blame for sexual assaults by adults, he declared, because “the

sexual constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculated to provoke sexual experiences of

a particular kind [seductions].” Karl Abraham, Freud’s associate, also believed the molestation of his

child patients was “desired by the child unconsciously.” Most psychoanalysts since then have continued

to label patient reports of childhood sexual abuse merely the victim’s “wishes.” As one psychiatrist

wrote, “I was taught in my . . . early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look very skeptically upon

the incestuous sexual material described by my patients . . . Any inclination on my part, or that of my

colleagues in the training situation, to look upon these productions of the patient as having some reality

basis was scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our naiveté.”

Nor has opinion really changed much in either academia or psychiatry. Scholarly academic

journals have recently praised pedophilia as “nurturant” and advocated abolishing laws against sex with

children. The American Psychiatric Association’s current diagnostic manual claims pedophilia is only a

psychiatric disorder if it bothers the pedophile; otherwise, having sex with children is healthy. In fact,

when I gave a speech at a recent A.P.A. convention showing that the majority of children in history were

sexually abused, the audience reacted by wondering if incest isn’t after all not really pathological, since

so many have done it.



http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html


‘For the rest of his life, in fact, Freud reiterated his belief that these clear memories of

incestuous attacks were real. In 1905 he wrote, "I cannot admit that in my paper on 'The

Aetiology of Hysteria' I exaggerated the frequency or importance of.. the effects of

seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely..." (1) Later, he repeatedly

wrote such statements as that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny

frequency among school teachers and child attendants.. and fantasies of being seduced are

of particular interest, because so often they are not fantasies but real memories." (2)

Furthermore, he considered the incestuous memories of such patients as Katharina, Rosalia

H., Elisabeth von R. and the Wolf Man as reality, not fantasy, saying of such traumatic child

abuse "You must not suppose.. that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives

belongs entirely to the realm of fantasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such

events were real and could be unimpeachably established..."(3) He even called his own

memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse, who had

not only forced him to perform sexually and, he reported, "complained because I was

clumsy," but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual blood. (4)

Therefore, regardless of all that has been written about the subject, an unbiased reading of

Freud's works shows that whenever he confronted clear evidence of sexual molestation, he

called it seduction, not fantasy. There was no "great reversal," no "suppression of

seduction," no "betrayal of the child," no "assault on truth."

Freud's courage in acknowledging the extent of childhood sexual molestation was not

shared by the majority of his colleagues. Most, like Jung, simply avoided the topic. Others,

who noted that large numbers of their patients had clear memories of incestuous rape,

blamed the victim, saying, like Abraham, that the molestation "was desired by the child

unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution..." (5)


http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incites.html

1. Freud, Standard Edition. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." Vol. VII (1905). p. 86.

2. Freud, Standard Edition. "Three Essays," p. 148; "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis." Vol. XVI (1917), p. 370.


3. Freud, Standard Edition. "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis." Vol. XVI (1917),

p. 370. It is true that Freud then went on to say that whether seduction had occurred in

reality or in fantasy, "The outcome is the same, and up to the present we have not

succeeded in pointing to any difference in the consequences, whether fantasy or reality has

had the greater share in these events of childhood." Ibid. Today a psychotherapist would

say that it certainly makes a difference whether incest occurred in reality or not. It would be

important, for instance, to know whether Freud's father was or was not the "pervert" Freud

called him--especially since, like most German children of his time he slept with his parents

in infancy. The point here, however, isn't whether Freud's every clinical opinion is held

today. It is only that Freud didn't deny that real childhood seduction all too often occurred in

his patients and in the society around him.

4. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887-1902. New York: Basic Books, 1954, p. 220.

5. Karl Abraham, "The Experiencing of Sexual Traumas as a Form of Sexual Activity." In Selected Papers of Karl Abraham. London: Hogarth Press, 1948. p. 48. Abraham's blaming of the victim is particularly clear in his case of the woman who was raped by her uncle in "On the Significance of Sexual Traumas in Childhood for the Symptomatology of Dementia Praecox. "In Karl Abraham, Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1955, p. 14.

[Absurd]

Hi, agape. You seem to be reading much on both Sigmund Freud and ****** lately, if I'm not mistaken. Why do you like these people?

L∩L.

Also, you seem to self-type INFp now. I thought you were ESTp before. Why the change?

Bolt typed him SLE for some time.

[HERO]

I really need to know how this thread looks to people. Does the text look normal or

kind of like this, so that one line goes all the way to the right and then the next one right under it is just
like two or

three words on the left-hand side of the page. I'm not sure if this illustration works, but I need to know, please. I checked it

from a library computer and it looked normal. Anyway, it's just the computer I'm

using right now (or I'm hoping that's the case; I don't know if my
attempt to

illustrate what it looks like will work anyway). Yes, The Ineffable did type me SLE years ago.

He did eventually realize that I'm IEI. I actually only self-typed SLE for a few months

(or less) in 2010. Or at least that's what I remember.