Intellectuals and Sexual Abuse. Advocates of adults’ ‘right’ to sexual relations with ‘consenting’ children. A further contribution to existential seduction theory. Anthony Stadlen conducts by Zoom Inner Circle Seminar 283. (18 June 2023)

 

Intellectuals and Sexual Abuse

Advocates of adults’ ‘right’ to sexual relations with ‘consenting’ children

A further contribution to existential seduction theory

Anthony Stadlen

conducts by Zoom

Inner Circle Seminar No. 283

Sunday 18 June 2023

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

[Also see: 

• Anthony Stadlen seminar on ‘Intellectuals and Sexual Abuse’. By Frank Schiphorst (16 May 2023) ]

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Louis Althusser

Louis Aragon

 

Roland Barthes

Simone de Beauvoir

Patrice Chéreau

David Cooper

Gilles Deleuze

Jacques Derrida

Françoise Dolto

Michel Foucault

Félix Guattari 

Michel Leiris

Jean-Franҫois Lyotard

Francis Ponge

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1977, leading French philosophers and writers, including Louis Althusser, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre, the opera and film director Patrice Chéreau, and a number of eminent doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists, including the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, petitioned the French Parliament to assert the ‘right’ of adults to engage in sexual relations with ‘consenting’ children and the ‘right’ of children to ‘consent’.

In a dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet broadcast by France Culture on 4 April 1978, later translated and published in Michel Foucault: politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writings (ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 1988), Michel Foucault said:

‘...to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.’

This phenomenon was not restricted to France. In the UK, Foucault’s friend Dr David Cooper, psychiatrist and founder of ‘anti-psychiatry’, had written in his book The Grammar of Living (1974, p. 50):

‘Initiation of young children into orgasmic experiences, in spontaneous body-exploration and play within their peer-group, will become, I believe, part of a full education towards the end of this century.’

And (p. 149):

‘Small children, as has been clearly demonstrated, can have orgasm too and the sooner initiation is achieved the better [...]’

On 26 August 1975, The Guardian carried a headline, Child-Lovers win Fight for Role in Gay Lib. The people The Guardian described as ‘child-lovers’ were the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).

PIE was granted affiliate status by the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, today renamed as Liberty). In 1976 NCCL made a submission to parliament’s criminal law revision committee:

‘Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult, result in no identifiable damage.’

Hence, argued NCCL, it was ‘logical’ that the age of consent be abolished; but, as this was ‘not politically possible’, it should be lowered to fourteen – or to ten

‘provided it is demonstrated that consent was clearly given by the child’. 

On 30 August 1977 – the year of the French intellectuals’ petition – The Times (p. 3) reported:

‘The Campaign for Homosexual Equality at a conference in Nottingham yesterday passed by an overwhelming majority a resolution condemning “the harrassment [sic] of the Paedophile Information Exchange by the press”. [...] The conference gave a standing ovation to Dr Edward Brongersma, a member of the Upper House of the Dutch Parliament, who led the discussion on paedophilia.’

Brongersma was a Doctor of Law, knighted by Queen Juliana in 1975. He wrote the book Loving Boys (1986, 1990).

Polly Toynbee reported a fortnight later in The Guardian (Guardian Women, 12 September 1977, p. 12) her interview with the former Chairman of PIE, Keith Hose, who argued for reducing the age of consent to four. He assured her:

‘...almost all children are far more capable of anal and vaginal intercourse than they are given credit for.’

Toynbee then consulted the psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Dr Anthony Storr, who said to her ‘without hesitation’ that sexual relations with adults are ‘very often extremely damaging for children’. She ‘felt relieved to hear all my own feelings absolutely confirmed’. But, despite her ‘disgust, aversion and even anger [...] at the thought of the age of consent being lowered to four’, she

‘had a sinking feeling that in another five years or so, their [PIE’s] aims would eventually be incorporated into the general liberal credo, and we would all find them acceptable.’

And she ended as she had begun:

‘I still have this sinking sensation that after a lot more airing of the paedophiles’ views, our most violent prejudices will eventually be broken down.’

That Ms Toynbee might cultivate a moral sensibility of her own, whether positive, negative, or neutral on ‘paedophilia’, independent of ‘the general liberal credo’, appears not to have occurred to her.

In the same year, 1977, Anthony Stadlen started his decades-long research on the foundations of psychoanalysis. This meant taking Sigmund Freud seriously when he asked to be judged not by his theories but by his paradigmatic case studies and detailed analyses of specific dreams and slips. (Albert Einstein, similarly, enjoined people to look not at what physicists say but at what they do.) This entailed an historical and philosophical investigation, not just of the existential-phenomenological validity of psychoanalytic practice and theory, but of the attitude, from the 1890s to the 1970s, of leading ‘intellectuals’ – including philosophers, psychoanalysts, writers, feminists – to so-called ‘paedophilia’, childhood sexuality, and sexual abuse of children.

It required a complete rethinking of, and historical research into, more than eighty years of psychoanalytic mystification, starting with what came to be called (not by Freud himself) Freud’s ‘seduction theory’ of 1896 and his subsequent retraction of it.

In a paper ‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’ published in French in March 1896, Freud wrote that his new method of both research and therapy, ‘psychoanalysis’, here publicly named for the first time, had revealed that

‘[...] a precocious experience of sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals, resulting from sexual abuse [‘Mißbrauch’] committed by another person in the years up to the age of eight to ten, before the child has reached sexual maturity [...] is the specific aetiology of hysteria.’

On 21 April 1896 he repeated in a paper, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, with the leading sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in the chair, that the ‘specific aetiology’ of ‘hysteria’ was sexual abuse (‘Mißbrauch’) in childhood ‘before the age of second dentition’. In the published paper (not merely as a throwaway comment in his spoken presentation) he called this

‘a momentous finding, the discovery of a caput Nili [source of the Nile] in neuropathology’.

This was named much later, though not by him, his ‘seduction theory’.

By ‘specific aetiology’ Freud had explained, in his 1895 paper ‘A Reply to Criticisms of my Paper on the Anxiety Neurosis’, that he meant a single feature necessarily present in every case of the ‘illness’, which when sufficiently intensified would lead to the ‘illness’ being necessarily present, like the ‘Bacillus Kochii’, whose discovery by Robert Koch a decade earlier had made Koch world-famous for solving the riddle of tuberculosis. Freud privately acknowledged, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fließ, that he had hopes of becoming similarly famous before he was forty. He made his claim to the Vienna Society and Krafft-Ebing two weeks before his fortieth birthday. However, he subsequently retracted the claim, but gave somewhat contradictory and misleading reasons for this retraction over the years, which were further mystified by later writers. 

On 20 October 1973, the philosopher Frank Cioffi gave a talk on BBC Radio 3, ‘Was Freud a Liar?’ (he concluded he was not, but was self-deceived, from pride).

Cioffi pointed out that in the ‘seduction theory’ Freud had stated: (1) that only under the ‘strongest compulsion’ of his avant-garde method, which he here named as ‘psychoanalysis’ for the first time, could his patients be persuaded to ‘reproduce’ the ‘scenes’ of sexual abuse in childhood that he admitted he was, at least sometimes, suggesting to them; and (2) that the patients objected that these ‘scenes’, even if ‘reproduced’ with emotion, did not feel like memories. This, Freud insisted, was the most decisive proof that they were memories.

But Cioffi also pointed out that, in Freud’s purported retraction of his theory, a retraction which took various forms over the years, he managed to convey, without contradiction from readers, that his original seduction theory had been quite different from what it actually had been. He now indicated that his patients had volunteered stories of childhood sexual abuse, which he had at first believed, but then, ‘in definitely ascertainable circumstances’, discovered to his chagrin to be fantasies. He represented this as a triumph rather than a defeat, as he claimed his error had led him to discover childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex.

This point is crucial. It is a common mystification of everyday life to apologise for a lesser error than the error one has made. Ordinary people succeed at this. Why should not a genius like Freud?

Freud did not just revise his seduction theory. He silently revised what the seduction theory he revised had been.  

Freud loved to give detailed evidence, when he had it, or thought he had it. His detailed case studies read, as he said, ‘like novellas’. He justified using the methods of the Dichter (creative writer) to show ‘the relationship between the Leidensgeschichte [deep, perhaps unacknowledged or denied (“unconscious”) existential suffering-history] and the Leiden [presenting complaint]’. But he insisted that his case studies were not fiction. He wrote that he regarded it as an ‘abuse’ (‘Mißbrauch’) to change any aspect of a case history apart from the minimum required to preserve anonymity. 

But neither for the seduction theory nor for its retraction did he give evidence.

Although both the ‘Katharina’ case of 1895 and the ‘Dora’ case of 1905 are brilliantly written, neither qualifies as evidence either for the theory or for the retraction. He ‘treated’ both these supposedly ‘hysterical’ young women when they were eighteen. Both had been incestuously or quasi-incestuously abused in adolescence, Katharina by her father and Dora by her father’s best friend with her father’s implicit collusion. But in neither case is there mention of abuse before the age of second dentition as required by the seduction theory. The two cases do, however, suggest a radical change in Freud’s thinking between 1895 and 1905. He regards Katharina’s vomiting, after she discovered her father having intercourse with her cousin, as an ‘hysterical symptom’ of what he implies was her justified but ‘unconscious’ disgust at her own earlier sexual abuse by her father; but he regards Dora’s conscious disgust at her sexual abuse by her father’s friend at the same age as Katharina’s abuse by her father as itself a pathognomonic ‘symptom’ of her alleged ‘hysteria’.

He did not publish a single case study, or even vignette, to illustrate or substantiate his claim that he had discovered that some patients who had reported sexual abuse in childhood were merely fantasising. Yet he claimed to have done so ‘in definitely ascertainable circumstances’. 

(Of course, this does not mean that nobody ever does so fantasise.)

A number of his published and unpublished case studies, both before and after the seduction theory episode, report detailed accounts by the patient of having been sexually abused in early or late childhood. In every case Freud believes the patient without question.

Stadlen emphasised that the point of the seduction theory was that it was an all-or-nothing theory. The specific aetiology claim meant that a single counter-example (though how one could be certain one had found such an example is unclear: how could one prove someone had never ever been sexually abused and repressed the memory of it?) would not just modify the theory a little. It would completely disprove it. Freud knew this, as he had specifically defined ‘specific aetiology’ thus. But he in effect blamed his patients for his mistake which he tried to turn into a triumph. 

His ‘seduction theory’ and his retraction of it had in common his claim that he was right and the patient was wrong.

But both the ‘seduction theory’ and the retraction were false.

According to Freud, in his 1914 essay ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’ (GW10, p. 56; SE14, p. 18),

‘[Karl] Abraham pronounced the last word on the question of the traumatic aetiology when he pointed out how precisely the peculiarity of the sexual constitution of the child knows how to provoke sexual events of a particular kind, thus traumas.’

It should be emphasised, however, that – despite Freud’s questionably uncritical attitude to the adolescent Dora’s sexual molestation by her father’s friend Herr K. (he actually calls her ‘a child of fourteen’, and Stadlen’s research shows that she was almost certainly only thirteen, below the Austrian age of consent at the time) – he was quite clear that sexual relationships of adults with prepubertal children were indeed sexual abuse and should be treated as criminal.

Moreover, Freud never claimed that all the patients he had taken to be sexually abused in childhood had merely been fantasising. But innumerable twentieth-century writers, for example Freud’s authorised biographer Ernest Jones (1953), asserted that this was precisely what Freud’s great ‘discovery’ had been. Jones eulogised and romanticised the year 1897, when Freud, in a private letter on 21 September 1897 to his friend Wilhelm Fließ, retracted the ‘seduction theory’ and ‘discovered’ childhood oedipal phantasy on which adults’ supposedly fantasied memories of supposed childhood sexual seduction were supposedly based. ‘1897,’ wrote Jones, ‘was the acme of Freud’s life.’

It became even more difficult for those who had been sexually abused as children not to be disbelieved, by psychoanalysts and by everybody else.

A further crucial mystification throughout this history from the beginning has been the presumption of illness: ‘mental illness’. We have discussed this in many seminars. A report of childhood sexual abuse was itself taken as prima facie evidence of the supposed ‘mental illness’, ‘hysteria’.

It is important to realise that, two-thirds through the twentieth century, it was completely standard, both in specialised psychoanalytic writings and in more general or popular accounts, to repeat, without any apparent sense of unreality, unlikelihood, or lack of common sense, that all Freud’s patients told him they had been sexually abused but he found all were fantasising.

For example, The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (1968), an authoritative work, edited by the psychoanalyst Ludwig Edinger with the assistance of other eminent psychoanalysts including Harold Blum, Edward Glover, Bertram Lewin, William Niederland, and Leonard Shengold, contains the following statements:

1. (p. 156) ‘In his autobiographical study, Freud (1925) was to recall that he was at first convinced that the seduction of children actually took place and was responsible for their neuroses. Later, he discovered that these patients reported seductions which hadn’t taken place. Consequently his theory of seduction had to be abandoned. Finally, he realised that from the child’s point of view there was no difference between a real seduction and the wish to be seduced. He therefore introduced the concept of psychic reality which accounts for this apparent contradiction.’
2. (p. 340) ‘At first Freud (1895) believed that what his patients reported as seductions in early childhood had actually occurred. Only later (in 1906) did he discover that they had never taken place and represented the child s wishes. This discovery at first confused him, until he realised that for a child a wish may be equal to an actual experience. Freud called this kind of infantile experience psychic reality.’      

There are a couple of more nuanced brief allusions to the seduction theory episode in the Encyclopedia, but it is telling that the above two statements were approved.

Typical of countless other examples is the account, chosen at random, in Sigmund Freud: A Short Biography by Giovanni Costigan (1965, p. 43):

‘Gradually, he was led to doubt the actuality of these stories of seduction in early childhood, upon which his entire theory of hysteria had been founded, and in course of time he came to abandon his belief in them altogether.’

Three further examples may hint at the extent to which interpersonal reality became discounted by psychoanalysts following Freud’s retraction of his seduction theory and replacement of it by ‘psychic reality’:

1. The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (1968, p. 109) explains:‘The feeling of disgust [Dora] felt when Herr K.’s erect penis pressed against her body (at fourteen) probably meant that she resented the size of her own member. That is, it represented a defense against her consciousness of penis envy. This feeling of disgust persisted, and perhaps was responsible for her refusal to play a feminine role. In this, her father and Herr K. were her competitors. They had what she had not, a penis.’
2. Melanie Klein’s concept of ‘projective identification’ is today often thought to describe an interpersonal situation. It is taken to mean that person P in phantasy ‘projects’ an unacceptable aspect of P, e.g. faeces F, into another person O, and O in phantasy identifies with F. This would be an important concept in its own right. But this is not how Klein originally defined it, in ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (1946). Her concept was purely intrapsychic, and she never changed it. As she describes it, person P projects unacceptable psychic material, e.g. phantasied faeces (F), into the ‘inner object’ representing person O in person P’s own ‘psyche’ or ‘inner world’. And it is person P, not O, who identifies with F, but now as part of ‘inner object’ O, still within P. This was still how ‘projective identification’ was correctly defined, directly quoting Klein’s original, wholly intrapsychic account, in The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (1968, pp. 332-3).   
3. John Bowlby, as a young psychoanalyst, wanted to study what happened between mothers and babies. He was told that this was not an activity worthy of an analyst, because since Freud had given up the seduction theory it was known that all that mattered was unconscious phantasy.

Intellectuals, and by no means only those who called for the ‘liberation’ of children’s sexuality and of adults’ right to exploit it, were often, like the psychoanalysts themselves, seduced by Freud’s and Jones’s seductive misrepresentation of the rise and fall of Freud’s seduction theory. Cioffi’s 1973 demystification of the episode went unnoticed.

Again and again, it was falsely repeated, even a century later, by otherwise intelligent people, not apparently in other respects out of touch with ordinary social reality, that all Freud’s ‘hysterical’ patients in the seduction theory period told him they had been sexually abused; that he had at first believed them all; but that he had then discovered that they were all merely fantasising.

For example, Dr John Casey, Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, wrote (Daily Telegraph, 7 December 1995), a few months before the centenary of Freud's announcement of his seduction theory: 

‘[...] patients came to [Freud] describing all sorts of sexual assaults and seductions by their parents and other relatives [which he at first believed but] then decided that these stories were all fantasies’.

Sartre may serve as a paradigm case.

In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre lucidly and rigorously defined and analysed mauvaise foi (bad faith, self-deception). He ruthlessly revealed the contradictions in Freud’s ‘metapsychology’ of ‘repression’, the ‘unconscious’, and the ‘censor’. 

But Sartre did not manifest the same clarity and sense of reality when addressing Freud’s seduction theory and retraction. He did not have the benefit of Cioffi’s analysis of 1974, but the data were as available to him as to Cioffi, when, in 1958, he wrote a gigantic screenplay, commissioned and drastically shortened by John Huston for his film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), and eventually published posthumously in full as The Freud Scenario (1984). This scenario is remarkable in many respects, but Sartre perhaps became a paradigm case of his own concept of bad faith in that he allowed himself to be naively seduced by both Freud’s and Jones’s false accounts of the seduction theory and its retraction. Freud had failed to give a single actual example, let alone case study, of a patient whose report of being sexually abused as a child he had at first believed but then shown (‘in definitely ascertainable circumstances’, as he claimed) to be a fantasy; yet Jones (though not Freud) had claimed this was true of all Freud’s eighteen seduction theory patients. Sartre was undeterred. He simply invented a paradigm patient, Cäcilie (in the film, Cecily), to exemplify both the seduction theory and its false retraction. Sartre showed Freud helping the fictitious Cäcilie first ‘remember’ that her father had raped her when she was a little child (the seduction theory) and then ‘realise’ that she had imagined this (in conscious ‘fantasy’) because of her oedipal desire (in unconscious ‘phantasy’) for her father (the retraction). Sartre wanted his paradigmatic Cäcilie to be played by Marilyn Monroe; but his wish was not fulfilled.

In the one hundred and twenty-seven years since Freud announced his seduction theory, there have been the wildest swings in the attitude of intellectuals, including psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers and others, to the sexual abuse of children. They saw it where it wasn’t and failed to see it where it was.

In 1984 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson published The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, which further muddied the waters by asserting that Freud’s seduction theory was simply right and his subsequent retraction simply wrong. Others confusedly claimed that Masson was simply right or simply wrong.

In 1987 Drs Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt, paediatricians at Middlesborough Hospital, claimed that their method of investigating reflex anal dilation revealed child sexual abuse in a large number of children. 121 children in Cleveland were removed from their parents; 94 were subsequently returned. In 1988 the Butler-Sloss inquiry concluded that most of the diagnoses were incorrect. 

In the same year, 1988, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis published The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, with its advice:

‘If you are unable to remember any specific instances but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did.’

This ‘recovered memories’ movement led to its adversary the ‘false memories’ movement headed by Elizabeth Loftus.

When positions are adopted dogmatically in either direction, the authorities (for example, in the UK) on the one hand persecute innocent people falsely accused by a criminal child-abusing fantasist; while on the other hand they fail to prosecute a television celebrity because of his fame, or city grooming gangs because of their race. These extreme abdications of rationality and responsibility are rewarded routinely with elevation to the peerage.

There is clearly a dialectic between the psychoanalytic and the societal views on sexual relations between adults and children. It would be reductive to try to derive either view from the other, but it seems clear that the psychoanalytic view has played an important part in the development of the societal view.

The Inner Circle Seminars started with a seminar on Sunday 21 April 1996, the exact centenary of Freud’s announcement on 21 April 1896, to the Vienna Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, of both the ‘seduction theory’ and ‘psychoanalysis’. Seventeen months later on Sunday 21 September 1997 we marked with a seminar the exact centenary of his private retraction of the theory on 21 September 1897 in a letter to Fließ. We explored in subsequent seminars his subsequent development of the ‘oedipal’ theory of infantile sexuality and sexual phantasy.

(See http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/1996/.)

We examined in detail over a number of years how the obfuscation of this episode – by Freud, Jones, and others, including family therapists and feminists who claim to be critical of psychoanalysis – has led to a mystification of the discourse on the sexual abuse of children, embracing both contending dogmas, of ‘recovered’ and ‘false’ memories. We continue this exploration today.

The factual investigation of sexual abuse must be differentiated from the moral discourse. But it is impossible to discuss the ethics of sexual relations between adults and children intelligently if the supposed ‘facts’ are so confused and unreliable.

Moreover, the facts do demand an ethical understanding; and, when a child represses aspects of his or her abuse, it is often precisely the memory of being seduced into denial of the ethical aspect that is repressed. This was not discussed by Freud, nor is it by psychotherapists generally.

In this seminar we shall continue to develop existential seduction theory, as we have done from the first Inner Circle Seminar twenty-seven years ago.

This means giving due recognition to ethics. It also requires the dialectical-phenomenological study of the specific ways in which human beings use language to seduce one another: mystification, invalidation, double bind, etc., as researched by investigators such as Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, R. D. Laing, and Aaron Esterson in the mid-twentieth century, but gravely neglected by existential therapists and Daseinsanalysts since then.

We will thus return to and continue our exploration (in Inner Circle Seminar No. 278 on Sunday 22 January 2023) of Martti Siirala’s critique of what he called the ‘violent elements in the absolutist claims for “Daseinsanalysis” to a direct access to the phenomena in an adequate, undistorted way’.

We shall ask how far these are due to Martin Heidegger’s distaste for dialectics; and whether they may be remedied, and existential seduction theory advanced, by developing concretely Heidegger’s early (1919), but never again mentioned, notion of Diahermeneutics.

In today’s seminar we will, then, be bringing together themes from a number of earlier Inner Circle Seminars; and it is certain that they will not be exhausted, either in this seminar or in the future seminars it will call for.      

Your contribution to the discussion will be warmly welcomed.

This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250

E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.