2
Some months earlier, in the same year, 1977, Anthony Stadlen started his decades-long research on the foundations of the existential psychoanalysis he had been practising for some years. This meant, as a first step, 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 historical and philosophical investigation of psychoanalytic practice and theory helped to make sense of the attitudes, from the 1890s to the 1970s, of leading ‘intellectuals’ – including philosophers, psychoanalysts, writers – to so-called ‘paedophilia’, childhood sexuality, and sexual abuse of children; in particular, to making sense of the attitudes in the 1970s sketched above.
It became increasingly clear that what was required, at least in relation to the psychoanalytic component of this inquiry, was a complete rethinking of, and historical research into, more than eighty years of psychoanalytic mystification, starting with Freud’s ‘seduction theory’ of 1896 and his subsequent retraction of it.
Freud himself never, in his Collected Works, used the term ‘seduction theory’; but the term is accurate in that he did use the word ‘seduction’ (‘Verführung’) to characterise what he called his ‘assertion’ (‘Behauptung’) of 1896. The term ‘seduction’ has been criticised, especially by feminists, because even by his own account, accurate or inaccurate, he was in at least some cases reporting or imputing not ‘merely’ seductive sexual abuse (‘Mißbrauch’, as he called it) of children – which was indeed rape in the legal (though not in France), moral, and phenomenological sense – but unequivocally violent rape (legally rape even in France).
However, the term ‘seduction’ is more accurate than appears to be generally realised or acknowledged, because Freud’s so-called ‘seduction theory’ applied only to those who, in his view, had ‘repressed’ the memory of childhood rape. That is to say, Freud’s hypothesis was that the child, in what Sartre calls mauvaise foi (bad faith, self deception), had seduced itself into pretending to itself to have forgotten, and to have forgotten having forgotten, and to have forgetten that there was anything to forget, whether or not the abuser – the rapist or seducer – had implicitly or explicitly seduced the child into this seduction of itself by itself into the pretence to forget.
Freud first announced the seduction theory in a paper ‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’ published in French in March 1896. He 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.
It is crucial to understand that Freud took ‘hysteria’ to be a physical illness and himself to be a bona fide doctor (physician) and medical researcher. In his 1905 ‘Dora’ case study he claimed that ‘hysteria’ was a real physical illness which mimicked other real physical illnesses. He was claiming to have discovered a caput Nili in neuropathology, not merely in ‘psychopathology’. This is one of the reasons Thomas Szasz was justified, sixty-five years later, in taking ‘hysteria’ as his paradigmatic ‘mental illness’ in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961).
It is true that Freud had already, in his and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895), justified using the means of the Dichter (creative writer) to make his case studies read ‘like novellas’, but this was in the service of medical science. His argument that psychoanalysis was not a medical discipline came thirty years later, in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926).
Freud privately acknowledged, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fließ, that he had hopes of becoming famous before he was forty. He made his implicit claim to be the Koch of ‘hysteria’ to the Vienna Society and Krafft-Ebing two weeks before his fortieth birthday. However, he subsequently retracted the claim, but gave, over the years, somewhat contradictory and misleading reasons for this retraction which were further mystified by later writers.
On 20 October 1973, the philosopher Frank Cioffi gave a talk on BBC Radio 3, published in The Listener on 7 February 1974, ‘Was Freud a Liar?’. Cioffi concluded, at this stage of his thinking, that Freud was not a liar, but was self-deceived, from pride. This, however, raises Sartre’s question in Being and Nothingness (1943), whether there can be, as Freud’s ‘metapsychology’ implied, genuine self-deception: ‘a lie without a liar’.
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 for the first time named as ‘psychoanalysis’, 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 bizarrely insisted, was the most decisive proof that they were memories.
But Cioffi also pointed out the crucial, undeniable, but hitherto apparently unnoticed fact 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.
It is a common mystification of everyday life to apologise for a lesser error than the error one has made. Freud showed that he, too, was capable of doing so.
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. As mentioned above, 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]’.
However, 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 Freud’s ‘Katharina’ case of 1895 and his ‘Dora’ case of 1905 are brilliantly written, neither qualifies as evidence either for the seduction 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 early 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’ (i.e., a phenomenon sufficient in itself to justify the diagnosis ‘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, that he did not give evidence does not mean that nobody ever does so fantasise.)
In a number of his published and unpublished case studies, both before and after the seduction theory episode, Freud reports detailed accounts by the patient of having been sexually abused in early or late childhood. In every case Freud believes the patient without question. And in none of these specific cases does Freud claim, far less give evidence, that the person had been merely fantasising.
Stadlen emphasised that the seduction theory 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 one 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 questionable, 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 which was fourteen at the time and in fact to this day) – he was quite clear that sexual relationships of adults with prepubertal children were indeed sexual abuse and should be treated as criminal.Joseph Wortis reported in his book Fragments of an Analysis with Freud (1954, p. 154):
‘Relations wth children ought not to be tolerated, said Freud; in fact they ought to be prevented with the severest measures. Nobody ought to be permitted to have sexual relations with people who did not enjoy freedom of choice and judgement...’
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 difficult for those who had been sexually abused as children not to be disbelieved, not only by psychoanalysts but also by lay people who had heard or read something about psychoanalysis and its history.
A further crucial mystification throughout this history has been the presumption of illness: ‘mental illness’. We have discussed this in many seminars, and will not repeat the argument here.However, not only was ‘hysteria‘ taken by Freud to be an actual disease or illness which imitated other actual diseases or illnesses (as he explains in the ‘Dora’ case study), but throughout most of the twentieth century a report of childhood sexual abuse was liable to be taken, by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and lay people influenced by what they had picked up from superficial reading of or hearing about Freud, as itself evidence of a supposed ‘mental illness’ of the person reporting having been abused.
3
It is important to realise that, two-thirds through the twentieth century, it was still commonplace, 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 at the time he was developing the seduction theory told him they had been sexually abused, but turned out to be fantasising; and that this enabled him to discover that there was, in fact, for a child no difference between a real or a fantasied seduction or assault.
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:
- (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.’
- (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 bizarre 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.’
It might be objected that Costigan’s is a popular account. But the same misleading story continued to be told by supposedly scholarly specialists, even after Cioffi’s demystification of 1973-4. For example, Alan Krohn in Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis (1978, p. 21) wrote:
‘Once again demonstrating his courage and scientific integrity, Freud came to see that the “seduction theory” was wrong, and that what patients had reported as memories of seductions were in fact fantasies that had been formed to cover up auto-erotic activity (and associated fantasies) in childhood. With Freud’s realization that these “memories” were remnants of infantile wishes came his recognition of the role of infantile sexuality.’
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’:
- 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.’
- 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).
- John Bowlby reported that, as a young psychoanalyst, he had wanted to study what happened between mothers and babies. But, he said, 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 ‘intellectuals’ who called for the ‘liberation’ of children’s sexuality and of adults’ right to enjoy and 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 educated and 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’.
