Freud’s First Case Study. Who was its ‘Heroine’? Fact or Fiction? Richard Skues conducts Inner Circle Seminar 237 (9 July 2017)

Sigmund Freud, 1891

Freud’s First Case Study (1892)

Who was its ‘heroine’?

Was Freud truthful?
Are his claims substantiated?

Richard Skues

conducts

Inner Circle Seminar No. 237

introduced by

Anthony Stadlen

Sunday 9 July 2017

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In this seminar the brilliant historian Richard Skues will reveal, and help us discover for ourselves, his paradigm-changing research findings on Freud’s first case history. This may well turn out to give evidence for Thomas Szasz’s affirmation in his 2007 Inner Circle Seminar:

Psychotherapy is one of the most worthwhile things in the world.

During twenty-one years of seminars we have criticised much in the great cases of psychotherapy; but this was the lively self-examination of a noble tradition – not a matter of ‘Killing Freud’ [one book’s title], or of promoting biological or compulsory psychiatry. We have criticised the corruption of psychotherapy by its confusion with clinical psychiatry and by the mystifying language of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’. But this is not an attack on psychotherapy itself.

We hope in this and future Inner Circle Seminars to demonstrate the great value and achievements of psychotherapy, and provide psychotherapists themselves, as well as the public, with authentic evidence for their discipline and craft, and for its often astonishing and unpredictable authentic outcome, as opposed to the alienated, institutionalised, mechanistic, box-ticking demands to justify their practice as ‘evidence-based’ and ‘outcome-focussed’.

We start (where better?) with Sigmund Freud’s first significant case history (1892): his hypnotic treatment of a woman who had difficulty breastfeeding. The philosopher and historian of psychiatry Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has claimed that the patient was none other than Freud’s wife Martha, thus entailing contradictions allegedly due to an alleged deviousness of Freud’s that would be ethically preposterous.

Why has Borch-Jacobsen’s claim not attracted more attention? Would it not be scandalous if Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, were so fraudulent?  The answer is that it has become a commonplace in recent decades to assume that Freud was indeed a liar and a fraud, so that Borch-Jacobsen can draw on this by now paradigmatic presumption to find, circularly, yet more ‘evidence’ for this presumed paradigm.

It is in this sense that the work of Richard Skues, one of the world’s most serious and respected Freud scholars, is paradigm-changing. A superb teacher, he will facilitate our researching in the seminar itself, with the help of our iPhones, tablets, etc., the questions:

(1) Who was the patient?
(2) Was Freud truthful?
(3) Can his claims of therapeutic success be substantiated?

This seminar is one of the most important of all since our seminars began 21 years ago.

Why?

Freud said that his theories were dispensable and (he used the English phrase) ‘open to revision’. To understand and evaluate psychoanalysis we should, he said, examine and ‘judge’ his small number of detailed individual case studies and analyses of specific dreams and slips. The case studies in particular he offered explicitly as true accounts, in which he strove for accuracy in all respects except the minimum disguise necessary for confidentiality. To change any other detail would be, he said, an ‘abuse’. And one should make clear what had been disguised.

For most of the twentieth century, nobody questioned Freud’s truthfulness at this basic level of reporting. His interpretations of what he reported were ridiculed by many as wild, crazy, far-fetched, absurd, the theories of a charlatan; but his honesty as a reporter of facts was unquestioned. And psychoanalysts such as Kanzer and Glenn, in their book Freud and His Patients (1980), argued that, like the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, Freud’s case studies would never be replaced as paradigms from which psychoanalysts and others would learn their craft, whether by agreement or dissent.

However, since the 1970s, philosophers, journalists, and even some historians have claimed that Freud, far from being an accurate reporter, was a liar and fraud whose case studies were fiction, even on one occasion portraying a patient who never existed.

This constitutes a grave crisis for psychoanalysis, and for psychotherapy generally. If the case studies which Freud said we should take as embodying his most fundamental discoveries are discredited as fraudulent, what then?

Leading Freudian and, significantly, Jungian analysts have pleaded that all case studies are necessarily fictional; that ‘narrative truth’, not mere ‘historical truth’, is what counts; that, in fact, we are all fictions; and that, for example, Freud’s living ‘Wolf Man’ patient was an ‘impostor’, while the ‘real’ Wolf Man existed precisely in the pages of Freud’s immortal case study and nowhere else. This hardly seems a satisfactory resolution of the crisis.

But why is this also a crisis for other forms of psychotherapy, such as Jungian and existential? Are they not independent of Freudian psychoanalysis? No. For example, the pioneer existential therapists (Binswanger, Boss, Szasz, Laing, Esterson) were all psychoanalysts. They would have been horrified at the schizoid way existential analysis and psychoanalysis are taught today as if they were in mutual contradiction. Boss and Holzhey wrote: ‘Daseinsanalysis wants only to be a purified psychoanalysis’: purified, that is, of natural-scientistic ‘metapsychology’. For what they saw as the phenomenological discoveries of Freud and later psychoanalysts, they had deep respect. They saw existential therapists who were ignorant of psychoanalysis as simply incompetent. Such therapists are likely to use vulgarised psychoanalytic ideas in any case, but without realising they are doing so, and without insight into their origin. In this sense, psychoanalysis and existential analysis stand or fall together.

Was Freud a fraudulent fictionaliser, or was he a conscientious chronicler, or perhaps a bit of both? This is what Richard Skues will help us decide on Sunday 9 July.

As explained above, this is not merely an historical footnote, but is of immediate practical urgency for us as therapists. As a true teacher, Richard Skues will not lecture us on his own views of the matter. Rather, he will show that we ourselves have the means to find the answer.

You are encouraged to bring smartphones and tablets so that we may participate in active research together. If you book, you will be sent a copy of Freud’s first case study as an email attachment.

Your contribution to the dialogue will be warmly welcomed.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, mineral water, fruit, nuts, biscuits included; payable a month in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

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

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857  +44 (0) 7809 433 250

E-mail: stadlen@aol.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.