The Assault on Truth by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

Between 1897 and 1903, Freud came to believe that the case of his early patient Emma Eckstein was typical: most (though not all) of his women patients had deceived themselves and him. Their memories of seduction were nothing more than fantasies, or memories of fantasies—they were products of the Oedipus complex, part of normal childhood sexuality.

The new world that opened up to Freud with this “discovery” was a remarkable one and permitted him to make a large number of genuine discoveries that have retained their value over the years: the sexual and emotional passions of childhood, the reality of the unconscious, the nature of transference and resistance, repression, unconscious fantasies, the power of unconscious emotions, a need to repeat early sorrows, and so on.

The question whether psychoanalysis could have emerged had Freud retained his earlier belief that the memories of his patients were real, not fantasies, is hardly peripheral to the practice of psychoanalysis (and perhaps to the practice of psychotherapy in general, since most therapies are based, openly or implicitly, on Freudian theory). Psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud himself, agree that the abandonment of the seduction theory was the central stimulus to Freud’s later discoveries. The original existence and the persistence of psychoanalysis are, by universal agreement, linked to the abandonment of the seduction theory. The preceding chapters have been concerned with the influences that came to bear on Freud, leading him away from the initial and unpopular insights he gained concerning the reality of abuse, physical and sexual, of children. I adduce a large number of new facts that were unknown before, or simply unnoticed, to support my opinion that Freud gave up this theory, not for theoretical or clinical reasons, but because of a personal failure of courage. I do not think that Freud ever made a conscious decision to ignore his earlier experiences or that he ever recognized what he did as a failure of courage. No doubt he believed he was doing the right thing, and the difficult thing, when he shifted his attention from external trauma to internal fantasy as the causative agent in mental illness. But that does not mean it represents the truth.

In fact, in my opinion, Freud had abandoned an important truth: the sexual, physical, and emotional violence that is a real and tragic part of the lives of many children. If this abandoned truth was to be erased from the history of psychoanalysis (it was certainly there at the beginning), traces of it would also have to be removed from the later theory. This was a task best left to the psychoanalysts who came after Freud. I believe they have succeeded: by and large most analysts would not agree with Freud’s insights that in my view are implicit in the 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria”—that many (probably most) of their patients had violent and unhappy childhoods, not because of some defect in their character, but because of something terrible that had been done to them by their parents. If this

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