Let me begin by giving you a 'caveat emptor' here and now. I am current engaged in by far my most vigorous investigation into the history of Psychoanalysis that is turning up new and different information each and every day that I didn't know previously. Thus, each and everyone of my essays -- including this one -- is a part of an ongoing evolutionary process for me in my creative vision and elucidation of the internal structure and building process of 'Hegel's Hotel'.
Thus, an essay of this type right here -- and every one I like it that I write on the subject and history of Psychoanalysis is necessarily of a strong, quickly evolving nature -- strong new information entering my interpretive and evaluative process often necessitating sudden, perhaps radical changes in judgment contingent on this new information entering and being assimilated into my cognitive system, my 'Central Ego' if you wish.
I can only imagine -- and speculate -- that the same type of scenario might have been also at work with Freud around 1895-1900. Fast changing clinical information may have easily -- or with great difficulty -- stimulated new theoretical conclusions and generalizations for Dr. Freud back in this very controversial and provocative time period. His judgments may have been -- and indeed, this is historically recorded as being -- the case as Freud went through this highly fertile (for good and/or for bad) and highly volatile period from 1895 to 1900 moving very quickly in relatively chronological order from Traumacy Theory to Seduction Theory to a systematic combination of Screen Memory Theory, Dream Interpretation Theory, Childhood Sexuality Theory, and Oedipal Theory.
The particular Freudian change from Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory to Oedipal Theory -- a 180 degree turn in Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory -- is the change that still has academics and professionals debating -- often with furious righteousness on both sides of the academic and professional, political fence -- the relative good and bad merits and consequences of Freud having made such a radical changeover in theory complete with its even more radical implications relativ eto therapeutic interpretation, evaluation, and technique.
In terms of public, academic, and professional volatility, the period from about 1980 to 1992 probably greatly outmatches the original period of 1896-1900 when Freud first had to defend his 'Abandonment of Seduction (Sexual Child Abuse) Theory against friends and foes alike; in the period of 1880 to 1892 was relatively alone (with some growing support that he listed in the 1992 version of his most controversial book, 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Abandonment of The Seduction Theory') to face the colossal wrath of the entire Psychoanalytic Establishment -- worldwide.
I have to smile at least a little (even as I feel compassion and empathy too) at the dark humor and irony of perhaps Masson experientially answering his own question that he posed historically to the world (and to Freud): Why did Freud abandon his Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Theory when there was at least some element of truth to it that needed to be looked at? Maybe Masson fully experienced the answer to that question between 1980 and 1985. Hell hath no fury like a society that doesn't want to talk about child sexual abuse. This topic was very high on the 'politically incorrect' scale back in 1896. Things hadn't changed much by 1980 as Masson took the full brunt of finding out.
Now, was Masson fair in his rather harsh character interpretation and judgment of Freud?
Writes Masson:
'I may disapprove of what I call Freud's loss of moral courage, but I cannot claim that I understand it. (Jeffrey Masson, Assault on Truth, 1992, Preface to the 1985 edition, pg. xxii.)
Now it is important to note that Masson was making an inferential interpretation and harsh judgment here into Freud's motivation and character for abandoning the seduction theory on information that is far from epistemologically clear. Masson stated that he didn't profess to know why 'Freud lost moral courage'; just that he did lose moral courage.
My question to Masson on this matter is how is this assumptive and judgmental claim relative to Freud's personality on Masson's part -- based on conflicting and totally unclear epistemological evidence around Freud's motivation for abandoning the seduction theory -- any less an example of 'character defamation' than what Masson accused Janet Malcolm of doing to Masson in her long article in The Newyorker around Masson's judgment of Freud which was probably the start of 5 to 10 years of living Hell for Masson as he was fighting with The Psychoanalytic Establishment, the media, the public, and Janet Malcolm and the Newyorker in court for 10 years (which according to internet information on Jeffrey Masson that I just read the other day ended in The Newyorker's favor.
One might be tempted to say, 'What goes around comes around?' There -- I just said it.
Now Masson is right that the whole scenario back around 1896 and after this up to about 1900 ended up in a change in various parts of his overall theory -- with the Seduction (Sexual Assault) Theory changing to the Oedipal (Repressed Incestuous Sexual Fantasy) Theory -- that when applied on a hardline basis with no moderation and no flexibility was a terrible changeover in theory.
Applied on a hardline basis, the post-1900 Oedipal Theory would practically guarantee that a woman sexually assaulted in childhood would not epistemologically and/or ethically be given a 'fair shake' just as I am not sure that Masson between 1980 and 1992 gave Freud a 'fair shake' in terms of 'character motivation' for a radical change in theory that was at least partly a collosal mistake. Competing theories can explain Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory that do not neccesitate the rather huge abstractive, interpretive character judgment that goes with Masson's words, 'loss of moral courage'.
Most notable of these alternative competing theories is the theory that Freud found out that one of his clients had 'lied' to him about a supposedly 'real infantile memory' that was instead a 'fantasy-memory' that never happened at all. This story was reported by the client -- treated by Freud -- to a German psychiatrist, Leopold Lowenfeld afterwards and written up in the psychiatrist's book, Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, in 1899.
If Freud changed his theory based strongly on this piece of clinical evidence, it would not imply that Freud 'lost any moral courage'. Rather, it would imply that Freud was trying to keep his theories in touch with the truth and reality of the evidence he was collecting in the clinical world. And if the clinical evidence -- or at least part of it -- suggested that some of Freud's clients were deliberately and/or unintentionally confusing 'real memories' for 'fantasy memories', then Freud was bound by his scientific integrity to 'stick to his clincal evidence' and to build his theories from this clinical evidence; not from clinical evidence that didn't exist. If this was indeed what happened, then Freud can hardly be interpreted as having lost his 'moral courage' -- just replacing a 'leaky' theory with an even leakier one. A bonehead, colossal theoretical mistake perhaps by Freud but not a 'loss in moral courage'. Freud's main theoretical problem was his tendency to 'overgeneralize and overcompensate'; not in my mind a lack of moral courage -- of course, I am speculating just as Masson was; neither of us have a telepathic connection to what was going on in Freud's mind at this time.
Masson's argument is at least partly tempting to believe. Aren't most of us at least tempted on a day to day basis to bend our ethics and moral for the sake of saving our job, career, and income. I see it happen around me every day in my corporate world and I generally keep my mouth shut when I know that my corporate bosses simply don't want to hear what I really believe. Call that 'narcissistic-corporate-survival-pragmatism' if you wish. And/or just call it a 'loss of moral courage'.
One has to judge the strength of the cultural-political-legal-socio-economic resistance, duress, and leverage against an individual person by the society -- or a portion of the society -- that they live in before anyone is labeled as 'lacking in moral courage'.
How many people even have the freedom to write anything close to the type of things I am writing about here in Hegel's Hotel with the type of editorial comments that I am making in half the countries around the world such as North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Afghanastan, and many, many more...Do the millions of people in these countries all 'lack moral courage'. Or are they afraid for their survival, afraid for their very lives?
Strong political, legal, ideological, and/or socio-economic leverage often 'bends moral individual courage' on the basis of either feeling a strong need to protect one's own narcissistic safety and/or for the sake of narcissistic (economic) gain. Isn't that at least partly why you moved to New Zealand, Dr. Masson? To get out of the firestorm of psychiatry and into a new field of study that was both more pleasant and more economically viable?
In your own words, Dr. Masson -- unless you were misquoted:
“ "I'd written a whole series of books about psychiatry, and nobody bought them. Nobody liked them. Nobody. Psychiatrists hated them, and they were much too abstruse for the general public. It was very hard to make a living, and I thought, 'As long as I'm not making a living, I may as well write about something I really love: animals.'"[9] ”
How many of us can say that we have never compromised our moral-ethical integrity for the sake of narcissistic gain and/or preventing narcissistic loss? Some people may be more or less guilty of this transgression than others, some people may be guilty of this transgression more or less often than others, but let us not be the first ones to throw stones at someone else unless we feel entirely guilt-free which is a hard claim for any of us to make in an authoritarian corporate world, and a politically correct world where political, corporate, legal, and economic leverage is being applied to each and everyone of us, each and every day.
Does this mean that our whole society lacks 'moral courage'? Maybe.
I know that I personally cringe every time I start to write something on some politically incorrect topic such as: 'invasion of individual privacy and loss of civil rights through corporate and government internet spying'; reverse discrimination and loss of men's civil rights relative to domestic justice and sexual issues between men and women...and I could list off a few more equally provocotive and controversial topics but I won't.
I guess this means that perhaps I lack moral courage. But, at the same time, I don't see too many other people writing about these topics. Does this mean that other people do not see what is happening? Or does it more likely mean that they are too scared to write about an issue that can be used to 'tar and feather' them.
It is for this latter reason mainly that these topics, for the most part, remain 'civilly buried, civilly suppressed, civilly repressed...'
Call it 'social repression or suppression'.
Even this whole issue of 'childhood memories' still remains a political powderkeg
Now it can be easily argued that Freud indeed did lose 'moral courage' after the storm of professional controversy he stimulated in his reading presentation of probably the most infamous little essay ever written by Freud -- 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', 1896. (Well, maybe Freud's 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' rivaled 'The Aetiology' in terms of immediate and/or long-term controversy.)
A letter from Freud to Fliess on April 26th, 1896, 5 days after the presentation, reports:
A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception from the asses, and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand-year old problem, a "source of the Nile"! They can all go to hell. (Masson, Assault on Truth, 1992, p. 9.)
However, Freud hardly seems contrite or cowered in the aftermath of Kraft-Ebing's -- and the rest of the membership's -- critical onslaught that nigh. Indeed, at this point in time -- as throughout his entire career -- Freud comes across as every bit the righteous-rebellious unbowed soldier, like Hannibal perhaps, Freud's hero, or like Custer continuing to fight to his death, in The Battle Of Little Bighorn, Custer's Last Stand, in Montana in 1876 on June 25th, almost 20 years to the day that Freud probably felt like he was fighting to his death against the Psychiatric Society at that most emotionally volatile meeting.
Freud didn't lose moral courage although one could hardly blame him if he did with the amount of social, professional, political -- and perhaps economic -- pressure that was being applied against him by the medical community, or that could have been.
Maybe Freud felt 'just a snippet' of what he was bound to keep getting if he had kept pressing the truth and value of The 'Seduction Theory' that he was 'so sure' of back then but then soon was to dismiss over the next four years like 'awakening from a bad dream'.
Maybe a more accurate barometer of the full extent of the negative pressure that could have been applied against Freud politically, economically, and socially was approximately the negative treatment that Masson received between 1980 and 1985 -- for going where Freud generally chose not to go to after 1896: the unwanted public awareness and knowledge of childhood sexual abuse.
So, Dr. Masson, if you had it to do all over again -- would you do it again? Would you live 1980-1992 all over again. Was it worth it? The ten year lawsuit against Janet Malcolm and The New Yorker that didn't even end in your favor.
What were the words that particularly disturbed you -- someone calling you an 'intellectual gigolo' -- Gee, I can think of probably millions of men who would have worn that mantle proudly -- including myself.
Plus, can we really blame Janet Malcolm on that one -- unless she made up these words herself or took them from you or someone else and then quoted it from someone who didn't say them. That would be an unethical display of journalism.
At the same time, maybe you, yourself Dr. Masson, got a little too cocky and a little too arrogant in an unguarded moment. What was it? Something about -- opening all the windows in Anna Freud's house -- and letting some women in? Again 25 years after you may or may not have said it -- I support you fully if you did indeed say it. Bravo! Get some fresh air and new feminine energy into Psychoanalytic Institute and Establishment.
Get some feminine perspectives into The Psychoanalytic Institute -- not as suppressed and repressed hysterical clients (although even Anna O and Emma Ekstein were enlightening, even in their respective traumacies and tragedies.
No, what The Psychoanalytic Institute and Establishment needs is a new influx of Psychoanalytic students and graduates -- independent intellectuals, therapists, theorists and individuals in their own right with separate 'wills to power' and 'wills to truth' and 'wills to psychological and psycho-therapeutic excellence'. Not all these authoritarian patriarchs who continue to hang on to Freud like he is the one and only last lifeboat on the Titanic.
I have no Psychoanalytic reputation to protect. And I don't have enough money that anyone would want to take me to court.
Like Spinoza, and believe me, as much as Spinoza remains one of my greatest philosophical idols and role models, I don't profess to have a tenth of the ethical fortitude that he did (when your editorial opinion could cost you a 'beheading', or a 'hanging', or an 'excommunication from society' or a 'burning at the stake' like St. Joan of Arc, or a 'coerced poisoning' like Socrates, then you know that you are really dealing with a man or woman with an ultimate display of courage... still, like Spinoza, I prefer to operate in a 'non-partisan' environment where there is not serious leverage and pressure being applied to me to say one thing, and not another, because I am being paid to say be biased.
The Seduction Theory in and by itself is grossly reductionistic and overgeneralizing. Not every female and/or male child is sexually assaulted in childhood even if the number and percentage of female children that are sexually assaulted climbs significantly higher and higher the older each and every female -- and for that matter, male -- child gets.
Similarly, the Oedipal Theory too is grossly reductionistic and overgeneralizing particularly the more you treat the Oedipal Theory literally as opposed to symbolically and metaphorically.
Thesis: Seduction Theory. Anti-Thesis: Oedipal Theory.
That which divides us, defines us.
Two opposing bi-polar sexual theories dissociated and alienated from each other. Each drawing energy away from the middle. Each drawing 'theoretical partisans' away from the middle. The one is about 'Narcissistic Traumatic Memory'. The other is about 'Narcissistic Pleasurable Fantasy'.
If you are a post-Aristolean or a post-Kierkgaardian philosopher', you say to yourself, 'Either/Or'. 'Pick one'. 'The left door or the right door'. 'The left path or the right path.' 'The left paradigm or the right paradigm'. And if you are lucky, you may get a 'round peg of reality' that fits into a 'round hole of theory'. Or visa versa. If you are not lucky, and your theory doesn't fit the clinical facts, then you might: a) traumatize your client for trying to impose a 'false reality' on him or her; b) re-traumatize a client by doing the same thing -- and repeating what the client's childhood assaulter, for example, quite likely was saying to the client as a child: essentially, 'This didn't happen'; c) you alienate, dissociate -- and perhaps even lose the client (eg. Freud's case of Dora) because you try to 'impose on the client a false reality'.
In contrast, if you are a 'post-Hegelian philosopher like myself who believes in the value and authenticity of 'dialectic logic', then you see 'the creative energy and functional value of integrating opposite or paradoxical ideas'. Why? Because life is paradoxical -- ignited by opposites being attracted to each other, and energized by each other, in their conflicting-attracting, bi-polar characteristics and energies.
Who was it? -- Plato, in a part of The Symposium (the part on love) -- who had one of his various creative characters saying that men and women used to be 'united' as 'hermaphrodites'. But then some wise or smart or sadistic -- or 'jokerman' for a -- God decided that he would 'split men-women-hermaphrodites in half' so that they would become disconnected and alienated from each other and themselves until they found each other again in -- united love.
Male-Female, Testosterone-Estrogen, 'Yin-Yang'.
People -- and academics -- do not come close to fully understanding and appreciating how similar Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, The Han Philosophers, Hegel, and Darwin were in their respective evolutionary West, East, and Central Theories.
Particularly Hegel and Darwin -- lumped in with Freud, Fliess, and Jung.
It does not take rocket science to see how close Hegel and Darwin were in there respective theories with Hegel's theory of Epistemological and Existential Evolution and Alienation (The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind', 1807) both pre-dating and subsuming Darwin's later even more controversial and provocative theory of evolution ('On the Origin of the Species, 1859').
Thesis: Female/Estrogen/Egg/Yin
Anti-thesis: Male/Testosterone/Sperm/Yang
Dialectic-Synthesis-Integration: Child/Shared DNA/Mixed Testosterone and Estrogen, Mixed Female and Male Energy, Mixed, Physiological and Psychological Bi-Sexuality.
Hegel's 'Dialectic Logic and Theory' simply followed, traced, and structurally was patterned after -- 'The Dialectic Nature of Life and Evolution'.
Hegel simply connected all the dialectic dots and lines and put them all together -- or at least most of them.
I have the decided advantage of having 200 more years of human intellectual evolution at my ready disposal -- at a click of my 'mouse' and a 'tapping of my keys'.
Wow! I am so phenomenally -- and phenomenologically -- lucky!
Each and everyone of us living today with any kind of serious and/or obsessive interest in human evolution and the history of ideas -- is technologically blessed.
My dad, back in the 1970s, partly foresaw this day coming when he was 'marketing his software and audio-visual hardware' -- and talked to me and his customers about a 'generic and customized information highway'.
Which brings me back to Freud, Psychoanalysis, The Seduction Theory, The Oedipal Theory -- and 'a creative bi-polar integration, orgasm, and cross-fertilization, of ideas, encounters, relationships...and DNA'.
Who said that ideas -- and drab old, patriarchal Psychoanalysis -- couldn't be sexually exciting and 'bi-polarly, bi-sexually energizing? Yin and yang. Estrogen and testosterone. Sperm and eggs. Men and women. Coming together -- and balancing together -- both internally and externally in creative, dialectic-democratic harmony. I forgot to mention Cannon's classic 'Wisdom of The Body' which also 'harmonizes dialectic logic' -- in the field of biology, chemistry, and physics. Freud and Jung 'harmonized dialectic logic' in psychology.
And with all of these 'allusions to sexuality and bi-sexuality', I am starting to write like Freud, Fliess, Wilhelm Reich, and Fritz Perls all rolled into one -- many of them 'psychoanalytic bad boys' before Jeffrey Masson rolled into town and perhaps took the cake.
I'm a taxi dispatcher, not a Psychoanalyst. (You see how we label ourselves according to our jobs and careers.)
But there is one thing that I can take out of taxi dispatching that can easily be applied to Psychoanalysis.
If I am dispatching late at night and I have a large area of potential customers north of Toronto to cover -- and say I have four taxi drivers to work with -- I will try my best to distribute those cars evenly over the area that I need to cover as a dispatcher and they need to cover as drivers. Such as: Upper Left Hand Quadrant (Richmond Hill), Lower Left Hand Quadrant (Thornhill), Lower Right Hand Quadrant (Lower Markham), Upper Right Hand Quadrant (Upper Markham).
Similarly, if I only have one driver to work with, I am going to try to place him right in the center of our whole area of business.
That makes logical sense -- so that the driver is essentially 'equi-distance' from any prospective customer who may phone in.
The same can be said for any 'ideal' Psychoanalytic Theory.
If you have a 'left-handed' theory of Psychoanalysis, then you are going to discriminate against 'right-handed clients'. And if you have a 'right-handed theory of Psychoanalysis, you are going to discriminate against 'left-handed clients'.
Idealistically, what Psychoanalysis needs is a 'Centralist Psychoanalytic Theory' that is 'equi-distant' and 'non-discriminatory' against any type of Psychoanalytic customer -- a theory that can move flexibly to either the left or the right, up or down, to serve a client properly.
That is the type of theory that Psychoanalysis needs. And that is the type of theory that I will try my best to describe in more and more detail as we move along in our future essays on this topic.
That is enough for today.
-- dgb, July 10th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
