I said that I would re-read Janet Malcolm's book, 'In The Freud Archives' (1984) and I am in the process of doing that. It was about 15 years ago the last time I read it. The book is a composite of two articles Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker in 1983.
Malcolm's book, similarly to Masson's own book with different editorial opinions, 'Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst', 1990, documents Masson's 'fall out of grace' with the Psychoanalytic World after he had risen almost right to the top of the Psychoanalytic hierarchy as Executive Director of The Freud Archives -- behind only Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler in perceived power and status.
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Sigmund Freud Archives
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The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress [1] and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London. They were at the center of a complicated scandal which is described in Janet Malcolm's book In the Freud Archives. Jeffrey Masson writes about it in Chapter Nine Disillusions of his book Final Analysis.
After World War II Dr. Kurt Eissler (1909-1999) and a small group of psychoanalysts who knew Sigmund Freud personally, including Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Bertram Lewin and Herman Nunberg, decided to preserve Freud's letters and papers in a single archive. The Library of Congress, Dr. Eissler wrote, agreed in a legal "instrument" to accept as a donation all documents collected by the Archives, and to make them accessible to scholars. By the 1980s Dr. Eissler, with the help of Anna Freud, had collected thousands of tapes, letters and papers for that archive. (An exhibition of parts of the collection was held at the Library of Congress last year and will be at the Jewish Museum this year.) [2]
The Archives were founded in 1951 by Dr. Eissler and directed by him for decades. Dr. Eissler prevented many well-meaning scholars from seeing many Freud doucments claiming confidentiality, even when their donors had not requested nor demanded that confidentiality, nor was anyone a potential victim of the revelation of those documents. In 1974 the 65-year-old Dr. Eissler met Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born 1941), a 33-year-old Sanskrit scholar and psychoanalyst, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Eissler took a liking to Masson, appointed him his secretary, and meant to make him his successor at the Archives. Being an officer of the Sigmund Freud Archives Masson had 'administrative access' to all documents in the Archives, he was allowed to see anything he wanted breaking the seal whenever necessary. In 1981 Dr. Masson, who was then the Projects Director of the Archives, delivered a paper to the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Masson said that Freud had abandoned his seduction theory -- the idea that adult neurosis is caused by childhood sexual abuse -- for personal rather than scientific reasons. By dropping the seduction theory, Dr. Masson concluded, "Freud began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, has come to a dead halt in the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis throughout the world." Dr. Eissler was deeply shocked ("Just today Masud Khan called me from London and asked me to dismiss you from the Archives. The board members, all of them, or at least most of them, are asking for the same.") [3] and sought to dismiss Dr. Masson from his job at the Archives, which led to bilateral legal action and a well-publicized scandal.
Masson was subsequently dismissed from his position as project director of the Freud Archives after a vote by the 13-member board of the Freud Archives - a nonprofit foundation controlling the vast public and private papers of Freud - not to renew Dr. Masson's contract as projects director for a second year starting in January. [4]
The current director of the Archives is Dr. Harold P. Blum, a well-known psychoanalyst and scholar [5]. Dr. Harold P. Blum succeeded Dr. Masson and Dr. Eissler as Executive Director of The Sigmund Freud Archives. The other current officers of The Sigmund Freud Archives are: Drs. Alexander Grinstein, President; Bernard L. Pacella, Secretary/Treasurer; and Sidney S. Furst.
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Janet Malcolm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, and In the Freud Archives.
Malcolm is best known for the 1991 lawsuit triggered by In the Freud Archives, when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued Malcolm and The New Yorker for $10 million, after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations attributed to him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles."[1] The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Background and personal
* 2 Masson case
* 3 The Journalist and the Murderer
* 4 Works
* 5 References
* 6 Sources
* 7 External links
[edit] Background and personal
Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters--the other is author Marie Winn-- of a psychiatrist father. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York City. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960's. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
[edit] Masson case
Publication of the book In The Freud Archives triggered a $10 million legal challenge by Jeffrey Masson, former project director for the Freud Archives, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.
In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo", who had slept with over 1000 women; said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court[3], and after years of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. (See the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
In August, 1995, Malcolm discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in The New York Times[4] the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
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DGB
What I wish to do in this essay is to give my own editorial comments on some of the various 'ethical transgressions' committed by the various 'players' in this Psychoanalytic scandal -- Freud, Fliess, Masson, The Psychoanalytic World, and Janet Malcolm -- no one comes off 'ethically scot-free' in this huge Psychoanalytic scandal: neither Freud nor Fliess in the mid 1890s, nor Masson, Malcolm, nor the Psychoanalytic World in the mid 1990s.
Indeed, it is partly ironical or maybe a sense of 'poetic justice' that this Psychoanalytic scandal that hit its peak in 1983-1984 was just short of a 'hundred year anniversary transference-repetition-compulsion' of the original Freudian ordeal (1896-1897) and '180 degree change in Psychoanalytic Theory' from 'real traumacy and sexual abuse to sexual fantasy' that provided the backdrop to the 1993-94 Masson vs. Malcolm and The Psychoanalytic Institute scandal.
In this regard, it was almost like Masson was playing the role of Freud's 'suppressed righteous-ethical conscience' -- in technical language, his 'rejecting object or Superego' for inventing a theory that engaged in 'the alleged role of childhood sexual fantasy' in Psychoanalytic cases where there may have been real, live patients who had 'suffered from the very real traumacy of childhood sexual abuse'.
In a Masson quoted comparison from 'In The Freud Archives', pg. 55, that I will extrapolate on here, that is like trying to pretend that 'Aushwitz' never happened -- that it was one big 'sexual fantasy', or alternatively, that there is essentially no reason for a therapist trying to deal with any 'real or imagined gap' between a patient's 'subjective, psychic reality' of how he or she 'experienced Aushwitz' and the 'objective reality' of what really happened to that patient at Aushwitz.
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Auschwitz concentration camp
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(Redirected from Auschwitz)
"Auschwitz" redirects here. For the town, see Oświęcim. Distinguish from Austerlitz.
This article is semi-protected.
Coordinates: [show location on an interactive map] 50°02′09″N 19°10′42″E / 50.03583°N 19.17833°E / 50.03583; 19.17833
Auschwitz-Birkenau
German Nazi Concentration and
Extermination Camp (1940-1945)*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
The main gate of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 2006
Type Cultural
Criteria vi
Reference 31
Region** Europe and North America
Inscription history
Inscription 1979 (3rd Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List.
** Region as classified by UNESCO.
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Konzentrationslager_Auschwitz.ogg Konzentrationslager Auschwitz (help·info)) was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and extermination camps, established in Nazi German occupied Poland. The camp took its German name from the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby which later was mostly destroyed by the Germans.
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Oświęcim was annexed by Nazi Germany and renamed Auschwitz, the town's German name.[1]
The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million,[2][3] about 90% of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe.[4] Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".
In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the first two camps. By 1994, some 22 million visitors - 700,000 annually - had passed through the iron gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei (Work brings freedom)". The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945 is celebrated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom, and other similar memorial days in various countries.
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DGB
As basically black and white, life and death, as Aushwitz obviously was -- and similarly in clear-cut cases of childhood sexual abuse where there is much witness testimony and/or supporting empirical evidence -- in many, many cases, particularly as the therapist is still getting to know the client and what he or she is all about -- there is nothing nearly so 'objectively and epistemologically clear' in the therapist's office between therapist and client. The therapist may not know to what extent he or she can trust the client's 'subjective revelations'.
Any psychotherapist -- as well as any of us in our day-to-day living -- is often caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to determining 'objective, epistemological reality' relative to the memories, reports, and experiences that are coming out of the mouths of people who are talking about situations where we were not there at the time of these 'alleged events'.
The dreaded distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective' reality raises its 'clouded' face again.
Kant's 'subjective-objective-metaphysical split'.
The idea that we can never know for 100 percent sure what is happening in our own 'objective (noumenal) world' was one of the main theses of Kant's classic philosophical treatise: 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Kant's extremely skeptical, pessimistic epistemological conclusions in this regard were greatly disturbing to those who believed (like Hegel after him) that we could -- through human evolution -- get closer and closer to 'epistemological truth'. In some areas of science, yes. In many areas of day to day living -- and even in many 'court epistemological conclusions and decisions' -- not necessarily. 'Truth' in many life circumstances will always remain 'fleeting' and 'cloudy' -- even 'impossible to unequivocally determine'.
Did Freud 'lose moral courage and integrity'? Was Freud a fraud? How can any of us living today know for sure what was going on inside Freud's head back in 1896-97 in this regard when any and all conclusions are based on entirely, speculative, associative, circumstantial evidence?
Did Freud make a bad ethical if not legal mistake when he entrusted his patient, Emma Ekstein, to his closest friend, Dr. Fliess, who in turn conducted a totally unnecessary nasal surgery on her that almost killed her when he left -- and forgot -- a 'long string of gauze' in her nose that another doctor found days later when she was not healing properly, pulled on and pulled out -- and she almost bled to death from the nasal hemorrhaging? Yes. But is this the reason, or one of the reasons, that Freud changed his thinking from 'The Seduction Theory' to 'The Oedipal Theory'? None of us can know this. Including Dr. Masson. The theory that 'Freud lost moral courage and integrity' -- and that The Oedipal Theory, in effect, was a 'fraudulent cover-up theory with a hidden agenda behind it' -- to escape the 'political incorrectness' of child sexual abuse amongst his medical peers and superiors, and/or to 'save his own medical career' and/or to save both himself and his best friend, Fliess, from a 'huge medical guilt trip' -- all of these individual pieces of evidence do not in anyway conclusively prove Masson's 'theory into Freud's subjective mindset' -- this theory remains only that -- a theory -- just like Freud's 'Seduction Theory' and just like Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' -- impossible to prove conclusively one way or the other.
Actually, The Seduction Theory -- in its totally generality and reductionism -- is the easiest theory to logically disprove.
Not all people who are 'neurotic' are sexually assaulted as children.
I for one, can attest to that. I have a whole network of 'transference neuroses' in my personality, and I know for a fact that I didn't get sexually assaulted as a child. (Unless I was asleep or unconscious when it happened. Nope. Didn't happen. Indeed, I fully agree with Masson on this part -- if I was sexually assaulted as a child, I would know about it. I would remember it. Here Masson and I totally agree.
Personally, I don't think that 'repression' (unremembered memories) has much to do with human neurosis at all except perhaps in some very extreme and unusual case examples.
Here I part company from Psychoanalysis altogether both before and after 1896. I much prefer the ideas of 'dissociation' and 'splitting of the ego' (Charcot, Janet, Freud) into 'Persona' and 'Shadow' (Jung); or 'Ego' and 'Alter-ego' (Janet?); or Dionysian Ego and Apollonian Ego (my extension of Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'; or 'Superego', 'Ego' and 'Id' (Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis).
There is nothing in my thinking that says that the 'sexual and/or violent' content in a person's 'Id' or 'Dionysian Ego' has to be 'unconscious' or 'repressed'. Often it may 'dissociated' or 'denied' or even 'suppressed' but not at all 'unconscious' or 'repressed'.
Thus, when I start to talk about 'Transference Complexes, Scripts, and Neuroses', I turn instead to Adler's very fertile idea of interpreting conscious early memories.
For me, conscious early childhood memories can be viewed as 'transference memories'.
In my opinion, if I am a therapist and some client tells me that he or she was sexually assaulted as a child, I am going to do two things: 1. tentatively accept the client's 'subjective, psychic reality'; and 2. retain a certain element of 'agnosticism' or 'objective skepticism' realizing that what the client is telling me has not been 'empirically verified or confirmed' in any way by any outside witnesses and/or supporting evidence.
The therapist is being hired as a therapist -- which means mostly the role of 'Nurturing Superego' as well as 'Insight Giver' -- not as 'judge' and 'jury' either for or against the client, or for or against any of the client's living 'family members' who may or may not have been guilty of some moral and/or legal transgression against the client when the client was a much younger age. That is for the police and/or courts to decide -- if the client wants to proceed that far -- not for the therapist to play the role of police, judge, or jury -- or even to 'push' the client in that direction. As a therapist, we can 'surmise and infer or interpret' all we want -- and even this can be extremely dangerous when it gets to the point of 'interpreting or reconstructing a sexual assault memory' that is coming out of your mouth, not the client's. I would not try to touch such an interpretation with a ten foot pole -- it might make you a legitimate, and deserved, candidate for a client or family lawsuit.
One only has to review the case of Dr. Charles Smith to see 'how far the seduction theory can potentially get out of control if it is not kept within reasonable boundaries'. Dr. Smith was a 'child forensic pathologist' who rose to the top of his field before he was 'disgraced' by the 'over exuberance' with which he seemed to be looking for 'child murderers'. Furthermore, a good psychoanalyst can see the 'transference connection' between what Dr. Smith was doing in his forensic office and in the court room -- and his own 'abandonment by his mother both as a child and again when he contacted her as an adult'.
'Transference reversal and/or revenge' for a person who has a lot of power in a field where he or she can 'act out' with relative impunity his or her particular brand of 'underlying psycho and socio-pathology' in the guise of 'technical expertise' is a very dangerous social phenomenon. We need to know more about it.
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Dr. Charles Smith: The man behind the public inquiry
Last Updated Oct. 1, 2008
CBC News
On a typical case, he might have to decide whether a child had been shaken to death or accidentally fallen from a highchair.
Dr. Charles Smith was once considered top-notch in his field of forensic child pathology. In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.
Dr. Charles Smith was long regarded as one of Canada's best in forensic child pathology. A public inquiry was called after an Ontario coroner's inquiry questioned Smith's conclusions in 20 of 45 child autopsies. (CBC)
For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies.
But Smith no longer practises pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.
The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.
That inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge and concluding in October 2008, found that Smith "actively misled" his superiors, "made false and misleading statements" in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials.
Far from an expert in forensic child pathology, "Smith lacked basic knowledge about forensic pathology," wrote Goudge in the inquiry report.
"Smith was adamant that his failings were never intentional," Goudge wrote. "I simply cannot accept such a sweeping attempt to escape moral responsibility."
Acted more like a prosecutor
Some have accused Smith of taking on a role larger than pathologist. The lawyer for Brenda Waudby said he was on a crusade and acted more like a prosecutor. Waudby was convicted in the murder of her daughter after Smith analyzed the case.
A pubic-like hair found on her daughter went missing during Smith's investigation. It was discovered he had kept the hair in his office before police found it five years later. In the end, Waudby's charges were dropped and the child's babysitter was convicted.
Smith said he had a passion for uncovering the truth in child deaths. The Ontario pathologist told media lampooning him he had "a thing against people who hurt children." He welled up when speaking about a mother looking for the cause of her baby's death.
Smith had been in search of his own personal truths. He was born in a Toronto Salvation Army hospital where he was put up for adoption three months later. After years of looking for his biological mother, he called her on her 65th birthday. But she refused to take his call.
Smith's adoptive family moved often. His father's job in the Canadian Forces took them throughout Canada and to Germany. He attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in 1975.
Sick Kids tenure
Hired by Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children in 1979, Smith worked in surgery for a year and then moved on to pathology training. A pathologist studies diseases and illnesses by assessing matter such as cells, tissues, organs and fluids. Pathologists also examine biopsy material, and give a subsequent diagnosis.
When it comes to autopsy reports, the field of pathology can be a subjective one. It's based on research and opinion, and it's especially controversial in Canada, where there is no formal training or certification process. Only a handful of practitioners in Ontario are entrusted with the job — and they've learned by doing.
With child victims, forensic analysis is rarely cut and dried. It can take an infant up to 24 hours to die of a shaking incident, which is a crime that doesn't leave evidence the way a regular killing might.
After his initial training at Sick Kids, as the Toronto hospital is known, Smith began conducting child autopsies in 1981. He started with children who had died of accidental and natural causes. By the late '90s, Smith saw more forensic child cases than any other pathologist across the country.
Smith's unit used arrest warrants to reinvestigate cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He oversaw the autopsies of exhumed babies that led to new murder charges.
In one such case, Smith appeared before a court in the death of six-month-old Sara Podniewicz. He concluded she had been dead for up to 15 hours before her parents reported the death. The parents had told a 911 operator the girl had died just moments before. Smith's analysis led to second-degree murder charges.
First doubts
In 1991, a family in Timmins, Ont., was the first to raise questions about Smith's work. He had concluded their one-year-old baby had died from being shaken. The child had been under the care of a babysitter who said the baby had fallen down stairs.
In court, experts challenged Smith's opinion, which had resulted in the babysitter's charge of manslaughter. The judge in the case stated Smith should have taken other causes into consideration.
Once the most prolific pathologist, Smith began getting a reputation for late cases, and his disorderly desk produced samples that had gone missing.
In 2002, he received a caution from the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college said he was being "overly dogmatic" and had a "tendency towards overstatement."
In June 2005, Dr. Barry McLellan, Ontario's chief coroner, started the review of 45 child autopsies conducted by Smith between 1991 and 2002. The review, released in April 2007, found that Smith had made mistakes in 20 cases involving the deaths of children. The review cast doubt on criminal convictions in 13 of the cases.
"I am very surprised with the overall results of the review, and concerned," McLellan said. "In a number of cases, the reviewers felt that Dr. Smith had provided an opinion regarding the cause of death that was not reasonably supported by the materials available for review."
The chief coroner said the results of the review were being shared with defence and Crown attorneys involved in all of the relevant criminal cases.
After resigning from Sick Kids in 2005, Smith accepted a pathology position in Saskatoon. He was fired after three months. A tribunal later reinstated him, but without a licence, Smith was unable to practise.
Smith told media his marriage ended in light of stress from the highly publicized events. He had lived with his wife and two children on a farm north of Newmarket, Ont.
As a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Smith says he has been fuelled by his life's purpose — finding out the truth for parents who have lost babies.
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DGB
With all due respect to Masson because I greatly respect his work and his willingness to stand up to his conclusions, some of which I support and others which I don't, memories are like all human experiences -- they are subjectively biased, and can be distorted, even intentionally or unintentionally totally fabricated.
This certainly does not mean that they are always, or even usually, fabricated in the cases of memories of sexual assault. Indeed, I agree with Masson's conclusion that if a person has been sexually assaulted, they are usually going to clearly remember it; there certainly does not have to be any 'repression' involved, nor does there need to be any repression involved to 'cause' neurosis.
First of all, let me give you two examples of 'fabricated memories' from my own life. In the first case, my dad was going through one of the most stressful times of his life. His company was collapsing, the work that he had done his entire life was collapsing, he wasn't making enough revenue anymore to pay for all his bills, and his bills -- including company creditors -- were soaring higher and higher. My dad seemed bordering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Neither his thoughts nor his memories were 'logically connecting' in a way that people around him would normally expect from him in any normal conversation.
My family and I years previous to this happening, had gone on a trip to the Bahamas. My brother and I had recounted a memory several or numerous times in the intervening years where we had gone for a walk along the beach first thing in the morning. On our way back to the hotel we got 'trapped' by one of the many canals in Freeport, Bahamamas that wound its way inland for seemingly miles from the ocean beach.
My brother and I were looking at the 100 feet or so that it would take to 'swim' across the channel, and we were also looking at the 'seemingly miles that we would need to walk inland to walk around the canal. Swimming, and getting soaked in the process -- we were wearing summer clothes at the time, not bathing suits -- was becoming more and more attractive to the point where we were going to do it when a large stingray meandered past our very eyes in the light blue-green water that we were looking down at. We quickly changed our minds -- and walked around the canal.
Years later, during this period of heavy stress for my dad, a group of us were in my parents' living room when my dad recounted the story as if he had been there! My brother and I looked at each other -- and said nothing. But quietly we were both shaking our heads because we knew he had not been with us that morning, he was either back at the hotel or out somewhere doing his own business that morning. It had just been my brother and I who had been there.
Just to show that this type of thing can happen to all of us -- and me too -- I remember my dad recounting a memory where at the age of of about 5, I had stood up in front of a whole church congregation and named off every country on a globe that presumably my dad pointed to in front of me. I succeeded, obviously with a lot of private practice before I got to that moment and event in the church. The thing is, I never 'remembered' the incident until my dad shared it with me numerous times in my later life. Then I started to 'remember' what only can be construed as a 'false memory'. This can happen to all of us.
Similarly, the particular detail events in memories over time -- especially as we get older and our memory is not as good as it used to be -- can be 'added' to and/or 'subtracted' from the memory, different or similar events from different memories in different times and/or places can be 'conflated' together. All of this is to say that 'subjective, narcissistically biased memories' -- unless otherwise supported and confirmed by other witnesses and/or credible evidence -- should not be construed as being the same as 'objective facts'.
Having said this, not many people are going to 'forget' a memory with the magnitude of 'subjective importance' of a sexual assault -- or anything close to it. I can remember twice in my younger life -- between 20 and 35 -- where I was verbally propositioned by homosexual men. At least once when I was driving cab in my 30s, a second time too, I believe, that I cannot remember the details, and once in my teens or early 20s where I was propositioned in the man's apartment after he had just locked the door. I politely told the man, 'sorry, but I didn't lean that way' -- and promptly undid the lock and left. Another time -- stupid on my part -- I was hitchhiking back to university late at night and got into a car with a homosexual man. The man towards the end of the trip made a 'physical pass' at me, putting his hand on my knee and running it up my leg -- this was probably one of the most stupid situations that I ever got myself into but fortunately we were in Waterloo by this time and I was out of the car in a flash without anything further developing.
That last memory I have only shared with one or two people in my life -- I was embarrassed, humiliated might be a better word, for getting myself into the situation in the first place where it happened. Memories like this, we don't 'forget'. Maybe we 'suppress' them -- don't share them with others -- but that doesn't mean that we either 'forget' or 'repress' them. We remember them clearly.
Or speaking from my own experience, this is what I believe.
So Freud's 'Oedipal Theory' clearly did a 'disservice' to mankind, and particularly to any Psychoanalytic clients who may have been sexually assaulted as children because the Oedipal Theory basically 'denied the existence' of such 'traumatic experiences and the memories of such experiences' having re-theorized and classified these experiences and memories of experiences into 'normal childhood -- and/or later teenage -- sexual fantasies unconsciously re-worked, masked, distorted, and/or fabricated as 'actually happened events' that in post 1900 Psychoanalytic theory -- didn't happen. For a client who may have been actually horrifically sexually assaulted, this would be like the equivalent of telling a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust that 'the Holocaust never happened'. Thus, in this regard, The Oedipal Theory can only be construed as a 'brutal pathology of normalcy' within Psychoanalytic Theory itself -- and something that to this day, still needs to be changed amongst all Classically trained Psychoanalysts who are still adhering to this 'distorted' theory.
In my opinion, The Oedipal Theory should be defined and described differently: it is our tendency to be romantically and/or sexually attracted to a person who reminds us in some way, consciously or subconsciously, of one or both of our parents.
This does not need to imply that we were all sexually attracted to our parent of the opposite sex growing up -- or that we wanted to 'conquer and destroy' the parent of the same sex in order to get to the parent of the opposite sex, although in many families growing up, it might indeed, actually seem like this type of psychological process was going on. But this theory is better taken 'metaphorically, symbolically, and/or mythologically' in my opinion, than to be taken literally like a Classically trained Psychoanalyst is taught to do.
Freud created the 'Oedipal Complex' from the ancient Greek Sophocles Trilogy.
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Oedipus Trilogy
The Oedipus Trilogy was originally written by Sophocles and is meant to be told in a story-telling fashion.
SOPHOCLES
OEDIPUS THE KING
Translation by F. Storr, BA
Formerly Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge
From the Loeb Library Edition
Originally published by
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
and
William Heinemann Ltd, London
First published in 1912
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ARGUMENT
To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born
to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother.
So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together
and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the
babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took
him to his master, the King or Corinth. Polybus being childless
adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's
son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god
and heard himself the weird declared before to Laius. Wherefore he
fled from what he deemed his father's house and in his flight he
encountered and unwillingly slew his father Laius. Arriving at Thebes
he answered the riddle of the Sphinx and the grateful Thebans made
their deliverer king. So he reigned in the room of Laius, and
espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes
prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the
city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge
themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which
he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by
step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene
reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own
act and praying for death or exile.
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But in my opinion again, 'The Oedipal Myth' is best left interpreted as a myth -- and not something normally to be taken literally, although again, in some particular circumstances, it almost looks like it should be taken literally.
And often, it is quite possible to get some extremely 'mixed up' and/or 'conflated' variables.
For example, we could divide the Oedipal Complex in half and talk about the 'Antigone Complex' where a child metaphorically and/or literally wants to 'conquer and/or destroy' his or her parent of the same sex.
And we can also talk about the 'Polar Oedipal Complex' where we are attracted to a person who has the opposite characteristic(s) of one or both parents.
Indeed, it is not at all unusual for elements of Freud's 'Traumacy-Seduction Theory, Oedipal Theory, Transference Theory and and Narcissistic Compensation/Overcompensation/Mastery Compulsion Theory (Adler's influence)' -- all to be conflated together in particular case examples giving an extremely muddled clinical picture unless a therapist is actually taught (and/or learns him or herself) to expect this type of clinical picture to happen. Because I think it is more the norm than the exception.
Personally, I believe that the strongest Freudian Theory exists when all of Freud's various theories are merged together -- even the ones he personally 'disowned' -- and treated as supporting each other, not as being mutually exclusive.
This is where we all have a tendency of getting caught up -- and 'tricked' -- by Aristolean or Kierkgaardian 'black or white, either/or logic' when oftentimes we are better utilizing Hegelian or post-Hegelian 'dialectically-integrative logic'.
One of the best ideas of 'wisdom' that I can come up with is the distinction of 'properly knowing when we are best utilizing Aristolean-Kierkegaardian either/or logic vs. when we are best utilizing Hegelian or Post-Hegelian dialectically-integrative logic'. Often, we get 'stuck' and 'locked' inside an Aristolean-Kierkegaardian model of viewing the world and our own particular choices when we would be better utilizing a Post-Hegelian, Humanistic-Existential, Dialectically Integrative Model.
To give you another example, in physics, to the best of memory, there used to be a 'particle' theory or matter. Then there was a 'wave theory' of matter. However, the best model of all came when -- using Hegelian dialectic logic -- a 'wave-particle duality' theory was created which became a central quantum mechanics.
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Wave–particle duality
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In physics and chemistry, wave–particle duality is the concept that all matter and energy exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, duality addresses the inadequacy of classical concepts like "particle" and "wave" in fully describing the behaviour of small-scale objects. Various interpretations of quantum mechanics attempt to explain this ostensible paradox.
Wave–particle duality should be distinguished from wave-particle complementarity, the latter implying that matter can demonstrate both particle and wave characteristics, but not both at the same time (that is, not within one and the same experimental arrangement).
The idea of duality is rooted in a debate over the nature of light and matter dating back to the 1600s, when competing theories of light were proposed by Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton). Through the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).[1] The only distinction in this regard is that in different contexts, because of mass or energy or frequency, some matter seems more particle-like than wave-like; in other contexts, or with reduced values of energy etc., the same matter will more obviously show wave-like qualities than particle-like.
This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; because of their small wave lengths, the wave properties of macroscopic objects cannot be detected.[2]
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The same type of 'dialectically integrative' or 'duality theory' should be applied to Psychoanalysis as has been done in physics.
Everyone of Freud's many 'sub-theories' should be equally respected and/or modified and then merged together to create what I think is potentially the best Psychoanalytic theory of all -- a 'multi-dialectic-integrative-and-wholistic one'; not a 'reductionistically torn apart and dissociated one' where all the individual pieces and sub-theories need to be put back together again like 'Humpty Dumpty'.
Even Freud's last theory that was only just being started to be developed on 'dissociation' and the splitting of the ego' would become an incredibly valuable addition to 'Object Relations' Psychoanalysis as clinicians and theorists like Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, Harold Guntrip, Heinz Kohut, and Eric Berne would take this 'theoretical ball and run with it'.
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Melanie Klein
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Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
* 2 Thought
* 3 Literature
* 4 In popular culture
* 5 External links
* 6 Notes
[edit] Life
Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage[1], Klein first sought psychoanalysis for herself with Sandor Ferenczi when he was living in Budapest during World War I. There she became a psychoanalyst and began analysing children in 1919. In 1921 she moved to Berlin where she studied with and was analysed by Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. However, impressed by her innovative work, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones invited Klein to come to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.
Klein had a major influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications consisted of a teaching degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.
After the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna, in London in 1938, Klein’s ideas came into conflict with those of Continental analysts who were immigrating to Britain. Following protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Anna Freud during the 1940s, the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Anna Freudian, and (3) independent. This division remains to the current time.
Apart from her professional successes, Klein’s life was full of tragic events. Allegedly the product of an unwanted birth, her parents showed her little affection. Her much loved elder sister died when Klein was four, and she was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed and her son died, while her daughter, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Mother and daughter were not reconciled before Klein's death, and Schmideberg did not attend Klein's funeral.
[edit] Thought
Although she questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of Sigmund Freud, Klein always considered herself a faithful adherent to Freud's ideas. Klein was the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques[2] (such as working with children using toys) and her theories in infant development. Strongly opinionated, and demanding loyalty from her followers, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. She is considered one of the co-founders of object relations theory.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a speculative hypothesis eventually accepted by Freud, which stated that life may be a fragile occurrence, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains a drive towards death. In psychological terms Eros (properly, the life instinct), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly seeks to terminate and disintegrate life.Both Freud and Klein regarded these biomental forces as the foundations of the psyche. These were human instincts ("Triebe") unrelated to the animal instincts of ethology.These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the "id," sparked the ego--the experiencing self--into activity. Id, ego, and superego--to be sure--were merely shorthand terms (like the "instincts")referring to highly complex, mostly uncharted, psychodynamic operations. Freud and Klein never abandoned the terms or the conceptualizations despite protests and controversies by many of their adherents, especially now.
While Freud’s ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children’s play as their primary mode of emotional communication. After observing troubled children play with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine, pencil and paper, Klein attempted to interpret the specific meaning of play. She realised that parental figures played a significant role in the child’s phantasy life, and considered that the chronology of Freud’s Oedipus complex was imprecise. Contradicting Freud, she concluded that the superego was present long before the Oedipal phase.
After exploring ultra-aggressive phantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore. She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position. The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid-schizoid position.[3]
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analysing children brought her into conflict with Freud's own daughter, Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists working in England at that time. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial/scientific discussions.
Today, Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the major schools within psychoanalysis. Kleinian psychoanalysts are members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the predominant school of psychoanalysis within Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exception of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. Within the United States of America, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the major training center that follows the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults is characterized by a very traditional technique using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on interpreting very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies.
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DGB
In the 'Splitting of the Ego in The Process of Defense' essay (1938), written a year before he died in London, England, Freud's opening paragraph is extremely significant.
'I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter.' (The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 23, p. 275).
There are numerous ways in which this 'old-new' line of thinking on Freud's part should both be linked to his past work -- and to the work of Pierre Janet -- as well as pointing a 'new' path for Psychoanalysis in the future.
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Pierre Janet
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Pierre Janet
Born May 30, 1859(1859-05-30)
Died February 24, 1947 (aged 87)
Nationality French
Fields psychology, philosophy, psychiatry
Doctoral students William James
Known for dissociation
Pierre Marie Félix Janet (May 30, 1859 - February 24, 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
He was one of the first people to draw a connection between events in the subject's past life and his or her present day trauma, and coined the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’. He studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris. In several ways, he preceded Sigmund Freud. Many consider Janet, rather than Freud, the true 'founder' of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis, L'état mental des hystériques, in 1892. He earned a degree in medicine the following year in 1893.
In 1898, Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913.
In 1923, he wrote a definitive text, La médecine psychologique, on suggestion and in 1928-32, he published several definitive papers on memory.
Whilst he did not publish much in English, the fifteen lectures he gave to the Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria and he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.
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DGB
Personally, the one theory of Freud's that I more or less completely 'dissociate' myself from is his theory of 'repression' and 'the unconscious'. I much prefer Janet's concepts of 'dissociation' and 'subconscious'. And the concept that Freud is just starting to develop here -- specifically, the 'splitting of the ego in the process of defense' although here we need to either make critical distinctions and/or 'equal associative linguistic and semantic connections' between the 'splitting of the ego', 'the splitting of the psyche', and the 'splitting of the Whole Self'. I am inclined to lump all three of these ideas together to mean exactly the same thing.
Many psychoanalysts, I believe, would not want to do this. Freud, as I recall -- I will have to check this -- believed that the newborn baby was basically a 'bundle of biological, biochemical, sexual, and psychic energy' -- which he called the 'Id' -- to be differentiated later from the biological, social, evolutionary survival function and development of 'the ego' as it 'split off from the id' in order to protect the self from 'internal and/or external dangers'. 'The Superego' -- i.e., the 'internalized (or introjected) righteous, ethical, social conscience of society and/or the parents -- would be viewed by Freud as a later 'splitting off of The Ego' into the third part of the human psyche which Freud gave the name 'Superego' to.
Now Freud's 'classic 3 part model of the human psyche' as discussed above is either a little bit or quite a bit different than any kind of 'Object Relations' model depending on who is doing the interpreting and what kind of Object Relations model we are talking about.
Freud was the first psychoanalyst to use the term 'object' (1915?) -- starting from his 'drive theory' (sexual and aggressive) and then differentiating between the 'source', 'the aim', and the 'object' of the particular drive. In 1917 ('Mourning and Melancholia), Freud started to talk about 'external objects' and 'lost objects' relative to depression which eventually paved the way for Melanie Klein to start to talk about 'relational psychoanalysis' with 'internal' and 'external' objects as well as 'drive Psychoanalysis' (a derivative of Freud's sexual and aggressive instincts) and Fairbairn to take this one step further and drop 'drive Psychoanalysis altogether.
The two types of models can actually be integrated and incorporated into the same model as Klein more or less tried to do (but with some further distinctions).
My intent is similar but in a way that is much broader (and less convoluted) than Klein as I aim to integrate all elements of Psychoanalytic Theory (as well as some aspects of 'Non-Analytic' theory: Adler, Jung, Perls, Berne, Masson).
This includes: Traumacy-Seduction Theory, my modified version of Oedipal Theory, 'Unorthodox Transference' Theory, the Adlerian interpretation of conscious early childhood memories as 'conflicted transference memories', Narcissistic Id Theory, 'Mastery Compulsion, Compensation, and Transference-Reversal Theory', and Object Relations Theory...with the outside contributions of the aforementioned Adler, Jung, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Perls, Berne, and others...
What this requires is essentially a further 'splitting off' of both The Ego and The Superego as well as perhaps even the Id and/or other 'Subterranean' elements of the Personality into further 'components', 'compartments' or 'divisions' of the psyche.
This idea we will develop more specifically in the next essay.
Enough for now.
-- dgb, August 1st, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
