I am at a crossroads here. With my last several essays, I have gotten back into a Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic (GAP) mode of thinking again. I have gone back into the field of Psychoanalysis, into Psychoanalytic History, into Transference Theory, the history and evolution of Transference Theory, its similarities and differences to Adlerian Lifestyle Theory, and I have gotten back into the whole, highly provocative, Seduction Theory Controversy -- a theory that Freud basically abandoned between 1896 and 1899,
I've gone back to the ideas of Dr. Jeffrey Masson, a high ranking psychoanalytic researcher who was given the highly esteemed position of Projects Director of The Freud Archives and who went through all of Freud's most personal letters with Anna Freud's permission and blessing -- and then something suddenly didn't fit for him. Masson turned against Sigmund Freud and said that 'Freud lost moral courage' for abandoning -- or in his words 'suppressing' -- The Seduction (Childhood Sexual Abuse)Theory in 1896 in order to avoid political heat and pressure from the doctors who didn't like the paper ('The Aetiology of Hysteria') that he had just read to them, one of them describing Freud's Seduction Theory as a 'scientific fairy tale'.
In Masson's mind, Freud was intimidated by these doctors who had power and control over the young Freud's freshly evolving medical and psychiatric career -- and so, to Masson's way of thinking, Freud over the next few years radically changed his Seduction Theory changing it into a 'Fantasy Theory' and an 'Oedipal Theory' that would 'no longer blame fathers for these alleged childhood sexual assaults' because they were no longer being viewed by Freud as being 'real' but rather as 'dreamed up sexual fantasies of their daughters who were in love with them'. And this would become the established position of Psychoanalysis -- a position that is still held today after Masson was removed from his position as Projects Director of The Freud Archives for going on public record as saying that Freud effectively 'suppressed the truth of childhood sexual abuse' in order to save his own career.
Do I continue on this path of further research, investigation, and theorizing that I have opened up here again -- or do I take a break from this investigation -- finish up the rather long essay I was going to write this month on 'Language, Epistemology, Narcissism, Ethics, and Central Ego Functioning' -- and then take up the subject of Psychoanalysis and Modified Post Psychoanalysis again afterwards, probably in the new year?
That is the question....I will ponder a little longer...
-- dgb, Dec. 5th, 2009.
