Let me be clear on one thing. I am not here to write 'deconstructive' essays on Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis that don't have a more 'constructive' purpose behind them.
I would not have invested hundreds of hours (if not more) into studying Freud if I didn't -- for the most part -- like, and respect, what I was reading.
Now as Fritz Perls has emphasized in similar but different words, there is a big difference between trying to 'swallow a steak whole' as opposed to 'chewing it carefully into small little pieces' and then 'swallowing the small pieces in a way that is much easier on the stomach and does not cause indigestion' -- perhaps 'picking 'grit and fat from out of your mouth', and putting it on your plate rather than trying to swallow what is probably not good for you.
The same is true of learning. 'Carefully Chewed -- or Assimilated -- Learning' is generally much better for you than ''Non-Chewed, Introjected Learning'.
So it is with Freud and Psychoanalysis. Information that is absorbed from Freud -- when it was written in a totally different time and place, Victorian Vienna until the last year of his life (1938) -- can be 'hazardous to your health' if it is 'swallowed whole' -- i.e., 'introjected' -- without very careful chewing and assimilation into your own independent thought process that critiques everything you are reading'...
I, myself, am very 'anal-selective' in terms of the ideas that I am integrating into my own brand of GAP-DGB (Quantum Dialectic) Psychology (Psychoanalysis) -- and my almost 40 years of studying different schools of psychology (since I first read Maxwell Maltz's 'Psycho-Cybernetics' and S.I. Hayakawa's 'Language in Thought and Action in 1972 which led to studying psychology at The University of Waterloo (I wrote my Honours Thesis for the very esteemed 'Cognitve-Behavior Theorist' -- Dr. Donald Meichenbaum when he was there in the same time period between 1974 and 1979); after that I went on to study Adlerian Psychology at The Adlerian Institute of Ontario and Gestalt Therapy at The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, before I focused in on Psychoanalysis and some Jungian Psychology -- all of this time and energy, and assimilated learning, I think, gives me decent credibility for choosing the ideas that I have chose, and/or am still in the process of choosing to be a part of my own integrative psychology system here -- and to draw -- with a lot of careful thinking -- the rather bald and harsh conclusions that I have drawn below regarding some of the suspcious, bad ethical choices, decisions, actions that Freud made and participated in between 1895 and 1896.
Because I am certainly not here -- like perhaps others before me -- to hide what I believe to be the historical truth, and the truth behind Freud's very unethical behavior as reported and interpreted below.
For one thing, psychoanalysts have tried very hard for the most part to either ignore or at least minimize the seriousness of Freud's cocaine abuse. The less idealized reality of the situation was Freud's cocaine abuse was very serious -- from the few reports that I have read on this matter that seem to be much closer to the truth, Freud took cocaine for at least 11 years -- from 1884 to 1895, and possibly longer. Not too many Freudian scholars -- or even 'anti-Freudians' -- want to openly and publicly say this.
I seem to get 'bad public ratings' whenever I open this Freudian can of worms...
The 'Coke Can'....
Is this because I am 'out to lunch' on what I am writing?
Or is it because readers in general just do not want to see this 'ethically challenged' side of Freud?
Masson wrote that Freud 'lost moral courage'. I used to question why Masson made such an 'inflammatory' statement back in the 1980s. The statement essentially ruined his career while he was near the very top of The Freudian Hierarchy....right next to Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler...
After reading 'The Complete Letters'...including the 'unpublished' ones that Masson found in The Freud Archive, which led Masson to draw this highly inferential and inflammatory conclusion....
Now I don't.
In fact, if anything, I have taken Masson's inferences even further than Masson did...Masson didn't -- and still doesn't -- want to write or talk about Freud's cocaine involvement other than to the extent that Freud used cocaine for allegedly 'medical' reasons...
I do.
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Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered (or persuaded -- my addition) by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. (I will hold up a 'mirror' before I leave them alone -- my addition).
Ayn Rand
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I had a sister-in-law that started taking cocaine about the same age that Freud did -- 28 -- and she died about the same age that Freud was showing many of the tell-tale signs of prolonged coke abuse: heart arrythma, heart attacks, migraines, depression, infected sinuses, pus running out of his nose...for Freud that was in 1895 at the age of 39...and it was right in the centre of one of the most distressing and disturbing 'professional' events in Freud's life -- a female patient under his care and persuasion, Emma Ekstein, was convinced by Freud to have a 'nasal surgery' (as some form of new, obviously radical, 'physical psychotherapy' -- which I would put in the same category as 'Electric-Convulsive Therapy (ECT)' and 'Lobotomies'...not something that I would recommend to anyone...). The nasal surgery would be conducted by Freud's best friend -- Dr. Wilhelm Fliess -- who was a nasal specialist -- and a 'radical, overly-adventurous' theorist and therapist -- just like Freud in terms of throwing 'medical caution to the wind', in the name of 'science'. 'Go boldly where no man has gone before'....Freud and Fliess both tended to take this slogan far too literally without putting up 'ethical stop signs'...
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Wilhelm Fliess...Wikipedia.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Fliess
Wilhelm Fliess (German: Wilhelm Fließ; 24 October 1858, Arnswalde, Province of Brandenburg – 13 October 1928, Berlin) was a German otolaryngologist who practised in Berlin. On Josef Breuer's suggestion, Fliess attended several "conferences" with Sigmund Freud beginning in 1887 in Vienna, and the two soon formed a strong friendship. Through their extensive correspondence and the series of personal meetings, Fliess came to play an important part in the development of psychoanalysis.
Fliess developed several idiosyncratic theories, such as reflex nasal neuroses, postulating a connection between the nose and the genitals, and vital periodicity, forerunner of the popular concepts of biorhythms that never found scientific favor outside of psychoanalytic circles, though others, such as the idea of innate bisexuality, were incorporated into Freud's theories. Freud referred occasional patients to him for treatment of their neurosis through anaesthetization of the nasal mucosa with cocaine, and through nasal surgery. Together, Fliess and Freud developed a Project for a Scientific Psychology, which was later abandoned.
Emma Eckstein (1865-1924) had a particularly disastrous experience when Freud referred the then 27-year-old patient to Fliess for surgery to remove the turbinate bone from her nose, ostensibly to cure her of premenstrual depression. Eckstein haemorrhaged profusely in the weeks following the procedure, almost to the point of death as infection set in. Freud consulted with another surgeon, who removed a piece of surgical gauze that Fliess had left behind.[1] Eckstein was left permanently disfigured, with the left side of her face caved in. Despite this, she remained on very good terms with Freud for many years, becoming a psychoanalyst herself.
Fliess also remained close friends with Freud. He even predicted Freud's death would be around the age of 51, through one of his complicated bio-numerological theories ("critical period calculations"). Their friendship, however, did not last to see that prediction out: in 1904 their friendship disintegrated due to Fliess's belief that Freud had given details of a periodicity theory Fliess was developing to a plagiarist. Freud died at 83 years of age.
Freud ordered that his correspondence with Fliess be destroyed. It is only known today because Marie Bonaparte purchased Freud's letters to Fliess and refused to permit their destruction.
Fliess's son Robert (1895–1970) was also a psychoanalyst and a prolific writer in that field. He devised the phrase ambulatory psychosis[2].
Though Fliess' ideas are often ridiculed today, modern science has in fact revealed that the nose has more than one connection with sexual behaviour and the genitals. The nose is now known to contain erectile tissue, and this may also become engorged during sexual arousal as a side-effect of the signals fired off by the autonomic nervous system to trigger changes in the genitals of both men and women. A condition exists known as honeymoon rhinitis, in which men and women experience nasal stuffiness during sex, and a small number of people are known to sneeze, sometimes uncontrollably, when engaging in or even thinking about sexual activity. The existence of evolutionary relics within the autonomic nervous system has been hypothesised as a cause.[3] Even more remarkably, a study on mice has suggested that the difference between male and female sexual behaviour may be explained by a tiny organ in the nose rather than gender-specific brain circuitry.[4]
He appears as a character in Joseph Skibell's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic.
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Unfortunately, Fliess -- like Freud -- was sometimes a little too liberal, exuberant and unrestrained in 'trying out his new theories'. Most of them were pretty crazy sounding, only got more convoluted and more confusing, the more you read about them, and unfortunately, neither Fliess nor Freud were 'conservative and careful enough' to stop themselves from using a human patient as a human guinea pig for a brand new 'nasal-sexual' surgery. Perhaps there was one common denominator that made this new 'nasal-sexual surgery' make some kind of logical, albeit unprofessional, sense -- specifically, cocaine abuse.
We will continue with this story in a few minutes but first let me say this:
I don't really care too much about what Freud did on his personal time. If Freud's cocaine use/abuse hadn't quite possibly/probably altered the course of Psychoanalytic history, I probably wouldn't have been writing about it. But something funny happened in 1896 -- most Freudian scholars will shrug their shoulders and say that Freud radically changed and, for the most part, left behind, a theory that he believed was wrong (The Traumacy-Seduction Theory). This explanation has not satisfied some theorists who think that Freud over-reacted and changed/abandoned a theory he shouldn't have changed/abandoned.
Most notable in this latter regard -- or 'camp' -- was the work and beliefs of Dr. Jeffrey Masson, former Projects Director of The Freud Archive, who challenged in the early 1980s, after reading, editing, and eventually releasing to the public (1985) The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, what he believed to be Freud's 'suppression' of his 1896 Seduction (Child Sexual Abuse) Theory, arguing that Freud 'lost moral courage' in the spring of 1896 after he had read his new essay/theory (The Aetiology of Hysteria, 1896) to The Psychiatry and Neurology Society on the evening of April 21st, 1896.
Masson argued that Freud was politically, professionally, and economically intimidated and coerced by The Society -- among other factors that were happening at the time, of which probably the most important was The Emma Ekstein nasal surgery fiasco mentioned above, which we will continue to discuss in a few short moments.
I have read some of the 'Complete Letters' and agree with Masson -- in fact, have introduced the 'cocaine' factor here that Masson has, for the most part, stayed away from in his writing as a 'pathological factor'. This factor -- if I am right, which I strongly believe that I am -- takes more of centre stage in Freud's professional life when, in 1891, Freud saw a friend/patient (Flieschl) die partly because of 'cocaine addiction' that was prescribed to him by Freud with the intention of helping Flieschl to 'kick his morphine addiction'. Flieschl had numerous medical problems leading up to his death -- but cocaine was certain one factor in his death, and Freud was right in the middle of this situation, and should have learned right there and then in 1891, like other doctors at the time had already learned around him a 4 or 5 years earlier, that cocaine was very dangerous and addictive, and shouldn't be handed out to patients, friends, and family -- like 'candy' or some 'magical potion'.
Freud didn't seem to learn and was taking it by reports in his own letters right up to at least 1895 -- with perhaps or probably another patient -- Emma Ekstein -- getting involved in Freud's 'cocaine misadventures'. The evidence is 'circumstantial' but I believe (and I think that many or most of you will likely agree with me) -- 'circumstantially strong'.
All of this was happening -- as Masson has described in 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of The Seduction Theory' (1984, 85, 92) -- at a time when Freud radically turned the theoretical and therapeutic assumptions of Psychoanalysis upside down.
It is the changes that Freud made to Psychoanalysis that I am primarily concerned about here, as much as you may or may not want to negatively judge Freud for his 'loss of medical ethics' -- under a strongly dangerous and addictive drug -- cocaine -- that contrary to most 'narcissistically biased' historical reports, was causing Freud a lot more trouble in his personal and professional life than most Freudian scholars and historians would have us believe As mentioned above, Freud was experiencing serious medical problems himself in 1895 that showed all the tell-tales signs of cocaine abuse -- and Freud's and Fliess' belief in -- and 'surgical involvement' with -- 'nasal-sexual' surgery doesn't make too much sense until you introduce the factor of -- cocaine.
Regardless, I am here to change -- or at least significantly modify -- the assumptive foundations of Classical Psychoanalysis, not dwell more than necessary on Freud's cocaine abuse. Like a hundred post-Freudian theorists before me, I am here to get rid of -- and replace -- a handful of bad Freudian assumptions with better Post-Freudian ones (borrowed and integrated from other theorists like Adler, Jung, Klein, Fairbairn, Fromm, Berne, Perls...) -- 'the bad Freudian assumptions' being introduced at a time when Freud was under extreme mental and emotional stress and duress.
What I am doing theoretically -- indeed, what I have done to a large extent already -- is unique in its particular integration and configuration of 'Pre-Psychoanalytic, Classical Psychoanalytic, Object Relations, and Post-Freudian elements of psychology and psychotherapy.
Read my last paper on 'A Transference Analysis of The Freud, Fliess, and Ekstein Medical Fiasco' -- and you will read a 'transference analysis' of Freud's character that is uniquely different from any previous psychoanalytic and/or non-psychoanalytic analysis before me. It rests on the assumptive principles of what I used to call 'GAP' Psychology -- as in Gestalt-Adlerian-Psychoanalytic Psychology. Now I call it 'GAP-DGB Psychology or just DGB Psychology or DGB Quantum-Dialectic Psychology (or Psychoanalysis).
However, the years 1895-1896 have always been the two most controversial years in the history of Psychoanalysis. The highly emotionally charged Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory of Freud's in 1896 -- and his subsequent 'abandonment' of it -- is still generating 'emotionally explosive' essays more than 100 years later. After 1896, Freud essentially 'turned Psychoanalysis upside down (or right side up, depending on your perspective') in the same manner that Marx turned Hegelian Dialectic Theory upside down -- to make it an 'economically deconstructive and idealistic' philosophy (Marx) as opposed to an 'epistemologically idealistic' ('The Evolutionary Search for 'Absolute Truth') philosophy (Hegel).
With Freud -- Freud was thinking 'economics' when he turned Psychoanalysis upside down in 1896 -- but he was not thinking 'socialistic idealistic economics' -- rather, he was thinking 'narcissistically' about his own 'Capitalistic Economic Survival'. And he was also thinking about his own medical and professional reputation. In May, 1896, Freud had no clients -- and presumably no money coming in -- he had been 'blacklisted' by the Psychiatry and Neurology Society for his brand new 'Childhood Sexual Abuse' theory and its 'causal' relation to hysteria and other neuroses. That didn't go over very well with the 'masculinely biased, patriarchal' Psychiatry and Neurology Society at all. Krafft-Ebing said that Freud's latest essay read like a 'scientific fairy tale'. Freud's client referrals 'coincidentally' started to dry up immediately after this 'professional, scientific conference'.
Also converging on May 4th, 1896 -- about a week after the Psychiatry Conference that was held on the evening of April 21st, 1896 -- was an 'unfinished', year old problem that had been 'ethically bothering' Freud for over a year, and was still very much at the top of Freud's mind. This was the 'botched Emma Ekstein nasal-surgery affair conducted by Freud's best friend, Fliess, in February, 1895 -- Freud had the same surgery done on himself by Fliess with less -- but still significant -- surgical after effects. At least we can say that Freud was willing to undergo the same 'surgical treatment' that he had persuasively pushed onto the naive, unsuspecting Emma Ekstein. Obviously, Freud was totally not expecting the 'horrific surgical consequences' of Emma Ekstein's surgery -- where Fliess left a long string of gauze up her nose -- and then Fliess, and Freud, forgot it was still there while Fliess went home to Berlin from Vienna.
The gauze stayed in Emma's nose for about a month until some other unsuspecting doctor got involved (because Fliess was back in Berlin at this time), and checking out some problems that Emma was still having with her nose. It seemed to be badly infected. The new doctor found something up Emma's nose, pulled on it, and the long piece of gauze came tumbling out of her nose -- along with about a gallon of blood (I'm exaggerating a little bit here for emphasis.) Emma almost bled to death in front of Freud who went white with shock...Every doctor can -- and does make mistakes -- but it would seem that Freud very much 'repressed' Hippocrites First Oath: 'First, do the paient no harm!'
When you add to this almost tragic story the very real possibility -- indeed, probablility -- that 'the use of cocaine' was likely tied into these two 'nasal-sexual operations' (which was what Fliess and Freud called this type of surgical procedure -- read Freud's Complete Letters to Fliess...and shake your head in shocked amazement...), and that a year later, on May 4th, 1896, Freud was still thinking about Emma -- and trying to 'rationalize away' his own feelings of ethical and medical guilt -- and you converge this with the disastrous Scientific Meeting that Freud just came out of April 21st, 1896, along with Freud's fastly diminishing case load, and you add to this picture, the fact that Anna Freud had just been born in December, 1895, and Freud had a lot of kids to feed....and the fact that Freud's dad died in 1896 (I don't know what month he died)...the point here is that Freud had a lot of stress on his mind in the spring of 1896...and something had to give...
Something did give -- Freud's Seduction (Childhood Sexual Assault) Theory.
Emma Ekstein can be viewed as Freud's first case example of his brand, spanking new (post-Seduction Theory) 'Instinctual Impulse and Fantasy Theory'. Or stated differently his 'wish fulfillment' theory -- which would four years later take over centre stage in his 1900 Classic 'The Interpetation of Dreams' (ID).
However, right now Freud had more pressing problems -- even as the material for 'ID' was fast entering Freud's forever creative mind...
On May 4th, 1896, Freud needed to 'absolve' himself of his Emma Ekstein guilt. And he did this in a very creative way -- Freud, in the letter of this day to Fliess, called Emma Ekstein an 'hysterical bleeder' -- but no longer in the 'traumatic' sense -- rather, in the 'sexual impulse' sense. Emma bled serially and profusely out of 'longing' -- longing for the two 'therapists' she supposedly loved -- who almost killed her.
In this minute of May 4th, 1896 -- although Freud had been developing this idea from the end of 1895 -- Freud 'blew away' The Traumacy-Seduction Theory (too much emphasis on 'victimizing adults' -- including 'victimizing doctors'...) and in its place, Freud made the client/patient 'accountable' for her own 'instinctual impulses'. Freud would use this same 'longing' theory publicly for the first time in the 'Dora' case of 1905. All you Freudian scholars, professionals, and students out there -- compare the 'analytic results' of the Emma Ekstein medical fiasco with Freud's 'interpretive analysis' of Dora in 1905. Voila! A 'new' source of the Nile -- the 'instinctual longing theory' -- and 'The Oedipus/Electra Complex'. Tell me that the results of The Dora Case weren't 'creatively born' from the nightmare results of the Emma Ekstein Medical Fiasco. Note clearly how the onus of responsibility and accountability had shifted very 'slyly' in both 1896 and 1905 from two 'victimizing adults' in each case (Freud and Fliess in the Emma case vs. Dora's father and his adult 'friend' who had propositioned a young Dora) to two 'sexually longing girls'...(who were allegedly 'longing' for their male victimizers...and/or 'sexual objects' depending on what pre or post-1896 Freudian perspective you wish to take...).
Magically -- i.e., Freud waved his 'magical theoretical wand' in 1896 -- and there were no more 'adult male victimizers' -- just 'sexually longing' women...
To put this another way, Freud can be viewed as a 'masculine feminist' -- before May 4th, 1896 -- 'charging on his white horse' to the rescue of all women who had been sexually molested, manipulated, assaulted, abused... as children or as teenagers...usually by adult, victimizing males...(most often 'allegedly' the father)...
Then, starting on May 4th, 1896, Freud 'absolved' all 'allegedly victimizing men' of responsibility, accountability -- and 'guilt' (especially his own relative to the Emma Ekstein medical nightmare), and instead made all young girls and women 'accountablie', 'responsible' for their own 'sexual longing' (even if it wasn't there).
All the male scientists, doctors, and psychiatrists were happy -- and Freud got his caseload back.
And here in a nutshell, is my extrapolated Massonian Theory of why Freud abandoned The Seduction Theory...
In a word -- 'guilt'.
Now I have taken it on myself to go back and fix Freud's 'neurotic theoretical damage'...
Freud was human and acted the way he did for narcissistic (selfish) reasons -- which is not uncommon to any of us to different degrees -- whatever you may think of him for probably doing what he did 'unethically'.
But this does not mean that 'Classical' Psychoanalysis should be forever 'neurotically and erotically reified' in the over-idealized, old man's guilt...
The Ivory Tower of The Psychoanalytic Establishment hangs to one side -- but still stands -- like The Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Maybe you like it looking that way.
But I have come here -- without Psychoanalytic consent since I am not a Psychoanalyst, and I would not likely get their consent even if I was a Psychoanalyst (Masson didn't) -- to 'straighten' its structural foundations.
Its long past time for The Psychoanalytic Establishment to get on board with today's feminists and to provide an 'equal treatment' for sexually victimized women -- from the 'traumatic' perspective -- as well as from any 'appropriate (instinctual) impulse' perspective.
In short, it is way past time for 'Classical' Psychoanalysis to become '21st Century Classical' Psychoanalysis...
This is not an 'either/or' campaign. All of Freud's 50 years of theorizing needs to be properly integrated together -- preferrably with the valuable integrative help of other important outside theorists as mentioned above.
And me as 'The Central Mediating-Integrating Theorist'...
Personally -- and you can call me a 'narcissistic megalomaniac' if you wish (I, like the rest of you, I speculate, in different stable vs. unstable degrees, carry a 'bi-polar, vascillating, fluctuating, inferiority to superiority complex...and back to square one again...sometimes living or dying on the strength or weakness of some perceived achievement and/or social acknowledgement vs. failure and/or social/self rejection') --
I think I am one of the leading-edge psychoanalytic theorists, underground or not, in the world right now...but of course...I am narcissistically biased...and, for better or worse, have a better overall conceptualization of what I am trying to accomplish here than those of you who I hope are motivated to follow me through this project to the end and achieve a better overall picture, complete with more concrete details, of how I am attempting to 'dialectically modify' Psychoanalysis, expanding its assumptive foundations and outer boundaries in numerous different directions -- and making it the 'central essence' of Hegel's Hotel.
Coincidentally -- or 'astrologically' -- it wil be the 115th anniversary (assuming my math is correct) of May 4th, 1896 -- the day Freud turned Psychoanalysis upside down -- tomorow -- which is now -- today.
-- dgb, May 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 2011
-- David Gordon Bain
