Freud's Fall from Grace

I'm not an expert on Freud (far from it), but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once (g). Actually I grew up on Freud and was so impressed I once spent much more than I should to acquire his complete works for my personal library. I was fascinating with his theories and his revisionist history, the way he described the "Old Testament" stories and their real inner meaning. I was enthrawed with his psychological theories about hysteria and our relationship to our parents. It did not occur to me that he might be wrong. I was vaguely aware of his misogyny even before I knew the meaning of the word, but it seemed less important that the morsels of wisdom I discovered reading all of his writings. But the tide has turned. I still feel endebted to Freud and not for a minute do I think the information in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism and other works are not insightful and enlightening. They are. Many great thinkers fall victim to ideas which are prevalent in their time and they add to them and rise above them as he has also done even if not enough to satisfy all of his detractors. This is my crititism, although somewhat limited by my study of him and what others are saying, but I hope it also will in some small measure add to the discourse. Everyone can and should make up their own mind.

"The tide had already begun to turn in the 1970s. The first hint that Freud's reputation was in trouble came from the new feminists. The year 1970 itself was particularly rough, when, in separate books, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Eva Figes all took Freud to task for his reactionary views on women.[2] 1970 also witnessed the publication of Henri Ellenberger's massive study The Discovery of the Unconscious, with its irreverent chapter on Freud; a few years later Paul Roazen's Freud and His Followers continued in a similar vein. Ellenberger and Roazen were significant precursors of the more full-blooded criticism of the 1980s, but in retrospect they seem relatively mild and conventional. The past decade, by comparison, has brought an avalanche of anti-Freudian writings, their tone ever more hostile. Undeniably, Freud's reputation has undergone a sea change." (Paul Robinson - Freud and his Critics - U of California Pr, 1993)

When Sigmund Freud was 39 years old in 1896, with six children, no money, a struggling practice, deeply indebted and depressed, he had a theory about the causes for neuroses, anxiety and hysteria. His conclusion was all of these problems were a result of sexual abuse as a child.

His theory was the female complaint of hysteria was caused by something done to her by a man, usually her father. His ideas were not accepted and when he presented his thesis, his first lecture on the subject on April 21, 1896 to members of the Association of Viennese Neurologists and Psychiatrists at their monthly meeting his presentation was met with silence.

The chairman stated that Freud's idea "sounded like a scientific fairy tale." Freud's hypothesis was not only rejected publicly, he continued to be in his words, "despised and universally shunned" by the association and local medical community.

A colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer speculated that Sigmund was "losing his grip on reality." He was being ostracized, did not receive referrals that his practice depended on and he became more impoverished. He decided his theory was wrong and he believed, as he told his closest friends, that the women who told him about being raped in her childhood must have been lying. He reached the conclusion, he said, that the abuse never happened and the women invented the stories of child sexual abuse by her father. And when asked why the women would invent the story, his response was terribly misogynist. He said, each women unconsciously wants to be raped.

"The woman's "memory" of having been raped by her father was actually a fantasy of her own creation. "If a girl tells you she was raped in her childhood, by her father, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it," Freud wrote. The motive Freud had in mind was the girl's unconscious desire to have sex with her father." (Dr. Leonard Sax, a physician and psychologist in private practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, writing in the magazine, World and I, "The future of Freud's illusion.(Freud's theories set psychiatry back one hundred years) - August 1, 2000)

Leonard Sax writes how astonishing a leap of logic this altering conclusion was, the only reason for it of course, was to reingratiate himself in his medical fraternity:

"Freud was now rejecting the same hypothesis that he himself had advocated so forcefully just one year earlier. On what grounds? The only reason that Freud himself gave was that his earlier hypothesis required one to believe that many young girls are sexually abused. "Surely such a [high] incidence of childhood sexual abuse is not very probable," he wrote. Freud had interviewed thirteen such women before making his speech in April 1896. In an astonishing leap, he decided in 1897 that not only these thirteen women but all women everywhere in all cultures and in all times desired sex with their father when they were young."

It is obvious that Freud, was damaged goods after presenting his hypothesis and his only way back would be a refutation of his original premise. This he did by discrediting his own witness to familial rape and abuse.

Dr. Leonard Sax wrote, "One of the most respected physicians in the Viennese medical community, Professor Eduard von Hofmann of the University of Vienna, maintained that girls and young women had "a pathological tendency to lie and exaggerate as well as an inability to faithfully recall an event. This reveals itself in a partiality for sexual accusations." The leading German authority on forensic medicine, Dr. Johann Ludwig Casper, warned in the very first page of his textbook about the "outright lies" of girls who accuse men of rape. In France, Professor Alfred Fournier insisted that these girls were lying, even when there was evidence of trauma to the genitalia. He wrote that he had seen "large numbers of vaginal inflammations which appeared in young girls in an absolutely spontaneous manner, apart from any possibility of sexual assault." Paul Brouardel, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, had written that "girls accuse their fathers of imaginary assaults on them or on other children in order to obtain their freedom to give themselves over to debauchery."

Not that it would excuse Freud, but there was nevertheless, the ubiquitist unfavorable opinion if women in Freud's time.

The prevailing opinion was that women were liars and not to be trusted. If you didn't go along with the prevailing view you were yourself suspect and did not fit in. Sigmund Freud evidently chose acceptance over the truth and cowardice over courage.

The biblical view was also unfavorable. A women is afterall, in the Judio-Christian-Muslim tradition only a rib and it was a women who is blamed for tempting Adam to eat forbidden fruit and apparently that view, as ignorant as it is, is still held by many in the religious community.

Dr. Leonard Sax also refutated Freud's manufactured evidence about the "Wolf Man."

He says, "In fact, Freud never had such evidence. So he invented it. He published a series of case histories in which he described patients with various minor psychiatric problems whom he claimed to have cured using his technique, which he decided to call "psycho-analysis." One of the most famous of these manufactured case histories was that of the Wolf Man. Before evidence of Freud's duplicity in this case became widely known in the 1970s, Freudian theorists regarded the story of the Wolf Man as "no doubt the most important of all Freud's case histories." The Wolf Man--whose real name was Sergei Pankeev--had come to Freud complaining of depression and self-doubt (what we today would call "low self- esteem"). At one point in the analysis--which was conducted daily over four consecutive years--the Wolf Man recalled dreaming about wolves howling outside his window (hence Freud's nickname for the patient). Freud decided that the dream must be an expression of the patient's fear of being castrated by his father. Freud was convinced, furthermore, that Pankeev must have witnessed his parents having sexual intercourse as a small child, and that watching this act had triggered Pankeev's fears of castration, which Pankeev had then suppressed. The repression had led to all his problems in adulthood, according to Freud. Pankeev insisted that he had never witnessed his parents having sex, and that in any case he had no fear of castration. Freud reassured him that after enough therapy, he would eventually recall both his repressed fears of castration and his repressed memory of watching his parents having sex. After four years of intensive psychoanalysis, Freud persuaded himself that he had cured the Wolf Man. Pankeev's self-doubt and low self-esteem were now a thing of the past, Freud concluded. Freud's vivid description of this case, highlighting his own brilliant deductions regarding the hidden meanings of the Wolf Man's dream, seemed to be substantial evidence supporting Freud's basic claim: that psychoanalysis worked. Psychoanalysis had the power to cure." (Sax)

"When Pankeev was finally interviewed by someone other than Freud--forty years later--he told quite a different story. The whole thing was "a catastrophe," Pankeev said. "I am in the same state [now] as when I first came to Freud." Freud's insistence that Pankeev must have witnessed his parents having sex was implausible, Pankeev explained, "because in Russia [where Pankeev was raised], children sleep in their nanny's bedroom, not in their parents'."Pankeev also mentioned that he had dreamed of dogs, not wolves, outside his window. Freud apparently decided that wolves added a more poetic touch to the story, so he changed the facts to suit his literary taste." (Sax)

"There's more. The Sigmund Freud Archives paid hush money to Pankeev for years--decades--in exchange for his silence. "Instead of doing me good," Pankeev said in an interview shortly before his death, "the psychoanalysts did me harm." Rather than a triumph of analysis, the story of the Wolf Man "appears instead to have been a tacitly recognized embarrassment whose true nature needed to be hidden by the arm-twisting and the financial resources of the Freud Archives," wrote MIT neuroscientist Frank Sulloway. Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg, after reviewing all of Freud's case histories, concluded that "Freud chose to demonstrate the utility of psychoanalysis through descriptions of largely unsuccessful cases"--because Freud had no successful cases to present." (Sax)

"Freud's fundamental belief- -after September 1897--was that psychiatric problems in adulthood derive from repressed childhood sexual fantasies. Freud believed furthermore that if the patient could be encouraged to remember those repressed fantasies, and be liberated from that unhealthy repression, then the anxiety, hysteria, or neurosis would vanish. To the extent that Freud could supply evidence of real people with real problems who had been cured using this approach, it would be reasonable to give some credence to his theories." (Leonard Sax)

Freud also invented the famous "Oedipus complex." This theory, also now rejected, is that ALL girls have this innate desire to kill their mother - AND to have sex with their father. He also hypothesized that ALL boys have an unconscious desire to kill their father and have sex with their mother.

Diane Jonte-Pace writes: "A group of scholars in Jewish cultural studies, among whom are Jay Geller, Sander Gilman, and Daniel Boyarin, has recently produced another set of important feminist analyses of previous hit Freud next hit, gender, and religion. The work of these scholars has been instrumental in demonstrating that previous hit Freud's next hit writings represent a response to an anti-Semitic ideology widespread throughout Wn de siècle Europe within which male Jews were coded as feminine, effeminate, or homosexual. previous hit Freud next hit attempted to portray a masculinized Judaism, they suggest, in reaction against this feminization of male Jewishness." (Diane Jonte-Pace - Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts U of California Press, 2001)

"Michel Foucault has called Freud a "founder of discursivity," meaning by that someone who has created a new way of speaking, "an endless possibility of discourse." Harold Bloom asserts, "No twentieth-century writer, not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka, rivals Freud's position as the central imagination of our age." Freud has fundamentally altered the way we think. He has changed our intellectual manners, often without our even being aware of it. For most of us Freud has become a habit of mind, a bad habit, his critics would be quick to urge, but a habit now too deeply ingrained to be broken. He is the major source of our modern inclination to look for meanings beneath the surface of behavior, to be always on the alert for the "real" (and presumably hidden) significance of our actions. He also inspires our belief that the mysteries of the present will become more transparent if we can trace them to their origins in the past, perhaps even in the very earliest past we can remember (or, more likely, not remember). And, finally, he has created our heightened sensitivity to the erotic, above all to its presence in arenas, notably the family, where previous generations had neglected to look for it. Exactly the Freud who has so invaded our minds is dramatically absent in the writings of his recent detractors. With a poet's wisdom, W. H. Auden more accurately captured Freud's historical stature in a poem commemorating his death in September 1939:" (Robinson)

        To us he is no more a person
        Now but a whole climate of opinion.

In spite of the growing body of criticism, the ideas of Sigmund Freud still manage to live on and to influence us for his deep introspection and insightful analysis into the depths of our psyche of what can only be called man's confusion about his own mind.