Misconceptions about Freud's Seduction Theory: Comment on Gleaves and Hernandez
(1999)
Allen Esterson
(Note: This is a pre-publication version of the article published in History of Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2002, pp. 85-91. Copyright: American Psychological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.)
D. H. Gleaves and E.
Hernandez (1999) write in relation to the seduction theory that "recent
writers now argue that ... Freud never made discoveries of sexual abuse"
(p. 332) and that "the assertion that Freud did not make discoveries of
abuse is unwarranted" (p. 324). In this article an outline of the case that
Freud had no adequate grounds for his 1896 claims of having uncovered infantile
"sexual scenes" is given. Some of the more important misconceptions
and erroneous arguments in Gleaves and Hernandez's article are then examined.
Gleaves and Hernandez (1999) acknowledge that at the time in
question Freud was using "a very forceful approach" to obtain his
objectives (p. 343). In his description of his current "pressure
technique" in Studies on Hysteria, Freud
(1895/1955b) several times emphasized that it was he himself who generally told
the patient the unconscious idea that he had inferred to be at the root of the
patient's symptoms (pp. 281, 282-283, 291, 295).[1] In "The Aetiology of
Hysteria" (Freud, 1896/1962a) he stated that his analytic method was analogous
to that of a forensic physician who "can arrive at the cause of an injury,
even if he has to do without any information from the patient (p. 192).
Starting from Breuer's "momentous
discovery" that hysterical symptoms are determined by certain experiences
"which are being reproduced in his
psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols," Freud endeavored to compel the symptoms of hysteria "to make
themselves heard as witnesses" to the origin of the illness (Freud,
1896/1962a, pp. 192-193).[2] (For Freud's
description of his reconstruction of an infantile "sexual scene,"
analytically inferred from the patient's symptoms, see Freud, 1896/1962b. p.
172, n.1) It should also be noted that Freud reported that the patients
"assure me ... emphatically of their unbelief" in the preconceived
"sexual scenes" that he claimed he had induced them to
"reproduce" (1896/1962a, p. 204).[3]
Before
he alighted on the seduction theory in early October 1895,[4] Freud had not
reported any instance of his having uncovered infantile sexual abuse among his
patients, yet within 4 months (Masson. 1985, p. 170) he had completed two
articles in which he claimed that for every one of his 16 patients[5] he had
analytically "traced back"' from their symptoms to such experiences
(Freud, 1896/1962c, p. 151). Gleaves and Hernandez (1999, p. 338) note that
Freud (1896/1962a) wrote: "In most of my cases I found that two or more of
these aetiologies [by different categories of assailants] were in operation
together; in a few instances the accumulation of sexual experiences was truly
amazing" (p. 208). However, they fail to appreciate that this actually
militates against their contention that Freud made genuine discoveries of
infantile sexual abuse. The sheer number of infantile "sexual scenes"
supposedly uncovered in such a short time, from an age never previously
reported by Freud,[6] is a further indication that his 1896 claims were
essentially based on the analytic interpretation of symptoms (of which most
patients would have had several).[7]
The Case Argued by Gleaves and
Hernandez (1999)
It is possible here to mention only some the more important
examples of erroneous or deficient arguments in Gleaves and Hernandez's (1999)
article. For instance, while noting that Freuds theory was "based on the
supposition that the original pathognomic [pathogenic?] memory had to be
unconscious," they write that "close examination of Freud's writing
suggests that, in many instances, his patients may have had conscious memory
for many of the events but were simply unwilling to talk about them" (p.
343). However. Freud (1896/1962a) himself reported that "Before they come
for analysis the patients know nothing about these [infantile sexual]
scenes" (p. 204). Furthermore. he stated explicitly that "With our
patients, those memories [of the infantile scenes] are never conscious"
(p. 211).
Gleaves and Hernandez (1999) note that "Freud ... pointed
to the therapeutic effectiveness of memory retrieval and processing as evidence
that the memories were genuine" and argue that "this type of evidence
is ... inconsistent with the hypothesis that they were false" (pp.
329-330, 346). Now, as Breuer acknowledged (Freud, 1895/1955b, p. 43), the
remission of symptoms cannot be used as evidence in this way. In any case,
Freud's letters to Fliess tell a different story from his public claims of
therapeutic success. For instance, Freud's (1898/1962d) assertion, in an
article published in February 1898, that he owed "a great number of
[therapeutic] successes" (p. 282, see also p. 283) to his recently
developed psychoanalytic technique contrasts with his report to Fliess in the
same month: "The cases of hysteria are proceeding especially poorly. I
shall not finish a single one this year either" (Masson, 1985, p. 299 and
pp. 218, 232, 264).
Gleaves and Hernandez (1999) acknowledge that "in 'The
Aetiology of Hysteria' Freud presented very little specific information about
what his patients actually said and how he went about eliciting the
information" (p. 339). Elsewhere in the article they write that
"rather than presenting the actual data on which he based his conclusions
... [Freud] addressed only the evidence that the data he reportedly acquired
were accurate" (p. 328). However, the absence of the "actual
data" does not inhibit the authors from accepting uncritically Freud's
(hardly disinterested) interpretation of the patients' agitated behavior as
their "reliving" of the infantile sexual experiences he had
postulated (pp. 329-330, 345).
To support their contention that "in other writings
[Freud] included enough direct quotes from his patients to demonstrate clearly
that they were telling him about what they remembered," Gleaves and
Hernandez (1999, p. 339) provide an example from Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895/1955b). However, Freud's reports
of patients telling him about incidents that occurred after infancy have no relevance to the point at issue. Moreover,
contrary to what the authors assert, in the example they give the crucial
incident is not reported in direct quotes but is recounted in Freud's own words
(Freud, 1895/1955b, pp. 275-276; Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999, p. 340). They
go on to say that in the "Aetiology" article and in letters to
Fliess, Freud included "numerous specifics of the abuse reports that could not have been inferred [italics
added]" (Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999, p. 340). Gleaves and Hernandez
must have little familiarity with Freud's writings if they are unaware of the
extraordinary analytic inferences he can arrive at on the basis of the most
slender material. One example of many is his analytic interpretation of the
Wolf Man's early childhood dream of looking at some wolves in a tree as a
repressed memory of the infant's witnessing his parents engaging in
"coitus a tergo [from behind],
three times repeated" (Freud, 1918/1955a, pp. 29-37; see also Esterson,
1993, pp. 68‑70). An instance from the seduction theory period is his
analytic reconstruction of an infantile "sexual scene" involving
fellatio in the case of Miss G. de B. (Masson, 1985, p. 220), critically
examined in some detail by Webster (1995, pp. 207-208).[8]
Contrary to Gleaves and Hernandez's (1999) contention that
"most of the corroboration reported by Freud ... has simply not been
addressed by recent critics" (p. 347), both Smith and I have called into
question the evidential value of the information provided by Freud in these
cases (Esterson, 1998, pp. 7‑8; Smith, 1991, pp. 13-14). The only case
they allude to (p. 330) that was not dealt with by Smith or me is not relevant
to the 1896 claims, because it involves events when the girl in question was
"approaching maturity" and Freud did not uncover the information in
his treatment. (The girl's physician told Freud that her governess had been
discovered visiting her at night; Freud, 1895/1955b, pp. 274-275.)[9] That
Gleaves and Hernandez describe the questionable "corroborations"
claimed by Freud as representing "strong evidence" (p. 347) that at
least some of the discoveries reported by Freud were genuine is a further
illustration of their propensity to take his assertions at face value.
Gleaves and Hernandez's (1999) discussion of the issue of
fathers as the supposed abusers contains errors and misconceptions (p. 338).
They state that "in [his] September 21, 1897, letter to Fliess, Freud
wrote that fathers were the perpetrators of the alleged abuse 'in all cases'
(Masson, 1985, p. 264)." However, Freud could not have been meaning what
the authors assert ("in all cases"), since he had implicated fathers
as the supposed abuser of the patient in only three out of some eight cases
reported to Fliess (see Masson, 1985). What he actually wrote was that in all
cases, the father "had to be accused
of being perverse [italics added]," not that fathers had been accused.[10] The authors also write that "in Freud's
later articles he explicitly stated that he had suppressed the fact that the
alleged perpetrators in some of his early cases were the fathers" (see
Freud, 1895/1955b, pp. 134, n.2; 170, n.1). However, the two instances cited
(from Studies on Hysteria) are not
germane to the seduction theory (Esterson, 1998, p. 10).[11] Again, Gleaves and
Hernandez (1999) claim that in the "Aetiology" paper Freud
"stated that [a love relationship involving adult close relatives] was 'by
far' the most common type of pattern" of abuse, and that "he did
state that adult 'close relatives' were most commonly the perpetrators"
(p. 338). Leaving aside that he nowhere uses the words "by far," this
does not accurately describe Freud's claims in the 1896 papers. In
"Aetiology" he lists three groups of alleged abusers, and of the
second group he writes that it
consists of the much more numerous [compared with the first group] cases in which some adult looking after the child – a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, unhappily all too often, a close relative – has initiated the child into sexual intercourse ... (Freud, 1896/1962a, p. 208)
In reporting Freud's list of alleged culprits the authors omit
members of this second group other than close relatives, and by taking the
"all too often" remark out of its context and rewording it they
extend its meaning beyond that given by Freud. Moreover, in "Further
Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (Freud, 1896/1962b) the
category cited as all-important by the authors (adult close relatives) was not even mentioned,[12] and in that
paper Freud wrote that teachers "figure
with regrettable frequency" (p. 164). If one were selective among these
lists one could, with as little justification as Gleaves and Hernandez (1999),
assert that Freud stated that teachers were especially prominent among the
abusers of the seduction theory patients. All of this undercuts their claim
that Freud "was consistent with his story (at least across time) that
fathers were frequently the perpetrators of the alleged abuse" (p.
338).[13]
Concluding Remarks
These comments deal with only a small part of Gleaves and
Hernandez's (1999) lengthy article but should give some idea of its
inadequacies.[14] The authors' central contention in relation to the seduction
theory that "there is a fair amount of evidence that some, if not all, of
[Freud's] discoveries [of childhood sexual abuse] were genuine" (p. 351)
is undermined by misconceptions and omissions of the kind indicated in this
article and by their tendency to take Freud's assertions on trust in spite of
the inconsistencies in his reports of the episode (see Cioffl, 1974/1998, pp.
199-204; Esterson, 1993, pp. 21-25, 1998, pp. 13‑15, 2001; Israëls &
Schatzman, 1993, pp. 40-47) and evidence that his accounts of his clinical
experiences are unreliable.[15]
NOTES
1.
Freud alluded to his use of the pressure technique in one of the earlier
seduction theory articles (Freud, 1896/1962b, p. 177).
2.
Gleaves and Hernandez (1999) argue that Freud most likely discovered a
"connection between certain symptoms and types of childhood abuse (or
fantasies ... )" and only then developed the theory that "allowed him
... to reason backward from symptoms to etiology" (p. 340). However, as
the above quotations indicate, the decoding of symptoms to uncover their
etiological origins was already central to his practice. Freud actually derived
the seduction theory on the basis of his speculative notion of "deferred
effect" (Esterson, 1998, p. 7).
3.
The word reproduction seems to cover
a wide range of phenomena; in "The Aetiology of Hysteria," for
instance, Freud (1896/1962a) referred to patients' symptoms as reproductions of supposed forgotten trauma (pp.
192-193). Patients' "reproductions" included "violent sensations"
and fragmentary images induced under the influence of the quasi-hypnotic
pressure technique (Freud, 1896/1962a, p. 204, 1896/1962c, p. 153; see Schimek,
1987, pp. 943-944).
4.
Freud postulated that an essential precondition for hysteria and obsessional
neurosis was an unconscious memory of sexual excitation in early childhood
(Masson, 1985, pp. 141, 144).
5.
The 16 included 13 cases that were diagnosed as hysteria plus three
"pure" obsessionals (Freud, 1896/1962c, pp. 152, 155). [I have
excluded two "mixed" cases on the assumption that these were already
included among the "hysterics". If this is incorrect, the total is 18
cases, an improbable increase of 5 cases (cf. 1896a, 1896b) for which Freud
claimed to have succeeded in uncovering deeply repressed memories of sexual
abuse in infancy in less than three months.]
6.
Freud reported that the "commonest age" at which the alleged events
occurred was 3 or 4 years, with two instances occurring in the infant's second
year (1896/1962b, p. 165; 1896/1962c, p. 152).
7.
In a historical account of his experiences in the period when he discontinued
the use of direct hypnosis Freud (1924/1961) reported that the patients'
material "did not bring up what had actually been forgotten," but
"with the help of a certain amount of supplementing and interpreting, the doctor was able to guess (or
reconstruct) the forgotten material from it [italics added]" (p. 196).
8.
In his report to Fliess on Miss G. de B. Freud wrote: "Once before I
traced back entirely analogous observations to sucking on the penis"
(Masson, 1985, p. 220). Gleaves and Hernandez (1999, p. 341) criticize me for
having left out [this] sentence about Freud having made an earlier
discovery" in my brief account of the report (Esterson, 1998, p. 6), and
they write that I had "ignored the critical piece of information"
that "invalidated" my argument. This indicates that for Gleaves and
Hemandez a mere assertion by Freud suffices as "critical" evidence of
a "discovery." On what grounds do they presume that the earlier
"discovery" had any sounder basis than that in the present case? In
another letter Freud reported that he had "confirmed" that
"agoraphobia in women .. is the repression of the intention to take
the first man one meets in the street: envy of prostitution and
identification" (Masson, 1985, pp. 217-218). If Freud were to trace his
next female agoraphobic's symptoms to this "intention," would the
fact of his having made his earlier "discovery" make a second such
diagnosis in the slightest degree more valid?
9.
Gleaves and Hernandez's (1999) rebuttal (p. 347) of my criticism of a
corroboration claimed in a letter to Fliess (Masson, 1985, p. 219) is
invalidated by the fact that the words they quote against me relate not to the patient
in question but to the governess in the case alluded to earlier.
10.
I discuss the common misinterpretation of this sentence in a previous article
(Esterson, 1998, pp. 9-10). The implication of the sentence is that, on
theoretical grounds, fathers had to be accused if Freud were to be able to
maintain his theory. As Makari (1998, p. 642) has pointed out, Freud's list of
categories of putative abusers in the 1896 articles was in general accord with
those cited in the literature by Krafft-Ebing and others (and made no mention
of fathers). In fact prior to December 1896 Freud had nowhere mentioned fathers
as abusers of the seduction theory patients, but in that month he reported to
Fliess his idea that abuse by fathers would explain a pattern of "pseudo-heredity"
(Masson, 1985, p. 212; see Makari, 1998, p. 642).
11.
As Swales (1988, pp. 94-96) has shown, there is no reason to doubt Freud's
statement in footnotes appended in 1924 that he had represented the fathers as
"uncles" in these cases (which did not involve forgotten
abuse in early childhood) for reasons of "discretion." It was normal
practice to alter some of the factual details in published case histories in
order to conceal the identities of the individuals involved.
12.
"Foremost among those guilty of abuses," Freud wrote, were
nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants, and teachers (1896/1962b, p. 164).
13.
In his first two retrospective accounts of the seduction theory episode Freud
made no mention of fathers (Freud, 1906/1953, p. 274, 1914/1957, pp. 17‑18).
It was not until 1925 that he produced an account of the episode in which he
implicated fathers, relating them to an Oedipal explanation of his supposed
clinical findings (Freud, 1925/1959, pp. 33-34, 1933/1964, p. 120). The notion
that his detailed lists in the 1896 articles disguised his belief that fathers
were predominantly the abusers has been rebutted by Schimek (1987, pp.
950-951), by me (Esterson, 1998,
pp. 9-10), and by McCullough (2001, p. 6).
14.
Readers interested in seeing a full reply to Gleaves and Hernandez's (1999)
article are invited to contact the author.
15.
Mahony, for example, has documented Freud's "intentional
confabulation" in the case of the Rat Man and demonstrated "the
serious discrepancies between Freud's day-to-day process notes of the treatment
and his published case history of it" (Mahony, 1986, pp. 72-79, 81-85,
1990).
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