And how did they react? Badly, to say the least. Frostily. Silence. They asked no questions. They shook their heads in disbelief and sadness that a young researcher had just ruined his career by saying silly things about an impossible subject. How could fathers ever abuse their own child, or how could anyone for that matter, ever abuse a child? Or as Krafft-Ebing, the chair, himself said at the conclusion of Freud's speech: "This is a scientific fairy tale." This much we know from the public record. BUT, and this is essential, Anna Freud took out of his letters Freud's response which was pure indignation and defiance: "They can all go to hell," he told Fliess. Then a few days later he wrote Fliess that he was being shunned! This too Anna Freud took out, as, she told me, it made her father sound paranoid. But he was not. He was making an accurate observation.
Q: Did Freud persist in believing this theory even though his colleagues were so strongly opposed to it?
JM: Later that year, he wrote to Fliess that he was more convinced than ever that patients are abused because of the work that Emma Eckstein was doing! But obviously Fliess did not approve, any more than did any of his male colleagues. He had no female colleagues who could balance this patriarchal system--it was complete and all-encompassing--there were no women professionals then, other than Eckstein herself. But slowly, as he realized that he would not have a place in the male society he had grown up in, nor at the university, and that he might even not be able to support his family, he began to change his mind on this important topic.
Eventually, by 1900, he gave up, and in 1903 he publicly announced that he had been mistaken. There was no such thing as incest. Yes, sexual abuse, once in a great while happened, but it was of no consequence, and generally women made it up. He completely gave in to the powers that be. Well, that is my interpretation. Nobody knows for certain what was going on in Freud's mind, so everything is just a hypothesis. And then none of his disciples dared to contradict him. And when they did, well, woe unto them, as we see in the Sandor Ferenczi case.
Once Freud no longer believed--or behaved as if he no longer believed--in the reality of abuse, he had to come up with explanations for why children or adults remembered such abuse. He said these were "screen memories," screening off their own sexual desires for their parents as children, hence the Oedipus Complex and the Electra Complex. Nobody has ever shown that children actually do desire their parents; but much research shows that parents, especially males of the species, are sexually interested in children.
Q: So there were actually some psychoanalysts who agreed with Freud's early theory of childhood sexual abuse, which is sometimes referred to as the seduction theory? Ferenczi, and who else?
JM: Oddly enough, one of the most passionate and articulate defenders of Freud's early views on this topic was the son of his close friend, Wilhelm Fliess. As an adult, Robert moved to New York, and became a prominent psychoanalyst, one of the most revered teachers in the institute there. In his volume Symbol, Dream, and Psychosis, Robert delves deeply into the subject of why he thinks Freud was mistaken in abandoning his early beliefs on this topic. Based on hints in Robert's writing about his father, I think there is strong reason to believe that he himself was sexually abused by him as a child--possibly one reason the elder Fliess was so extremely unreceptive to Freud's theories.
The other person I referred to, Sandor Ferenczi, was Freud's favorite student, and became a close colleague and a friend. Freud even hoped he would marry Anna. Ferenczi, a Hungarian, was brilliant and somewhat eccentric. He was loved by everyone, his patients, his colleagues, his friends, the general public. He had a warm charm that affected everyone.
He slowly began to believe his patients, that they had been abused, and when he told Freud about this, Freud was not pleased. He told him this was his own first and biggest mistake. "No," said Ferenczi, "It is not a mistake, I can assure you." "How can you possibly know?" Freud asked him. "Easy," said Ferenczi, "I have male patients who have confessed to me that they have abused children."
Freud was aghast, and did everything possible (behind Ferenczi's back) to bring him into disrepute within the psychoanalytic world. It is a sad tale, and Ferenczi eventually succumbed. He died prematurely, of a broken heart. His last essay was called "The Confusion of Tongues between Children and Adults" and is the single most brilliant article ever written about child sexual abuse. Freud did his best to see to it that it was not published, against all the rules and practice of the psychoanalytic society. Eventually it was published, but many years later, long after Ferenczi was dead. You can read the whole story of this terrible episode, along with a more detailed discussion of the events concerning Emma Eckstein, in my book Assault on Truth.
Q: So historically, every analyst who tried to present this topic was completely ostracized by his peers. Fast forward to the summer of 1981, when you began discussing your findings about Freud's early beliefs with a reporter from "The NY Times." How did other analysts react to your revelations when this series, which quoted a variety of Freud critics, appeared in "The New York Times"?JM: I was treated exactly as Freud was (hostility, silence, ridicule), and like Robert Fliess and Sandor Ferenzi were. I was thrown out of all psychoanalytic societies to which I had previously belonged. Basically the message was: you can no longer call yourself an analyst, because you believe women have been abused rather than having fantasies of having been abused. You no longer believe in the Oedipal Complex (true, I did not) nor in the power of fantasy to make a woman ill (true I did not).
In short, they were not happy. It was considered heresy. "Have you learned nothing from reading Freud?" I was often asked. I tried to explain that I was not just reading the published Freud, but the unpublished Freud as well, and the question was far more complex than we had been taught. But nobody in the analytic world at the time would listen to me or even give me a hearing. I was the Antichrist, period. I would read them letters from Freud they had not seen and they were the equivalent of children covering their ears and chanting "La,la,la, la, I can't hear you." It upset their very identity as analysts: fantasy was paramount. Reality was secondary or simply not interesting from an analytic point of view. Even female analysts whom one would expect to give me a more sympathetic ear were opposed. I was alone in the analytic world.
Sometimes they made fun of me, sometimes they actually accused me of paranoia for believing women's accounts. After I presented a paper on Ferenczi's views at a professional gathering in Munich, a psychiatrist who was present asked his colleagues to support him in having me locked up in a psychiatric institution!
Q: Wait! He wanted to have you committed because you presented a paper that said that childhood sexual abuse really existed and caused misery later in life for the women who had been abused?
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