I want to thank James Duffy for his very flattering message and again emphasize
that my purpose is not to denigrate Freud but to combat the Freud Worship which
inhibits open debate. Unfortunately I have misplaced (I hope temporarily) my
reprints on Freud's seduction theory, but I will try to present the broad
outline of what seems to me "Freud's error." It is most clearly presented in a
paper by Garcia in Psa Study of the Child (1986) where Freud is quoted as
claiming that the fantasy of sexual abuse can have the same pathogenic effect as
an actual experience. Garcia's paper is adulatory of Freud and says nothing
about how implausible such a claim should appear to an open mind. Freud's
reasoning as presented by Garcia is that fantasies of having been sexually
abused are generated by the child as a defense against guilt associated with
masturbation. Freud says nothing, however, about the question of why some
children masturbate and others don't or why some who masturbate create such
fantasies and others don't. Freud has presented the conceptual tools for dealing
with these questions in his concept of the complemental series in which
pathology is ultimately explained in terms of the interaction of heredity and
environment. It seems to me the concept of the complemental series is
misrepresented in the Person & Klar paper recommended by Andrew Brook in a way
that conceals Freud's error (I don't claim this is intentional). It has often
been noted that different individuals experience the same trauma in very
different ways, but what is overlooked is that these differences must ultimately
be explained by Freud's complemental series. Let me clarify. The way a current
trauma is experienced (i.e. psychic reality) must be explained by heredity and
the influences of previous experiences. But each of these previous experiences
must be in turn explained by heredity and preceding experiences--until the
causal chain is traced back to the earliest experiences which must be explained
in terms of heredity and environmental stimuli. Fenichel (1945) explains this
but his list of environmental events does not include either physical or sexual
abuse, though it does contain primal scenes. It seems to me Freud can certainly
be reproached for the reasoning behind his claim that a fantasy of abuse could
have the same pathogenic effect as real abuse (whatever he may have written
elsewhere). Whether Freud can be blamed for the incredible avoidance of this
issue by analysts for so many years (documented by Simon JAPA 1992) depends on
the influence Freud had on the psychoanalytic establishment. It is hard for me
to believe such neglect could have occurred without Freud's approval, but I am
not an historian. I recall reading something about Freud's opposition to
Ferensci who presented a paper emphasizing the importance of real abuse. These
points are presented in a very scholarly way by Milton Klein (1980), but he is
rarely cited by later authors despite the fact that his name was mentioned in
the same New York Times article that gave Masson such publicity. The moral of
the story is that analysts will ignore scholarly papers presenting heretical
ideas, and this resistance can only be overcome by immense effort or publicity
seeking of the kind Masson was so good at. When I find my reprints I can
document all this in more detail.
Eric Gillett, M.D.