I�ve realised that I didn�t *directly* answer my own question in my
previous message.
> So how come that although most of Freud�s early patients were
> women, his theory of psychosexual development was male-based?
In essence, I think that (once he had a starting point) Freud�s theories
were for the most part ideas derived by his own mental introspection
having only a tenuous relation with his clinical experiences. (The female
sexuality papers cited in my previous message are an especially good
demonstration of this.) Once he had alighted on an idea (such as the
notion that infant boys experience sexual desires for their mother), he
had a propensity to become infatuated with it, however flimsy the evidence
on which it was based. (His evangelizing for cocaine in the 1880s even
*after* its potentially devastating effects had become widely acknowledged
reflects this same personality trait.) The same trait can also be seen in
his absolute conviction in the 1890s that he had discovered an
epoch-making technique for accessing the contents of his patients�
repressed memories (and, later, their unconscious phantasies). When Fliess
bluntly told him that �the reader of thoughts [ie, Freud] merely reads his
own thoughts into other people� (letters, 7 Aug 1901, 19 Sept 1901), there
is no indication that it raised the least doubts in Freud�s mind � rather,
his friend�s scepticism was a major factor in the breakdown in their
relationship (letter, 19 Sept 1901).
Freud�s psychoanalytic technique of interpretation allied with his
propensity to become fanatically attached to his own ideas was a marriage
made in heaven. His use of an almost indefinitely elastic interpretative
technique, with its built-in anti-refutation devices, ensured that he was
never at a loss to provide what he presented as conclusive proof of his
theories. In the words of Frank Sulloway: �Time and time again, Freud saw
in his patients what psychoanalytic theory led him to look for and then to
interpret the way he did; and when the theory changed, so did the clinical
findings� (Sulloway 1979, p. 498). Add to this his theory of repression,
so that virtually all the phenomena he described were hidden from the
subject, and could *only* be revealed by the use of his psychoanalytic
technique, and we have the perfect closed system.
There is one other factor that is an essential component in the
successful propagation of Freud�s ideas: he had genius-class rhetorical
gifts. (See chapter 12, �Techniques of persuasion�, in my *Seductive
Mirage*.) Examples abound in his writings, but an especially good example
is �The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person�
(1926, SE 20, pp. 183-258). (The �impartial person� is, in effect, Freud�s
stooge, but at least he makes no attempt to present his invented
interlocutor if he were an actual person, as he did in the �Screen
Memories� paper (1899), and the celebrated �aliquis� interpretation in
�The Psychopathology of Everyday Life� (1901).) Freud displays the kind of
rhetorical devices that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Mark Antony in
the celebrated funeral oration for Julius Caesar, though on a much wider
canvass of course, and with a considerably greater repertoire. Antony
tells his audience, �I am no orator, as Brutus is� in the course of a
speech by means of with which he soon has the crowd in the palm of his
hand. In much the same fashion Freud attempts to disarm his readers�
critical faculties at the start of the chapter on female sexuality in �New
Introductory Lectures� by assuring them that he is bringing forward
�nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions�,
following which is an exposition consisting of little other than
speculation! (For a perceptive and entertaining dissection of Freud�s
rhetorical devices, see Stanley Fish�s essay on the Wolf Man case history
(Meltzer 1988, pp. 183-209; or see extract from Fish�s essay in: Crews
1998, pp. 186-199).
So, to finally answer the original question, why were Freud�s psychosexual
theories male-centred for some thirty years? (a) Because they were based
to some degree on his own, mostly surmised and embroidered, experiences.
(b) Because what he frequently, and misleadingly, referred to as �clinical
observations� were for the most part his own *interpretations* of his
patients� words and behaviour, ie, they mostly originated from his own
imagination. Since, in spite of commonly held opinion, his empathetic
powers were rather limited, he tended to express his ideas on psychosexual
development in self-centred terms. This, I think, explains why in his
expositions on this subject prior to the 1920s his imagination roamed over
what supposedly happened to young *boys*, and only as an afterthought
would he then write that girls had �analogous� experiences.
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html
www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10
References
Crews, F. (ed.) (1998). *Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend*,
New York: Penguin Books.
Fish, S. (1988). �Withholding the missing portion: power, meaning and
persuasion in Freud�s �The Wolf Man�.� In F. Meltzer (ed.), *The Trial(s)
of Psychoanalysis*, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988.
Sulloway, F (1979). *Freud: Biologist of the Mind*. New York: Basic Books.
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