I make no apology for returning to the subject of Peter Gay's biography
of Freud to cite one of the more egregious of the many misleading sections
in its pages, one that reveals more than most its deeply flawed essence.
These comments are especially for the benefit of TIPSters giving
introductory courses on Freud's ideas who may have been inclined to
recommend Gay's book to students requesting a biography of Freud. Please
note I make not the least criticism of psychology teachers who have done
so. How are they to know that so much of the basic material it contains
about Freud's clinical experiences and his later accounts of them are
grossly misleading, not to say downright false in many instances? After
all, Gay's book has received almost universal praise in reviews in the
mainstream press as a close-to-exemplary, supposedly warts-and-all, "Life
for Our Time" (Gay's subtitle). (It is described as a "National
Bestseller" on the frontcover of the 1998 paperback edition --
"scrupulously grounded" [New York Times])
Anyway, to business: In the 1980s Patrick Mahony, a writer and scholar
with impeccable psychoanalytic credentials, reported that there were
serious discrepancies between the original cases notes and the published
case history of the "Rat Man" (Mahony 1986). As he later wrote in a letter
to the "American Journal of Psychiatry": "My book pointed out Freud's
intentional confabulation and documented the serious discrepancies between
Freud's day-to-day process notes of the treatment and his published case
history of it' (Amer. J. Psychiatry, 147:8, August 1990, p. 1110). It
would be wrong to say that Gay makes no allusion to this crucial piece of
information, though there is mention of it in his characteristically
adulatory account of the case in the main text (pp. 262-265). For tucked
away at the back of the book, among his notes in tiny print citing his
sources, he writes (p. 761): "The most sustained exploration of Freud's
case history of the Rat Man, his family and his neurosis, and of the
differences between Freud's process notes and the published case history,
is Patrick J. Mahony, *Freud and the Rat Man* (1986). That sentence
encapsulates the disingenuousness that pervades the crucial sections of
Gay's book which deal with Freud's clinical experiences. With those words
he can claim that he has done his scholarly duty, that he did not conceal
the fact that Mahony had discovered the discrepancies alluded to above.
But he does so in a way that actually *conceals* far more than it reveals
(namely, the extraordinary nature of Freud's "intentional confabulation"
in the published report), in the knowledge that few readers will take the
trouble to seek more information about the "differences" that he so
casually mentions -- even assuming that they have consulted his
(unreferenced) source notes in this book comprising 650 pages of main
text. And not only does Gay engage in this cover-up of unpalatable
information, he writes in the main text that "Freud's account remains
exemplary [sic] as an exposition of a classic obsessional neurosis" (p.
267)! (Incidentally, even before the publication of Mahony's book Cioffi
had already highlighted an major instance of Freud's 'doctoring' material
for the published case history, an instance that Mahony failed to spot.
See Esterson, 1993, pp. 62-66, for an account of Freud's deliberate
confabulations in this case history.)
Gay adopts a similar disingenuous tactic in regard to the Anna O. case. In
the tiny print tucked away at the end of the book Gay writes: "Henri
Ellenberger, 'The Story of "Anna O.": A Critical Review with New Data,',
J. Hist. Behavioral Sciences, 7 (1972), 267-79, persuasively corrects
Jones' misreading and Freud's misremembering of the case." This is worse
than disingenuous, it is blatantly dishonest. There was no "misreading" by
Jones: he reported what Freud had told him. There was no "misremembering"
by Freud. Privately, in a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1932, Freud wrote in
terms very much the same as recorded by Jones in the first volume of his
1953 biography, except that he made explicit in that letter that his
account that became psychoanalytic received history (and is still
frequently reported as such) was nothing more than a "guess", a
"reconstruction" he arrived at some years after his break with Breuer
(late 1890s). In other words, this "guessed" occurrence (the "phantom
pregnancy" and Breuer's panic-stricken "flight") was something he dreamed
up out of his imagination considerably more than twenty years after the
conclusion of the case that he is purporting to give significant
information about. Yet, in the face of Ellenberger's (and later
Hirschmuller's) demonstration that the story is false (incidentally, that
it was a "reconstuction" is something one can detect by close reading of
Freud's published oblique references to the conclusion of Anna O.'s
treatment), Gay continues to recycle it in all its (phoney) glory [p. 67],
prefacing his description of this event that never happened as "the full
story of Anna O."! As a measure of his dishonest mispresentation of this
case, note that Gay *cites* the 1932 letter to Zweig, writing that "Freud
recalled [sic] 'what really happened with Breuer's patient'," and going on
to reproduce the phoney story. Incredibly, he makes no mention of the fact
that it is in this very letter that Freud writes that his account was
nothing more than a "guess", a scenario he had "reconstructed" from his
own imaginative (and self-serving) inferences decades later.
Returning briefly to Freud's own case histories, he destroyed his
case-notes for these (somehow those for the Rat Man survived), so we can
never know what tendentious confabulation may be present in the published
versions of the other famous cases. However, in the case of the Wolf Man,
we have the patient's memoirs as recorded late in life, and a couple of
letters exchanged between patient and analyst in the 1920s, as well as a
series of interviews conducted with him in old age by a journalist. Among
other significant remarks, the Wolf Man says he has no memory of the
servant girl, who was the central figure in the supposed belated
"recollection" "recollection" from the patient's infancy that provided the
"solution" to the case (and which I have demonstrated was almost certainly
a product of Freud's imagination). It is also evident from the memoirs and
the letters that two important elements in the case history are
essentially phoney, as well as some more minor items. (See my *Seductive
Mirage*, pp. 69-70, pp. 77-93).
In his foreword to 1998 edition of his biography Gay tells his readers it
is "reliable" (1998, p. vii) and a few pages later (p. ix) he uses a
highly effectively rhetorical device to supposedly demonstrate that this
is the case. He writes that on the one hand he was criticised from one
side as an apologist for Freud, and from the other ("fanatical Freudians")
he was "excoriated for daring to disagree with the Master and treating him
as a mere human being". Now it is true that on (rare) occasions Gay
withheld support from some of Freud's more outlandish interpretations
(though, as I indicated in my previous posting on this book, he loyally
endorses most of them), and -- especially -- he departs from
psychoanalytic custom by depicting Freud as someone who was vindictive
towards those who gave him less than complete support, sometimes
uncharitable towards his colleagues and in his personal relations in
general, and so on. This departure from psychoanalytic tradition certainly
offended the devout, as Gay indicates. But Gay uses this to imply that as
he was criticized from both "sides", his book must be pretty well right in
its position vis-�-vis Freud, (and, by implication, accurate in its
reporting of psychoanalytic history). This no doubt has been an effective
rhetorical device to assure the innocent reader that what was to follow
was "reliable", but it is just about as far from the truth as you can get,
as far as Gay's accounts of Freud's clinical experiences are concerned.
(And which sections, incidentally, are those that will be of most concern
to students, the great bulk of the rest of the book being devoted to
psychoanalytic 'politics' and general discussion of more specialised
material much of which students would almost certainly either skip, or
skim through in a perfunctory way, since much of it does not touch on the
material for which Freud is famous.)
As is only too apparent by now, my view is that any recommendation of
Gay's book should come with the equivalent of a "health warning", on the
lines of the following: This book provides much interesting information
about Freud's life after he became famous, especially in relation to his
interactions with colleagues and rivals, and about doctrinal disputes.
However when it comes to alleged factual material about Freud's clinical
experiences, what he 'discovered', and his case histories, the book should
be regarded as highly unreliable, and not infrequently utterly misleading.
One final point: Frederick Crews's celebrated 1993 review article in NYRB
which set in motion the recent period of media controversy around Freud
was titled "The Unknown Freud". It is a measure of the success of the
device of disparaging the authors of the (generally unread) writings on
which Crews's analysis largely depended as "Freud-bashers" that it remains
the case that much of the material in question still remains largely
unknown outside the small section of the academic psychology community who
have taken the trouble to investigate some of the books in question.
References:
Crews, F. (1995), *The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute*, New York
Review of Books (publishers).
Esterson, A. (1993), *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of
Sigmund Freud*, Open Court.
Gay, P. (1998 [1988]), *Freud: A Life for Our Time*, Norton.
Mahony, P. J. (1986), *Freud and the Rat Man*, Yale University Press.
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=58
http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html
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