An afterthought to the quotation from Glymour in my previous posting. Freud himself provided an explanation for why he chose not, in Glymour's words, "to think critically, rigorously, honestly, and publicly about the reliability of his methods" after 1897. Here is what Freud wrote in "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement":
"Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas by the right path, and yet they were not true. The firm ground of reality was gone. At that time I would gladly have given up the whole work, as my esteemed predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery. Perhaps I persevered only because I no longer had any choice and could not then [in his early forties] begin again at anything else." (1914, SE 14, p. 17) The uninformed reader (i.e., most people reading this passage) will be unaware of the incidental anomalies it contains. Here he writes that the "infantile sexual traumas" he claimed to have uncovered in 1896 "were not true" -- period. The last time he had written about the episode, in 1906, he had stated something very different: "At that time my material was still scanty, and it happened by chance to include a disproportionately large number of cases in which sexual seduction by an adult or by older children played the chief part in the history of the patient's childhood. I thus overestimated the frequency of such events (though in other respects they were not open to doubt)." The skilfully crafted disingenuousness of these sentences, and indeed of the whole paragraph from which it comes, is explored in my article "The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self-deception in Freud's accounts of the seduction theory episode" (2001), in the section headed "Extrication from potential disaster", pp. 335-339. It was not just, as Glymour writes, that Freud refused to face up to the lessons he should have drawn from the collapse of his seduction theory. He extricated himself from the debacle by deliberately misrepresenting what he had claimed earlier (in Borch-Jacobsen's words, by telling "fibs"). See my 2001 article for a documented demonstration of my contention. Buried in the above quotation is another of Freud's "fibs" (or, if you prefer, in this case an analytic "reconstruction" masquerading as historical fact), plus a discreditable aspersion about Breuer. The "unwelcome discovery" by Freud's "esteemed colleague" Josef Breuer had been subtly alluded to a few pages earlier. In relation to the "Anna O." treatment Freud wrote: "Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an 'untoward event' [English in original], he broke off all further investigation." Let's leave aside the fib that Anna O. was relieved of all her symptoms, and just note that what Freud means here by the "untoward event" is his belated reconstruction of a scene with the patient writhing in the throes of a phantom pregnancy. Ellenberger and Hirschmuller have documented that there is no evidence whatsoever that such an event ever occurred, and in any case there is a letter Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig in 1932 in which he explicitly states that he "guessed" the scene, and that it was a "reconstruction". He couldn't publish his hinted "untoward event" explicitly while Breuer was still alive, but the invented story was common knowledge in Freud's inner circle, and was later presented by his disciples, and credulously accepted by commentators, as historical fact. Why did he do it? Because Breuer had stated in his case history that sexuality did not enter into the case, and that was anathema to Freud � it would have contradicted his contention that sexual matters lie at the root of every neurosis. So he passed around the "reconstructed" phantom pregnancy story, and hinted at it in both his "History" and his "Autobiographical Study". Never mind that if sexuality hadn't been explored (as it wasn't) in Breuer's treatment it would mean there was a contradiction with the other claim Freud repeatedly made, that Anna O. had been "restored to health" by Breuer: On Freud theories, only if the sexual origins of the problem are brought out and resolved can there be a "cure". Freud's writings are replete with such anomalies, but such is the brilliance of his writing, and his mastery of rhetoric, these have largely eluded most readers until recent times and the "new wave" of Freud criticism inaugurated by Cioffi's 1974 article "Was Freud a Liar?" and Ellenberger's chapter on Freud in his 1970 volume *The Discovery of the Unconscious* (plus his finding original papers pertaining to the Anna O. case). And just to set the record straight after its tendentious mangling by Freud, Breuer did not "break off all further investigation" as the result of an "untoward event". He organised the patient's orderly transfer to a sanatorium, and it took place shortly after he terminated the treatment. Refererence Esterson, A. (2001). "The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self-deception in Freud's accounts of the seduction theory episode." History of Psychiatry, xii, pp. 329-352. Allen E. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
