���On 30 July 2009 Stephen Black wrote: >It's also worth noting that Freud himself admits in a remarkable >letter to Wilhelm Fliess (Feb 1, 1900):
>"For I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not >an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a >conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated". Fliess is also quoted by Freud eighteen months later as having written to the latter that "the reader of thoughts [i.e., Freud] merely reads his own thoughts into other people" (Letter 7 August 1901). This is an astute description of Freud's technique of analytic interpretation and reconstruction, one which has been too little appreciated, even by gener ations of Freud critics. Such is the persuasive power of Freud's writings and his mode of presentation that he has convinced most people that what he calls his "clinical observations" come from his patients when they are largely products of Freud's fertile imagination. (Critics on the whole have put down the apparent verbal productions of his patients that are consistent with his theories to suggestion, e.g. Adolf Grünbaum in *The Foundations of Psychoanalysis* .) I could give numerous illustrations, but one in particular is so often recycled in psychology texts that it has become historical 'fact'. Freud's dubious theories of female psycho-sexuality have been explained as the result of the f act that he was dealing with an unrepresentative group of middle class Viennese women in very different social circumstance from the present. But, as Freud wrote in 1935, "The information about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory deduced from it was concerned with male children." But if his theories were derived from the productions of his patients, why would a practice which in its early period was comprised predominantly of women lead to a theory of male psychosexuality? Answer: Because most of it came from his own (male) head, not those of his patients. Freud didn't produce his theories of female psycho-sexual development until some thirty years aft er he started practising psychoanalysis proper, at a time when, because of his cancer, he was for the most part restricting his practice to training analyses. Belatedly, he realized he needed a theory to parallel the one on male psycho-sexuality. He also needed to correct a manifestly erroneous assertion in his earlier writings, that the first attachment of female infants is to the father. To this end he now 'discovered' a pre-Oedipal period for infant girls when the attachment is to the mother. But this led to a problem: What led the female infant to transfer her attachment to the father? This necessitated his imagination to work overtime, and one has only to read consecutively his essay s on female sexuality in the early 1930s to recognize that the (often absurd) ideas are his own imaginative notions, not even tendentious derivations from analytic interpretations of patients' words. In other words, they have little to do with the actual circumstances of middle class Viennese women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. In his chapter on "Femininity" in *New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis* (1933) Freud wrote that he was bringing forward "nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions" (SE 22, p. 113). Given that I believe that it is evident that the "observations" he adduced to resolve the above problem were essentially made up as he tho ught of fresh explanations from essay to essay, I have to concede to Stephen that in this instance his material is fraudulent. (Had he presented it as speculative theorising there would have been no issue, but his describing this material as almost all "observed facts" goes beyond intellectual dishonesty.) Reference Esterson, A.. (1993) Chapter 8: "The Oedipus Theory and Female Sexuality." In *Seductive Mirage*, Open Court, pp. 133-151. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
