Psychoanalysis and Society's Neglect of the Sexual Abuse of Children, Youth and Adults

Re-addressing Freud's Original Theory of Sexual Abuse and Trauma

Arnold Wm. Rachman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000463347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

This book takes a comprehensive look at the understanding and treatment of child sexual abuse in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in society as a whole.

This book demonstrates how prophetic Ferenczi's ideas about sexual abuse and trauma were, and how relevant they are for contemporary psychoanalysis and society. Sexual abuse, its traumatic effect, and the harm caused to children, youth, and adults will be described in the neglect of confronting sexual abuse by psychoanalysis and society. This neglect will be discussed in chapters about the abuse of children by religious leaders, students by teachers, youth in sports by coaches, and aspiring actors by authorities in the entertainment industry. It covers key topics such as why there has been silence about abuse in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theories, and practices that can be counterproductive or even harmful, case studies of abuse in the wider community, and how psychoanalysis as a profession can do better in its understanding and treatment of child sexual abuse both in psychoanalytic treatment and in its interaction with other parts of society.

This book appeals to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars interested in the history of psychoanalysis.

Chapter 1 “A new motto: what has been done to you, poor child?” (Sigmund Freud, December 22, 1897)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429298431-1

At the turn of the 19th century, Vienna became one of the centers of intellectual inquiry, as Freud struggled to understand the origin of psychological disorder. In his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, his friend and muse, he outlined his exciting intellectual journey as he noted, a step-by-step unfolding of the sexual traumas children suffer at the hands of their parents (Masson, 1984). The period of discovery occurred from 1887 to 1904 in consort with Wilhelm Fliess, an otolaryngologist (surgical and medical management of head and neck), who for a time became Freud's best friend. The two met at the suggestion of Josef Breuer. Fliess attended several conferences with Freud beginning in 1887 in Vienna. The two soon formed a close friendship. Freud said Fliess left a deep impression on him. Freud's interchanges with Fliess became an important stepping stone in his attempt to sort out the role of sexuality in the origin of neurosis. Freud's original attempt to sort out this issue, in collaboration with Breuer, was not successful because Breuer did not agree with Freud's emphasis on the role of sexual impulse in the causation of hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895; Stafford-Clark, 1965). Through their extensive correspondence and personal meetings, Fliess came to play an important part in the development of psychoanalysis. The Fliess/Freud friendship grew through their frequent letters and regular meetings in Vienna and Berlin. They arranged 2- or 3-day trips away from home (they called these special meetings “congresses”). They not only exchanged their unorthodox scientific ideas, but also Freud provided intimate details of his own life (which he withheld from his wife). In fact, it has been claimed that Freud used these letters as “self-analysis” (Wilson, 1997, p. 49).

The authenticity of sexual trauma: letter from Freud to Fliess, December 22, 1897

In this letter sent to Fliess, 10 years into their relationship and correspondence, Freud sends an important letter to his friend and intellectual muse, describing a clinical case of infantile sexual trauma, which he feels provides the clinical evidence to believe in the authenticity of actual sexual trauma as a significant psychodynamic in the origin of psychological disorder. In particular, Freud described a female patient who was sexually abused by her father as a 2-year-old child. He inflicted her with gonorrhea, and she became ill by the loss of blood and vaginitis. In the session that Freud described, the patient recalls an incident when she was 3-year old, where she goes into a dark room where she sees her mother in a strange and very disturbing activity. Her mother is yelling (supposedly at her father), telling him he is a rotten criminal and she will not do what he requests of her. The mother becomes distraught and hysterical and tears her clothes from her body with one hand, and with her other hand she presses her clothes against it (Freud does not specify what “it” is. Presumably, it is a part of the mother's body that the father wants to invade, which the mother considers a criminal invasion). The mother's emotional reaction reaches a crescendo, much like a psychotic experience. Her face is contorted with rage, she covers her genitals with one hand and pushes something with the other. The mother's agony continues, shouting and cursing, she bends over and falls backward onto the floor. The scene ends with the mother in pain and utter despair.

Freud interprets the patient's description of the father's criminal assault on the mother with what is identified as anal rape. There were two other incidents when the patient saw her father-inflicted incidents of bleeding on the mother. The recall of the mother being emotionally torn apart by the father's psychopathic brutality, signaled the father turning toward his daughter for his brutal sexual needs.

Freud's description of this disturbing case of sexual abuse is presented in such a compelling narrative that one can feel both the sexual assault of the child and mother as well as the destruction to the individual psyche. Did the sexual brutality and the psychological damage described by his patient so move Freud that he noted at the end of this letter, first, his desire to turn away from this horror – “Enough of my smut”? (Masson, 1984, p. 289). What is more, Freud was so moved about hearing these firsthand reports of sexual abuse he realized that adults were mistreating children, and psychoanalysis had to inform the profession and the public about this. Hence, he declared psychoanalysis would raise our consciousness with:

A new motto: What has been done to you, poor child? (Masson, 1984, p. 289)

This book will explore how psychoanalysis and society has not paid sufficient attention to Freud's original concern about the sexual abuse of children.

Chapter 2 The origin of psychoanalysis in the discovery of the sexual abuse of children by their parentsn

DOI: 10.4324/9780429298431-2

Between 1897 and 1902, Sigmund Freud carried on a lively, exciting, and intellectually adventuresome exchange of letters with Wilhelm Fliess. They both shared a mutual interest in the sexual aspects of human behavior. Freud presented his Seduction Hypothesis to Fliess in these letters as it evolved from an embryonic idea to a definitive conclusion. A glimpse into this fascinating material is contained in a description of the moment of discovery. In a letter to Fliess on April 28, 1897, Freud described the interaction he had with a patient when she reached an obstacle in their clinical interaction. As is often the case in the exploration of childhood sexual trauma, the patient is reluctant to continue on with the exploration. The interaction is described as follows:

Pt: You must allow me to mention no names.

Freud: Names don’t matter. What you mean is your relationships with the people concerned. We can’t draw a veil over that.

Pt: What I mean is that earlier the treatment would have been easier for me than now. Earlier I suspect it, but now the criminal nature of certain things has become clear to me, and I can’t make up my mind to talk about them. On the contrary, I should say that a mature woman becomes more tolerant in sexual matters.

Freud: Yes, you’re right. When I consider that the most excellent and high-principled men are guilty of these things, I’m compelled to think it's an illness, a kind of madness, and I have to exclude them. Then let us speak plainly. In my analysis, I find it's the closest relatives, fathers or brothers, who are the guilty men.

Pt: It has nothing to do with my brother.

Freud: So it was your father, then (Freud, 1954, p. 195 – Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, April 28, 1897).

This clinical interchange clearly shows Freud's remarkable capacity to understand and empathize with the childhood sexual seduction of his female patient. It is perhaps, the first formal analytic clinical interchange focused on understanding actual trauma, and specifically, emotional carnage that sexually abusing a child can produce.

Although Freud was known as “the father of interpretation” as the methodological golden road to analyzing the Oedipal Conflict, in his early years, as this cited clinical interchange illustrates, he illustrates a capacity for empathy and activity. These clinical capacities receded into the background as he became wedded to his Oedipal Theory of neurosis, and encouraged his favorite pupil, Sándor Ferenczi, to formally introduce activity and empathy into clinical psychoanalysis (Rachman, 1997a). His capacity to attune to the subjective experience of a patient struggling emotionally and connecting to her dissociated childhood sexual abuse by her father allowed for a breakthrough, as she began to bring her trauma into consciousness. Freud reports this process of uncovering:

And it then turned out that her supposedly otherwise noble and respectable father regularly took her to bed when she was from eight to twelve years old and misused her without penetrating (“made her evet”, nocturnal visits). She felt anxiety even at the time a sister, six years her senior, with whom she talked thing over many years later, confessed to her that she had had the same experience with the father. (Freud, 1954, p. 196)

It is generally believed that psychoanalysis emerged from the continued clinical experience by Freud, with what we would now call “incest survivors.” The letters to Fliess conveyed his clinical experiences and his emerging thoughts about his, Seduction Hypothesis, making his friend a witness to history:

Not that among other things, I suspect the following; that hysteria is conditioned by a primary sexual experience (before puberty) accompanied by revulsion and fright; and that obsessional neurosis is conditioned by the same accompanied pleasure. (Freud, 1954; Letter Freud to Fliess, October 15, 1895, p. 126)

Have I revealed the great clinical secret to you either in writing or by word of mouth? Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock… “Presexual” means before puberty. (p. 126)

I am practically sure I have solved the riddle of hysteria…with the formulation of infantile sexual shock…I am just as sure that…neuroses are radically curable now – not just the individual symptoms but the neurotic disposition itself. (Freud, 1954; Letter Freud to Fliess, October 16, 1895, p. 128)

Freud was thrilled with this discovery of the origin of neurosis in the sexual seduction of a child by a parent conveying his enthusiasm to Fliess, as if he had solved one of the great intellectual mysteries of human life, and, of course this is what he had done.

Freud presented a paper in 1896 entitled, “The aetiology of hysteria” (Freud, 1896) before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, which became the first formal statement of the Seduction Hypothesis. The source of internal psychic pain lay in an actual act inflicted on the child. Family members were the seducers of children. Freud's theory was very negatively received by the Viennese Medical Society and he was crushed by the rejection (Masson, 1984). What is more, the medical journals did not publish the Seduction Hypothesis. Apparently, Freud did not present his evidence for the Seduction Hypothesis, which came from the actual data of his clinical cases and his method to retrieve these data, the psychoanalytic method. He felt the medical community would not respond positively to actual reports of fathers sexually abusing their daughters. The social climate them, in the 1890s, was not receptive to such a dramatic and disturbing statement about family relations. Are we any more receptive now to the same clinical observation that sexual abuse of a child by a parent can be the locus of psychological disorder? One cannot underestimate what a significant event Freud's original formulation for neurosis was for psychoanalysis and society. He brought together, for the first time, the finding that actual sexual molestation by a parent of a child was connected to adult psychological disorder. Freud was not only contributing to the understanding of a societal issue, but also suggesting an important new treatment, psychoanalysis. However, Freud's enthusiasm waned.

In a letter to Fliess, dated September 21, 1897, Freud started to express his doubts about the Seduction Hypothesis. First, he referred to his inability to “bring a single analysis to a real conclusion” and the absence of “complete success,” which he had hoped to accomplish (Freud, 1954, p. 215). Second, he indicated his “surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.” He began to question the “realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria…whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable” (Freud, 1954, pp. 215–216). Third, Freud argued that in an unconscious state, it is difficult to distinguish the fact from the fiction. In the unconscious state, there is no sign of reality, so one cannot differentiate between the truth and the fiction invested with feeling. Fourth, Freud wrote of his belief that in deep-reaching psychosis, unconscious memories do break through to the conscious, “so the secret of childhood experience is not disclosed even in the most confused delirium” (Freud, 1954, p. 216). In the same letter, Freud wrote that his loss of faith in his theory would remain known only to himself and Fliess, a fact he did not reveal in his own writings until 1914 (Freud, 1914). The shift in emphasis led to Freud's new theory of infantile sexuality. The impulses, fantasies, and conflicts that Freud claimed to have uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from external contamination, he now believed, but from the mind of the child itself (Rachman, 2012).

At the time Freud was conveying his ideas to Fliess about the origin of neuroses in the incest trauma, he was involved in another historically significant experience. He was involved in his self-analysis. This self-analysis was cited in these same Freud/Fliess letters (Freud, 1954) and his first published book, The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). One can conclude that the development of his Seduction Hypothesis is emotionally linked to his self-analysis. The important question is: Did Freud use his personal data to inform his theories and, if so, in what way? There has been a great deal of debate in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy about Freud's behavior in changing psychoanalysis’ focus from the Seduction Hypothesis to the Oedipal Complex. Ernest Jones, Freud's official biographer, felt the change to the Oedipal theory was in intellectual tour-de-force for Freud (Jones, 1957). In fact, Jones was incredulous that Freud could ever entertain the Seduction Theory. Jones reflected the official response of orthodox or traditional psychoanalysis. Speaking for her father's desires, Anna Freud told Jeffrey M. Masson, a psychohistorian of psychoanalysis, that Freud believed in, and wanted to maintain, the Oedipal theory as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis (Masson, 1984). To the far left of Jones, Masson put forth the idea that Freud had a loss of courage in abandoning the Seduction Theory. The very negative reception Freud and Breuer faced when they introduced the concept of “infantile sexuality” before the Viennese Medical Society, Masson concluded, had a severe emotional impact on Freud because he badly wanted and needed acceptance and then from his Viennese peers, Freud abandoned his Seduction Theory (Masson, 1984). Masson's assertion, of course, angered both traditional and nontraditional analysts. When Masson was Secretary of the Freud Archives, it was an outrageous intellectual and emotional charge to make about Freud. When the dust settled, however, it was possible to examine Masson's assertions in a rational way. There is some credible argument for suggesting negative motivation by Freud for abandoning the Seduction Hypothesis. For example, when Freud studied with Charcot in Paris, he had firsthand experiences of child abuse through autopsies he witnessed on sexually abused children as well as Charcot and other French physicians’ interest in trauma history (Masson, 1984, pp. 14–54). Masson found evidence of Freud's attempt to silence Ferenczi's Confusion of Tongues idea, which would have returned the theory to actual sexual trauma. More of this important issue later on in our discussion. Although I do not join Masson in accusing Freud of a loss of courage, I believe Masson's work along with Paul Roazen's writing (Roazen, 1975) and my own research (Rachman, 1997a, 1997b, 1999a), indicate that Freud, Jones, Ettingon, and others did attempt to silence Ferenczi and his work on the Incest Trauma. I want to trace Freud's change from the Seduction to the Oedipal Theory, which presents a trajectory of interest in the Incest Trauma in the history of psychoanalysis, from enthusiasm to neglect. Psychoanalysis lost interest in the Incest Trauma because of a seri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgment
• Foreword
• 1 “A new motto: what has been done to you, poor child?” (Sigmund Freud, December 22, 1897)
• 2 The origin of psychoanalysis in the discovery of the sexual abuse of children by their parents
• 3 Freud's neglect of his childhood sexual trauma
• 4 Freud's analysis of his daughter Anna: his emotional blindness to sexual trauma
• 5 Sándor Ferenczi's Confusion of Tongues paradigm: introduction of trauma theory and trauma analysis
• 6 Sándor Ferenczi's iconic case of Elizabeth Severn: development of the study and analysis of trauma
• 7 A pedophile among us?: Ernest Jones's trial for the sexual abuse of mentally defective girls
• 8 Todschweigen, Death by Silence (Rachman and Menaker): traditional psychoanalysis's punishment of dissidents
• 9 Sexual abuse of children within the family: the case of Lisa Steinberg
• 10 A mother invites her daughter to incest: parental neglect of childhood abuse
• 11 The “sensuous psychiatrist”: the case of Julie Roy vs. Renatus Hartogs, MD, PhD: landmark case of sexual abuse by a therapist
• 12 A group analyst's neglect of childhood sexual abuse
• 13 The Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal
• 14 A Catholic priest's audacious proposal: “the church should ordain women to be priests to reduce child abuse”
• 15 The conspiracy within the Orthodox Jewish Community to protect sexual abusers
• 16 Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Australia
• 17 The Eleventh Commandment: thou shall not lie down with children
• 18 The child sexual abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University: Coach Joe Paterno, from idolatry to shame
• 19 The worst example of sexual abuse in sports history: the case of Lawrence G. Nassar, MD
• 20 Two sports champions and emotional heroes: R.A. Dickey and Kayla Harrison, find their voices about their sexual abuse
• 21 Sexual abuse of children in our schools: St. George's, Elite Boarding School in Rhode Island
• 22 Untying the Confusion of Tongues in Hollywood: the advent of the #MeToo movement, sexual survivors find their voice
• 23 “The Casting Couch”: Harry Cohn, the godfather of sexual abuse of female actors
• 24 Harvey Weinstein: the heir apparent to Harry Cohn, Hollywood's sexual predator
• 25 Psychodynamics of sexual abuse in Hollywood: Uma Thurman and Mira Sorvino
• 26 Celebrity privilege and sexual abuse: the case of Roman Polanski
• 27 Celebrities and sexual assault: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer
• 28 The Confusion of Tongues explanation for psychoanalysis' neglect of childhood sexual abuse
• 29 My attempts to confront the Todschweigen, Death by Silence campaign against Sándor Ferenczi, Elizabeth Severn and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis
• 30 Contemporary activities which contribute to an appreciation of Ferenczi and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis
• 31 Truth and reconciliation: traditional psychoanalysis owes Ferenczi an apology for their Todschweigen campaign against him
• References
• Index