On Feeling Abused and Being Abused*

In considering the abused feelings which neurotic patients often express, the analyst may believe that these complaints are justifiable. Were not these patients abused in their childhood by possessive, domineering, neglectful, or overprotective parents, parents who abused their children in the service of their own neurotic needs? Do not many of these patients continue to be abused by others who make use of their compulsive needs, conflicts, claims, magical expectations, and externalizations onto the essential to distinguish “feeling abused” from “being abused.” These are quite different phenomena and not to be confused; yet they are related. The “abused feelings” are one of the strongest forces that lay people open to really being abused; in fact, the inner feeling often invites the act.

The problem of the relation between the feeling and the fact of being abused has arisen repeatedly. On each occasion decisive new insights are gained about the underlying psychodynamics. This first occurred when Freud, after many years of analytic practice, was forced to recognize that patients’ reports of early abuse or seduction by their parents were only fantasies they had invented. With this discovery, he was “for some time completely at a loss.” This insight shook the foundations of one of his previously basic genetic principles: that infantile sexual, traumatic experiences were the roots of their neuroses. At the same time he was led to the highly important conclusion that “as far as the neurosis was concerned, psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.”¹ This concept of psychic reality clearly defines the area with which the analyst deals, namely, the pateint's feeling that it is real.

Freud's concept of psychic reality, although potentially constructive, could not be successfully applied in therapy as long as it was limited by instinctivistic and genetic considerations. His psychic reality was seen mainly as the expression of libidinal wish fantasies. It d