Dr. Gediman's Point of View is by invitation of the editor. She contributes regularly to the psychoanalytic literature on a variety of topics. Both psychic trauma and the phenomenon of imposture in analysis have recently been subjects to attract her interest, so when the “tempest” she describes in this essay first arrived, courtesy of Janet Malcolm and the New Yorker, she was in an ideal position to grasp and comment upon several of the more central elements in the story.
In the press coverage of Jeffrey Masson's relationship with the Sigmund Freud Archives and of his book (1984), The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, publications have at best confused, at worst, inflamed the lay public. The press coverage of Freud's abandonment of the “seduction theory,” and the alleged seducibility of those members of the Board of the Sigmund Freud Archives who at first respected and later, when they felt he had been trying to gull them, rejected Masson as Archives Projects Director, has polemicized some of the subtlest areas of our theory and practice. A net effect has been an unfortunate muddying with obfuscatory, poorly informed, often ad hominem argumentation, masking difficult and controversial issues which responsible psychoanalysts have been tackling for some time.
For example, Janet Malcolm, in In the Freud Archives (1984), despite her painstaking research efforts at impeccably accurate reporting, insufficiently credits Freud and his followers with due appreciation of a real world of sadness, pain, misery, and cruelty. Her intentions
in highlighting Masson's now famous quip, “They would have to recall every patient since 1901. It would be like the Pinto” (p. 19), would appear at first blush as a humorous attempt to document Masson's irreverence.
However, a careful reading of Malcolm's emphases and elipses in context could lead one to conclude that she herself expresses a measure of ambivalence toward psychoanalysis. Nowhere does she highlight or document Freud's and his successors' neverending respect for the role of trauma —early or reactivating, actual or retrospective, “real” or psychic—in the psychogenesis of both the psycho- and the traumatic neuroses. The net effect of her selectivity could even appear, ironically enough, despite her explicit intentions to the contrary, as an endorsement of Masson's conclusions.
She creates for us a peculiarly simplistic dichotomy of analysts: the “purists” who disregard the role of trauma, on the one hand, and, on the other, those whom she calls revisionists. The latter consist of occasional “avant garde” analysts, among whom only Shengold is singled out. Shengold, Malcolm asserts, stands “alone among analysts who have dedicated themselves to the repair of seriously damaged souls” (p. 81). Revisionists include also the “psychoanalytic foundlings,” namely, the object relations and developmental theorists who emphasize the role of early trauma. These revisionists, she says, find themselves on the same side of the fence as Masson. Would we have to include among the avant garde revisionists such analysts who have addressed psychic trauma as Freud, Greenacre, Blum, Kris, Rangell, Kohut, Katan, Furst, and Cooper?
I shall elaborate three areas, insufficiently understood or covered in the popular press, in the hope of helping to relegate the tempest to its proper teapot container.
Masson, and Schur (in Freud: Living and Dying, 1972) as well, according to Malcolm, advanced as the reason that Freud abandoned the seduction theory his not being able to face the truth about Fliess's surgical mismanagement of Freud's patient, Emma; and that is why he had to develop the theory “that all patients lie.” And ever since, continues Masson, analysts have been denying the reality of their patient's lives (Malcolm, pp. 48-51). A consequence of Malcolm's emphasis on Masson's claims has been a confusion of the specific and abandoned seduction “theory” as explaining neurosogenesis with the unquestionable importance of seduction and other trauma in the lives of many people.
Freud abandoned the seduction theory to explain neurosogenesis as he did the first anxiety theory to explain actual neurotic conditions: the neurologically grounded theories simply were inadequate to explain the facts in the slowly developing psychological-psychoanalytical contextual matrix. That Freud abandoned a particular theory as explanatory does not imply that he ever gave up his conviction about the importance of seduction and other early trauma. Real trauma to this day is regarded as an important component in pathogenesis of the neuroses and of the more severe disturbances, just as the “kernel of truth” in paranoid delusions and the day residue in dreams imprint importantly on the manifest content of psychic experience.
And we should not forget Freud's never abandoned “complemental series” to account for neurosogenesis. Libidinal
fixations and early experience both predispose. The focus of psychoanalysis is mainly on psychic reality, on transformations in the psychic representations and the subsequent elaborations in fantasy of literal seductions as well as a wide range of other real trauma. This has, I believe, never led any competent analyst to tell a patient: “It never really happened. It's only in your mind.” Historical truth or material reality are concepts not alien to psychoanalysis, despite some current fashions which would view psychoanalysis as an exclusively hermeneutic discipline.
It is true, some patients find it seductive to use reality, even the reality of real seductions, as a resistance to understanding the place of later psychical elaborations in their idiosyncratically developing psychic economy. Telling patients that they only imagined that which really happened, or “that's just your version,” may eventuate in iatrogenically induced disturbances. Such occurrences are fewer, I am convinced, than incidences of real early trauma and are far from justifying Masson's much publicized Pinto aphorism. Malcolm, however, never challenges seriously Masson's allegation that analysts drive their patients crazy in this particular way. Her contextualization of his false accusation that analysts always disregard historical truth or material reality thus often reads as a biased historical account of theory development.
Malcolm's question, does it really make a difference (whether something happened or not) leaves out a careful consideration of difference in terms of what. It would seem superfluous to remind this readership that a memory of a trauma should not be conceived in either/or terms: fantasy or reality. That false polarity has led, more than any other factor, to Masson's repeated innuendo of iatrogenesis: that psychoanalysts tell patients who are convinced that something really did happen, “It's only in your mind.‘ It could appear demeaning to even trouble to challenge Masson's statement that ”ever since then analysts have been denying the reality of their patients’ lives“ (Malcolm, p. 50).
However, in the light of the public outcries following Masson's published material, certain reminders may be in order. Analysts do not deny the reality of their patients' lives, especially of abuses suffered helplessly in childhood. In fact, they willingly suspend disbelief in all that the patient tells. Yet, Malcolm's coverage, despite her disclaimers that Masson's views are at variance with the nature of the psychoanalytic endeavor, does imply that Masson is on to something about analysts—that they are solipsistically involved with fantasy and are not particularly interested in helping their patients gain therapeutically valuable perspective on their own life histories.
Malcolm quotes Shengold (“Child abuse and deprivation: soul murder,” Journal of the American Psychoanal. Assn., 1979): “the patient must know what he has suffered, at whose hands, and how it has affected him. The means he uses to not know, to deny, must be made fully conscious“ (Malcolm, p. 81). But she incorrectly implies that Shengold stands alone among analysts in ”disagreeing with the purists' contention“ that it doesn't matter what really happened.
The focus of psychoanalysis is mainly on psychic reality, on transformations in the psychic representations and the subsequent elaborations in fantasy of literal seductions as well as a wide range of other real trauma. This has, I believe, never led any competent analyst to tell a patient: “It never really happened. It's only in your mind.”
It is not altogether impossible to be swept away by the passions aroused on learning of the realities of sexual and aggressive child abuse and lose analytic neutrality. But that does not usually happen. According to Masson, “there are certain kinds of reality that are so overwhelming that they admit of only one interpretation … I find it so sad that an analyst should support the position that a child can be raped by her father and have a positive experience. It's an awful position” (Malcolm, p. 55). Masson here is fusing and confusing an appraisal of an actual outcome with an analytic judgment which allegedly condones traumatically abusive practices. Real trauma has to influence, either by determining limits on or enhancing aspects of the shape, form, intensity, and content of drive-related fantasies.
So Malcolm is not quite right in saying that Masson is presenting a travesty of the analytic view. She would have been more accurate to state that the issue of analytic neutrality got lost in the sophistry of his argumentation. A child may experience an incestuous rape retrospectively with both pleasure and unpleasure, even though at what Freud called the “traumatic moment” itself it may indeed have been experienced one way predominantly. And the experience is by definition one of unpleasure if there is more excitation than can be discharged, and a resulting state of psychic helplessness ensues. That is how we define psychic trauma.
But maintaining that memory and its associated experience remains statically only one way over time ignores transformations and elaborations in memory and fantasy. We know that some traumata upon recollection—which may be false recollection—gratify instinctual drives (among the many other things that they do) and some do not. That is, we may sometimes expect to see in a child who has been sexually and/or aggressively abused more, and more intense sadistic and aggressive drive-related fantasy than in one who has not.
We may also sometimes expect to see the so-called “beneficial” effects of incest, the recognition of which has apparently tempted Masson out of an analytically neutral stance into a socially polemical one. The neutral analyst neither scotomatizes nor shrinks away in outrage upon learning that incest may be followed by increased capacity for orgastic pleasure accompanied by sadomasochistic fantasies (as, for example, Adams-Silvan and Silvan reported at the Association's December, 1983 meeting); or even, as Shengold reported, an increased sense of being protected. Masson approaches the truth in saying that certain overwhelming realities can be experienced in only one way. But that does not imply that they must, particularly as they are recollected over time and past the occurrence of the traumatic moment.
Transformations occur in reconstructive work during the course of a psychoanalysis itself. They also occur during individual development, as the child's mental capacities grow in more complex and diverse directions. Both processes enable the attribution of multiple and complex meanings to even the most overwhelming reality, limited as it may have been at the original moment to permitting only one line of interpretation. Indeed, the remembered reality of seductions may exercise a seductive
power in the direction of resistance to other issues. Then again, a fantasy linked to early trauma may serve as a screen memory, regressively defending against danger situations of a somewhat later period in childhood, as well as serving other functions of compromise formations.
Masson was not right in claiming that Freud was never completely comfortable in giving up “the ” seduction theory. But he was right in sensing Freud's everlasting appreciation of the historical truth value of early trauma no matter what its later elaborations in the representational world of the mind. Freud simply had not come to the point of integrating conceptually all of the various currents of experience influencing the development of psychic reality. That was to be the task of all of his followers, not just those in the so-called “avant garde.” It does make a difference if something really happened or not, especially insofar as traumatic overstimulation makes its indelible imprint on the course of fantasies as powerfully motivating forces in the personality.
Let us accept as reasonably accurate Malcolm's portrayal, based on extensive recorded interviews with Masson, of the attractions and disenchantments between the individuals involved with the Sigmund Freud Archives. Masson tires of people and areas of interest—Sanskrit, Psychoanalysis—once they are no longer new to him, or when they no longer serve his shifting interests. He “decathects,” as Malcolm says, once their initial fascinating effect wears off.
That a man who survives well by such an easy substitutability of objects and interests may have “seduced,” if you will, at one time or another, some of the world's most respected psychoanalysts, including those entrusted with the Sigmund Freud Archives, is indeed a tempting topic for journalism.
So Malcolm is not quite right in saying that Masson is presenting a travesty of the analytic view. She would have been more accurate to state that the issue of analytic neutrality got lost in the sophistry of his argumentation. A child may experience an incestuous rape retrospectively with both pleasure and unpleasure.
However, analysts generally may be vulnerable to being fooled in particular ways. It is a requirement of the analytic situation that analyst (and analysand) must focus on multiple shifts from inner to outer reality; must aim toward constructing multiple and changing life histories; and must adopt multiple vantage points and perspectives for understanding current life problems and conflicts. That is, the analyst must make trial and flexible identifications in order to be empathic. This fluidity of perspective required for doing analysis empathically, while a valuable and essential aspect of any good analyst's character might also constitute a “pull” for certain, hopefully transient and reversible “as-if” behavior, phenomenologically speaking. And along with that pull would go a willing though temporary suspension of disbelief, even, perhaps especially, where multiple identifications in an imposturous “other” are concerned. Thus, what makes for vulnerability may also constitute a most valuable analytic tool.
There is also a great deal in the psychoanalytic literature on a universal tendency to idealize. Just as no one is entirely immune from psychic trauma, no one is entirely free of vulnerability to being gulled, and at certain critical times, some may be more vulnerable than others.
Those who ego-syntonically display their infantile omnipotence may exercise a powerful attraction on those others who are either characterologically or transiently gullible; on those who have renounced their own omnipotence yet who, on precisely that account, may be particularly prone to idealizing those who have not. And one may be particularly vulnerable in states of lonely and isolated creativity, of being in love, or in craving immortality in the search for one's “replacement.” And while such passionately idealizing investments may be characteristic and pathological for some individuals, they may in others be seen simply as temporary “states,” encompassed in the psychopathology of everyday life, analogous, I believe, to the subjective experiences during certain “traumatic moments.” The subjective experience of “sudden” realization, and the subsequent process of “de-idealization”—what Malcolm correctly understands as a typical after-reaction of a universal tendency to deny painful reality—may also be part of the psychopathology of everyday life. Ironically, one may experience such realizations as shock and fresh trauma; e.g., as having been traumatically seduced into being fooled. Is this what Malcolm meant when she said, enigmatically: “The story of Freud and Fliess/Breuer/Jung is a cautionary tale whose moral seems so obvious that there may be another, more subtle one hidden behind it.“? (p. 27). Malcolm left ambiguous what that subtle moral might be.
That a man who survives well by such an easy substitutability of objects and interests may have “seduced, ”if you will, at one time or another, some of the world's most respected psychoanalysts, including those entrusted with the Sigmund Freud Archives, is indeed a tempting topic for journalism.
It is too bad that Malcolm chose to spotlight such vulnerabilities in such a way as to lead to the repeated innuendo of Freud's and Eissler's common failure at being a “Menschenkenner.”
Freud did need Fliess, as Eissler may have needed Masson, as we all may at certain critical times in life long for in the “other” that omnipotence which we have renounced more or less successfully. This is especially so for those who must work intensely with the willing suspension of disbelief for reasonably long periods of time, in exploring the unknown and the ambiguous in ourselves and others. Such yearnings constitute transient and reversible experiential states among the otherwise resilient and sturdy, a truth well known to psychoanalysts. If Malcolm had grasped that truth; if she had duly appreciated the rootings of psychic trauma in historical truth; perhaps she would not, despite her attempts at accurately reporting Masson's machinations about Freud's alleged “assault on truth,” have done her part to keep seething the tempest in a teapot.