To the Editor:
We are writing to suggest an elaboration on the relationship between trauma and fantasy stimulated by Dr. Gediman's excellent article in the Spring, 1985 Newsletter. It seems to us that there is an aspect to the developmental problems children have in sorting out personal myth from personal reality that has been implicit but not adequately spelled out in the psychoanalytic literature, nor in Dr. Gediman's article. It bears directly upon Masson's failure to comprehend fully the issues he was struggling with.
In 1965, Anna Freud (Normality and Pathology in Childhood, New York: Int. Univ. Press), among others, made the basic developmental point in discussing the difficulty that enlightened and presumably empathic parents have in communicating sexual concepts to their children. The familiar finding she articulates is that children “persisted in clinging to … their own sexual theories which translated genitality into age-appropriate terms of orality and anality, violence and mutilation” (p. 7).
Our suggestion, which goes beyond what she explicitly states, is that the primitivization she describes holds true in normal development, following the child's perception of any of the ways in which parents regulate a variety of tensions in themselves or with each other, in a more highly integrated manner than that of which the child is capable.
The suggestion may seem radical. However, we believe Freud was making the same point when, in 1909, in his description of the Rat Man (Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis, S.E.: 10), he wrote: “in his phantasies about his infancy the individual, as he grows up, endeavors to efface the recollection of his auto-erotic activities; and this he does by exalting their memory-traces to the level of object-love … This explains why these phantasies abound in seductions and assaults where the facts will have been confined to auto-erotic activities and the caresses or punishments that stimulated them” (pp. 206-7). Elsewhere, in 1917 (Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis: Lecture XXIII. S.E.: 16), Freud wrote: “A fantasy of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usually employed by a child to screen the auto-erotic period of his sexual activity. He spares himself shame about masturbation by retrospectively fantasying a desired object into these earliest times (p. 370).”
Again, in discussing the Rat Man, Freud adds: “Furthermore, it becomes clear that in constructing fantasies about his childhood the individual sexualizes his memories; that is, he brings commonplace experiences into relation with his sexual activity, and extends his sexual interest to them — though in doing this he is probably following upon the traces of a really existing connecting (p. 207).”
In these passages we believe that Freud was describing exactly the same phenomena we have observed. That is, we believe he was referring to the child's primitive emotionality and his occasional inability to respond appropriately to parental approval and disapproval (“caresses and punishments”), from which he retreats to auto-erotic activities (fantasies of “seductions and assaults”). When Freud asserted that the child then raises these auto-erotic activities to the level of object relationships by subsequently fantasying seductions and assaults perpetrated upon him, we would only add that this fantasy projects on to his parents the child's own, less neutralized ways of dealing with his own tensions and that this developmentally culminates in a primal scene fantasy.
Paula Heimann made precisely this point in 1952, (Certain functions of introjection and projection in early infancy. In J. Riviere (ed.), Developments in Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.) where she noted that the infant's own pregenital aims represent “the resources from which he draws, when occupied with his parent's inter-relationship. The result is he forms notions of something … frightening; the ‘primal scene’ has its roots in the infant's fantasies as they operate at the beginning of the oedipus complex” (p. 164).
The question of why children regularly do this can also be described from the viewpoint of cognitive development. In Piaget's schema, the years between two and seven are called the preoperational period of representational intelligence. This is a phase characterized by magical omnipotence, animism and “interiorized imitation” which, we assume, is synonymous with projective identification. During this time an event is subsequently recalled by the child each time in a way that fits the cognitive style of the later developmental phase. This could be a cognitive explanation of why primal scene fantasies are “remembered” as real events under the influence of the transference regression.
Finally, we believe there is an underlying connection between Freud's and Anna Freud's comments in that the caresses and punishments that Freud describes are analogous to the enlightened explanations of the parents whom Anna Freud describes, and that the seductions and assaults are analogous to the violence and mutilation theories with which the children respond.
Is there anything to be added to Freud's explanation of why children do this in response to their parents' sublimated (e.g. tender), or neutralized (e.g. thoughtful) interactions? We suggest it occurs for several additional reasons. First, following Heimann, because of a combination of the primitive nature of their perceptions and the pain of feeling left out of something they cannot understand fully, nor master, and which they have no power to interrupt. Feeling
left out is a familiar, painful experience sometimes called jealousy, in which libidinal tension is stimulated without relief because the objects through whom discharge can occur are busy with each other.
We assume there is a projection of the primitive nature of the child's self-perception in the form of, “If I don't understand it, I will make them be like me.” This also deals with the pain of envying what the parents can do, apart from jealousy of their pleasure in each other. Thus, children create a primal scene fantasy of oral-incorporative or destructive, or anal sadomasochistic, or phallic exhibitionistic-voyeuristic interactions depending on their developmental level, and then identify with one or the other of their parents in the fantasy. This repairs their self-esteem which was damaged by (a) feeling envy and jealousy, and (b) not understanding. It also provides libidinal gratification via identification.
Second, we would add that the wish to observe the parents in sexual activity also contributes to the primal scene fantasy, based on the child's need both to obtain pleasure through identification and to reduce his own tension through comprehension. Third, we also believe the commonplace observation that masturbatory discharge can be a powerful soother of a variety of anxieties for children.
While it may be a bit much to expect even a first-rate journalist like Malcolm to grasp these subtleties, they should not have eluded Masson, since they are an everyday part of the psychoanalytic prose we all speak.
William Offenkrantz, Milwaukee Arnold Tobin, Chicago