I've always been drawn to psychoanalysis and particularly to its Herr Sigmund Freud's earth-shattering notions that we have a subconscious mind that we can communicate with -- or at least hear stories from. The more I read about Freud, the more I was convinced that he is one of his own beloved case histories: a subconscious that we can read through the stories it tells us. He was scared, traumatized, and even held captive, in a way, by a profession and a career path he needed in order to succeed and so adjusted his findings in order to corroborate the story being told to him. When Freud first began working with disturbed females, he found that their problems could most often be traced back to early childhood exposure to a sexuality it wasn't quite prepared for -- and usually by a male member of the girl's own family. Judith Herman says it better than I will:
"It was Freud who followed the threat the furthest, invariably this led him into an exploration of the sexual lives of women" (13, my emphasis). Now, before I continue, this sentence is fascinating, if even for only one reason: the word "threat" is a typo. This quotation begins a paragraph; the last sentence of the preceding paragraph ends with Herman quoting Breuer, who, to pick up on Herman's syntax, "describing his work with Anna O, spoke of 'following back the thread of memory.'" The sentence which follows should instead read "It was Freud who followed the thread the furthest," but instead, in a classic Freudian slip, chooses, through multiple edits and now two editions, "threat." Indeed, this word choice/slip does much of my argument's convincing work for me in that it points to the threat to Freud's institution which his following the women's threads would cause. It also foreshadows the threatening situation these women as young girls have found themselves in. (Fascinating that the editors and publishers and proofreaders and even the author has "missed the threat"... now in its second-edition misprint/misread.)
So, starting again, Herman writes:
It was Freud who followed the thread the furthest, and invariably this led him into an exploration of the sexual lives of women. In spite of an ancient clinical tradition that recognized the association of hysterical symptoms with female sexuality, Freud's mentors, Charcot and Breuer, had been highly skeptical about the role of sexuality in the origins of hysteria. Freud himself was initially resistant to the idea: "When I began to analyze the second patient . . . the expectation of a sexual neurosis being the basis of hysteria was fairly remote in my mind. I had come fresh from the school of Charcot, and I regarded the linking of hysteria with the topic of sexuality as a sort of insult -- just as the women patients themselves do."
You have to keep in mind that at this time, hysteria was being treated with medical orgasm and tonics and the like. It was a condition swathed in uncertainty and confusion and myth and hearsay. It was a wack-science, indeed, because it had anything at all to do with the fairer sex. Freud was initially resistant to this idea, so his mind was expecting not to find it. He was completely unprepared for what was about to happen to him.
This empathetic identification with his patients' reactions is characteristic of Freud's early writings on hysteria. His case histories reveal a man possessed of such passionate curiosity that he was willing to overcome his own defensiveness, and willing to listen. What he heard was appalling. Repeatedly his patients told him of sexual assault, abuse, and incest. Following back the thread of memory, Freud and his patients uncovered major traumatic events of childhood concealed beneath the more recent, often relatively trivial experiences that had actually triggered the onset of hysterical symptoms. By 1896 Freud believed he had found the source. In a report on eighteen case studies, entitled The Aetiology of Hysteria, he made a dramatic claim: "I therefore put forward the thesis at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology."
Freud completely bought into this reality-based construct of memory and hysterical symptoms. Sounds pretty sure of himself too, right?
Within a year, Freud had privately repudiated the traumatic theory of the origins of hysteria. His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients's stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called "perverted acts against children" were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility.
Herman later summarizes the next hundred years of psychology as "founded in the denial of women's reality." Freud passed on his unresolved trauma to us transgenerationally, vicariously, hegemonically.
