Why Freud abandoned his seduction theory? – Matters of Truth, Healing, and Countertransference
Sándor Ferenczi, was a close friend of Freud more than 20 years. He was also a devoted disciple of Freud and a psychoanalyst himself. He wrote in his diary (May 1st, 1932) that Freud said that patients are only “riffraff.” (in original German: “Die Patienten sind ein Gesindel” – from “Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson)
Freud said:
“The only thing patients were good for is to help the analyst make a living and provide material for theory. It is clear we cannot help them. This is therapeutic nihilism. Nevertheless, we entice patients by concealing these doubts and by arousing their hopes of being cured.” 1 (from “Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson)
Ferenczi realized and felt that Freud treated him as he had treated his other patients with such degrading and duplicitous attitude when Freud analyzed Ferenczi.
However, from the Freud early writing, it is obvious that Freud truly believed in healing these hysteric women patients. However, it seemed that when one of Freud’s patient (Anna O) suffered a relapse and Freud had a countertransference, coupled with the lying tendencies in hysterical women (similar with many other characterological psychosis, e.g. borderline), he became disillusioned. It is very unfortunate that there was nobody could/dared/bothered to have told him that he was having a countertransference because of his demigod-like statue in psychoanalytic community.
Also, in my opinion, in part, it could have been possible that the pressure from the established medical society and the pressure from rich and powerful also did him in as well. After all, all of his patients were children of his colleagues, rich, and/or powerful families and their parents had criminally motivated reason to hide what actually happened to their children for their social statues, wealth, and power (would anyone in such position voluntarily without any pressure give up all that to come out clean for what they had done to their children?).
Masson Writes:
“Since the time of this discovery, Freud no longer likes sick people…in fact, his dislike of everything that he considers “too abnormal”, even against Indian mythology.” 2
The original complex of Freud which caused countertransference was in his family structure (his parents). This is well illustrated between interaction of Jung and Freud.
Jung was once considered as Freud’s greatest successor, as such Jung tried to maintain very good relationship with Freud. However, Jung had to break away from Freud because of Freud’s insistence that all psychological diseases and symptoms are sex related. Jung just could not accept this as Freud demanded on all his followers and disciples. Jung speculated that Freud thought in such way because Freud had Oedipus Complex (fantasized about murdering his father and seducing his mother) on his parents. 3. (p36 C G Jung – Lord of the Underworld – Colin Wilson)
Indeed, Freud had a very old and authoritative father and attractive young mother. He also loved his mother very much. On the contrary, Jung’s mother was fat and ugly and his father was a weak and insignificant person. So for Jung, there was no such complex toward his parents.
“Jung was in a difficult position. Freud was an extremely powerful personality, who knew all there was to know about inspiring loyalty, trust, affection, even pity. Jung could say later: ‘I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon.’ ” (p42 “C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld” – Colin Wilson)
However, Freud insisted that all his disciple and associates have his view on psychoanalysis. There were some who broke away from him. He didn’t consider such people who broke away from him kindly, to say the least. One of them paid with his dear life. 4
Jung finally exploded at Freud by writing a confrontational letter to him about the earlier encounter he had with Freud when Jung had a Freudian slip (because of this mental conflict) and Freud pointed this out to him:
‘In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies . . . I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of your sons and daughters, who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as a father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself … You see, my dear Professor, so long as you hand out this stuff I don’t give a damn for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing compared with the formidable beam in my brother Freud’s eye … ‘ 5 (p534-535 The Freud and Jung Letters – William McGuire)
Colin Wilson writes:
He had put his finger squarely on a basic truth about Freud: that he was obsessed by a need for power, for personal authority. The reason it was so important that the sexual theory—with its crude reduction of religion to father fixations and genius to Oedipus complexes—should become an ‘unshakeable dogma’ was that it was the foundation of Freud’s authority. (P54-55 “C G Jung: Lord of the Underworld” – Colin Wilson )
Sándor Ferenczi, started to think in the same direction as Freud’s did in his early days of psycho analysis (i.e. Freud’s 1896 papers on hysteria).
Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. This culminated in a paper, “Confusion of Tongues,”….that was, in many respects, the twin to Freud’s “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” (p120 “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson)
Not just that, Ferenczi arrived to the same conclusion as Freud’s earliest thoughts:
For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be “the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. ‘My mother and father will kill me if I don’t love them, and identify with their wishes.’ ” Ferenczi never dared show this diary to Freud. (p121 “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson)
In the last years of Ferenczi’s life, he began to develop in the direction that Freud originally thought about the original of psychological disease. That is, hysteria is originated from parental sexual abuse and Oedipus complex is “the result of real act on part of adults, namely vioent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. ‘My mother and father will kill me if I don’t love them, and identify with their wishes.’”
He presented his paper on this in somewhat subdued tone at 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress. This was met with cold shoulder.
“Freud was too sick to attend, but many of the leading analysts of the time were there: Anna Freud, Federn, Alexander, Jekels, Jones, de Groot, Brunswick, Simmel, Harnik, Bonaparte, Sterba, Reik, Balint, Deutsch, Rado, Weiss, Odier, Glover,Roheim, Menninger, de Saussure.[6] Their response to the paper was uniformly negative. These senior analysts, the “bearers of the ring,” were of the opinion that views such as those expressed in the paper should not be circulated more widely than was absolutely necessary, that the dissemination of such views constituted a danger to society. (p123 “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.)
It is worth to read what Ferenczi and Masson thought about all this. I recommend readers to read this at the end note 6, which are extensive quote from the book “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
I would like to quote a couple of paragraphs from “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
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P16
Like Freud, many psychiatrists and psychologists begin their career believing that they are in possession of a special truth, a theory which, once explored and expanded, will restore the insane and the misguided to their rightful roles in life. The theory might concern the function of dopamine in the brain, or genetic engineering, or the discovery of insight through psychotherapy, or the learning of good habits through behaviour modification, or the acquiring of the right attitudes through cognitive therapy. They embark on their mission enthusiastically. For a time all goes well. A satisfactory number of patients behave in the way that the theory predicts. Unaware of how the advent of a bright, enthusiastic, cheerful young man or woman in the life of a sad and lonely person is likely to make that person feel much better, they claim success for their brand of therapy, and look forward to fame, riches, and the Nobel Prize.
“All therapies work, but no therapy works perfectly.”
You can take a ward full of patients of whatever diagnosis, age and sex, and you can give them all a new drug, or a new kind of therapy, or simply a change in their routine, and a third of them will get better, a third will stay the same, and a third will get worse, give or take a few each way. Of course, a few weeks or months later, some of those who got better will get worse, and some of those who got worse will get better. But you cannot be sure that when patients say they are better they really are. Patients, who are always trying to be good, kind people, are likely to tell the therapist what he wants to hear. After all, if this nice young chap has gone to all this trouble, it’s a pity to disappoint him.
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I maybe a bit biased toward the framework of the Motivational Triad and Fairbairnian psychology, but I think it is worth to explain because people here so much about Freud and sometimes Jung, but never really about Fairbairn or Motivational Triad for that matter – it gives alternatives on how think about their own psyche.
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End Notes:
1.
Ferenczi wrote in his diary:
Why should the patient place himself blindly in the hands of the doctor? Isn’t it possible, indeed probable, that a doctor who has not been well analyzed (after all, who is well analyzed?) will not cure the patient but rather will use her or him to play out his own neurotic or psychotic needs? As proof and justification of this suspicion, I remember certain statements Freud made to me. Obviously he was relying on my discretion. He said that patients are only riffraff.[Die Patienten sind ein Gesindel.] The only thing patients were good for is to help the analyst make a living and to provide material for theory. It is clear we cannot help them. This is therapeutic nihilism. Nevertheless, we entice patients by concealing these doubts and by arousing their hopes of being cured. I think that in the beginning Freud really believed in analysis; he followed Breuer enthusiastically, involved himself passionately and selflessly in the therapy of neurotics (lying on the floor for hours, if necessary, next to a patient in the throes of a hysterical crisis). However, certain experiences must have first alarmed him and then left him disillusioned more or less the way Breuer was when his patient [Anna O.] suffered a relapse and he found himself faced, as before an abyss, with the countertransference. In Freud’s case, the equivalent was the discovery of the mendacity of hysterical women. Since the time of this discovery, Freud no longer likes sick people. He rediscovered his love for his orderly, cultivated superego. A further proof of this is his dislike and expressions of blame that he uses with respect to psychotics and perverts, in fact, his dislike of everything that he considers “too abnormal,” even against Indian mythology. Since he suffered this shock, this disappointment, Freud speaks much less about traumas, and the constitution begins to play the major role. This involves, obviously, a degree of fatalism. After a wave of enthusiasm for the psychological, Freud has returned to biology; he considers the pyschological to be nothing more than the superstructure over the biological and for him the latter is far more real. He is still attached to analysis intellectually, but not emotionally. Further, his method of treatment as well as his theories result from an ever greater interest in order, character and the substitution of a better superego for a weaker one. In a word, he is becoming a pedagogue…. He looms like a god above his poor patient, who has been degraded to the status of a child. We claim that the transference comes from the patient, unaware of the fact that the greater part of what one calls the transference is artificially provoked by this very behavior [148–49].
From Ferenczi’s Secret Diary and the Experiment in Mutual Analysis
Quoted from “Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson p99
2.
Since he suffered this shock, this disappointment, Freud speaks much less about trauma, and the constitution begins to play the major role. This involves, obviously, a degree of fatalism. After a wave of enthusiasm for the psychological, Freud has returned to biology; he considers the psychological to be nothing more than the superstructure over the biological and for him the latter is far more real. He is still attached to analysis intellectually, but not emotionally. Further, his method of treatment as well as his theories result from an ever greater interest in order, character and the substitution of a better superego for a weaker one. In a word, he is becoming a pedagogue… He looms like a god above his poor patient who has been degraded to the status of a child.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff – “Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing” p15
3.
America in 1909, Freud suddenly fainted as Jung talked about the peat bog corpses found in Northern Germany. Afterwards, Freud accused Jung of talking about corpses because he had death wishes towards him. Jung says that he was alarmed by the intensity of Freud’s fantasies. Again in 1912, when Jung was discussing the Pharaoh Ikhnaton at a congress, and contradicting the notion that Ikhnaton had removed his father’s name from inscriptions because he hated him, Freud slid off his chair in a faint. Jung points out that ‘the fantasy of father-murder was common to both cases’. But why should Freud have fainted when Jung denied that Ikhnaton hated his father? Jung’s comment about the strength of Freud’s fantasies provides the answer. Jung clearly suspected that Freud had fantasized about murdering his father and seducing his mother, and that Jung’s denial of Ikhnaton’s patricidal tendencies aroused in Freud an intense feeling of guilt, the kind of feeling that may make a teenager blush when someone discusses masturbation.
Jung prefers to gloss over the obvious truth that the real difference between himself and Freud is that his own mother was fat and ugly, so there was no temptation to dream of seducing her, and that his father was pathetic and unsuccessful, so there was no temptation to fantasize about killing him. Jung was in a difficult position. Freud was an extremely powerful personality, who knew all there was to know about inspiring loyalty, trust, affection, even pity. Jung could say later: ‘I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon.’ But in 1908, Jung was also in the grip of Freud’s daimon, his tremendous charisma. Freud’s aim was to bend Jung to his will, to cajole and persuade and seduce him into dropping his reservations, and to become the leading exponent of the sexual theory, Freud’s spiritual heir. Jung’s letters to Freud all begin ‘Dear Professor Freud’. Freud’s to Jung begin ‘Dear Friend’. Freud was offering his own affection and loyalty in exchange for Jung’s. But there could be no final argument about the sexual theory: that was not negotiable.
p42-43 “C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld” – Colin Wilson
4
His name was Herbert Silberer. Below is wikipedia page quote about Silberer.
Many of the insights Silberer offered, especially into the link between alchemical imagery and modern psychology were similar to those first introduced by Carl Jung in his book “Psychology of the Unconscious” in 1911. (is book was later retitled “Symbols of Transformation”). Jung further developed these insights in his seminal work “Psychology and Alchemy,” in 1944, crediting Silbere for his research. Both Jung and Silberer had included psychic phenomena that Freud had excluded in favor of his theories of sexuality as the predominant factor and cause of psychic disturbances.
Freud and his associates coldly and cruelly rejected Jung and Silberer, hindering a greater understanding of our psyche and the treatment of psychic disturbances. Rather than fully understand the causes of disturbances, most patients are treated with medication, suppressing the symptoms which can resurface with greater force. Silberer committed suicide almost 9 years later after the split with Freud by hanging himself January 12, 1923. Jung described in his autobiography “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” the effect Freud’s censure had and how it precipitated a major upheaval of his psyche that nearly overwhelmed him as he believed it had for his friend.
Wiki credits “C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld” – Colin Wilson for the original source.
5.
The entire letter Jung sent to Freud
18th December 1912
Dear Professor Freud,
May I say a few words to you in earnest? I admit the ambivalence of my feelings towards you, but am inclined to take an honest and absolutely straightforward view of the situation. If you doubt my word, so much the worse for you. I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies ( Adler Stekel and the whole insolent gang now throwing their weight about in Vienna ). I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyse the analyst instead of himself. You ·would certainly ask him: “Who’s got the neurosis?”
You see, my dear Professor, so long as you hand out this stuff I don’t give a damn for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing in comparison with the formidable beam in my brother Freud’s eye. I am not in the least neurotic-touch wood! I have submitted lege artis et tout humblement to analysis and am much the better for it. You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis-just like you. If ever you should rid yourself entirely of your complexes and stop playing the father to your sons and instead of aiming continually at the1r weak spots took a good look at your own for a change, then I will mend my ways and at one stroke uproot the vice of being in two minds about you. Do you love neurotics enough to be always at one with yourself? But perhaps you hate neurotics. In that case how can you expect your efforts to treat your patients ‘leniently and lovingly not to be accompanied by some what mixed feelings? Adler and Stekel were taken in by your little tricks2 and reacted with childish insolence. I shall continue to stand by you publicly while maintaining my own views, but privately shall start telling you in my letters what I really think of you. I consider this procedure only decent.
No doubt you will be outraged by this peculiar token of friendship, but it may do you good all the same.
With best regards,
Most sincerely yours,
Jung
p534-535 “The Freud and Jung Letters” – William McGuire
The abridged form of this letter is from p68-69 of “C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld” – Colin Wilson
6.
Below are extensive quotes from “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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Beginning of the Quote
p120
Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933) was for more than twenty years Freud’s closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed him as “dear son”)….But in the last few years of his life, Ferenczi began developing in a direction that alarmed Freud. In a series of three papers that uncannily parallel Freud’s three 1896 papers, Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. This culminated in a paper, “Confusion of Tongues,”[1] his last (included below as Appendix C in a new English translation), that was, in many respects, the twin to Freud’s “The Aetiology of Hysteria.”
p121
Ferenczi had returned to Freud’s earliest insights, while putting a different interpretation on many later analytic concepts. For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be “the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. ‘My mother and father will kill me if I don’t love them, and identify with their wishes.’” Ferenczi never dared show this diary to Freud.
The paper he read before the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress is a somewhat milder distillation of these views. Yet the ideas he expressed in the paper met with the strongest disapproval by every leading analyst of the day. Ferenczi’s tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all of his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he never would emerge. Ferenczi’s paper, “Confusion of Tongues,” is one of those rare publications that show unmistakable signs of having been written by someone in a state of emotional turmoil which opens access to truths that are otherwise unavailable. The main focus of Ferenczi’s paper is the reality of sexual assaults on young children.
P122
Furthermore, Ferenczi explains, the parent who denies what he has done, or denies its harmful effects, often becomes physically abusive toward the child (projecting the wickedness onto the child). A seduction is generally followed by violence, suggesting to the child a connection between sexuality and violence, with disastrous effects on the child’s ability to love later in life. As a defense the child sinks into a dream or trance state in which it is easier to misperceive the quality of the aggression. The child’s need to deny altogether what has happened severely loosens her hold on reality. She (or, more rarely, he) becomes ashamed, the victim of the unconscious remorse of the parent that is expressed in violent anger toward the child.
P123
Seduction, then, is a form of hatred, not love. The child will often become extremely depressed after such an incident. The consequence for the abused child is that his or her own sexuality will remain undeveloped or will assume perverted forms. The child may well become psychotic (which is a defense not dissimilar to the original trance state, a protected but lonely hiding place).
Perhaps never before had anyone spoken for the abused child with such sympathy and eloquence. The ideas that Freud had propounded to a skeptical medical world in his 1896 papers were here repeated, but expanded through the knowledge gained by analysis in the years after 1896.
It is as if Ferenczi were demonstrating to the analytic world how psychoanalysis could have developed had Freud not abandoned the seduction hypothesis. But since Freud had abandoned that theory, the paper was a major break with the direction psychoanalysis had taken from the time of its inception to the present. This shift in direction was not lost on the analysts who heard the paper. Ferenczi was not yet sixty when he attended the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress held in Wiesbaden in September 1932 (the last he was to attend). Ferenczi opened the Congress with his paper. Freud was too sick to attend, but many of the leading analysts of the time were there: Anna Freud, Federn, Alexander, Jekels, Jones, de Groot, Brunswick, Simmel, Harnik, Bonaparte, Sterba, Reik, Balint, Deutsch, Rado, Weiss, Odier, Glover,Roheim, Menninger, de Saussure.[6] Their response to the paper was uniformly negative. These senior analysts, the “bearers of the ring,” were of the opinion that views such as those expressed in the paper should not be circulated more widely than was absolutely necessary, that the dissemination of such views constituted a danger to society.
English translation was not published for another sixteen years—until Michael Balint translated the paper and published it in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1949.[9]
End of Quotes from “Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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