Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

However, and this is another event of some significance, within eighteen months Freud was confiding to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss (but only to Fleiss) that he no longer believed in this theory of the origins of neurosis. He thought it improbable there should be such widespread perversions against children, and in any case he was failing to bring any of his analyses based on these ideas to a successful conclusion. ‘Of course I shall not tell it in Dan, nor speak of it in Askelon, in the land of the Philistines, but in your eyes and my own . . .’ In other words, he was not prepared to do the scientifically honourable thing, and acknowledge publicly that he was withdrawing his confidently-claimed ‘findings’ of the previous year. It was now that he began to consider the possibility that these events were unconscious fantasies rather than memories. However, even then this new variation took time to coalesce fully, because Freud at first thought that infants’ fantasies occurred in order to ‘cover up the auto-erotic activity of the early years of childhood’. In 1906 and again in 1914 he said that, around puberty, some patients conjured up unconscious memories of infantile ‘seductions’ to ‘fend off’ memories of infantile masturbation. In 1906 the ‘culprits’ of the fantasies were adults or older children, while in 1914 he did not specify who they were. In that report, however, he did at last fully retract his seduction theory. Even so, it was only in 1925,

nearly thirty years after the events in question

, that he first said publicly that most of his early female patients had accused their father of having seduced them. The size of this

volte-face

cannot be overstated. In the first place, there is no question but that he radically changed the scenario of seduction – from real to fantasised, and further, he changed the identity of the seducers from strangers/tutors/brothers to fathers. The important point to take on board is that this change occurred as a result of no new clinical evidence: Freud simply painted a different picture, using the same ingredients, except that this time he was a quarter of a century away from the evidence. Second, and no less important, during the long years between the late 1890s and 1925, during which time he treated many female patients, Freud never reported that any of them mentioned early seductions, by their fathers or anyone else. In other words, it seems that once Freud stopped looking for it, this syndrome ceased to show itself. This is surely further evidence, say the critics, that the seduction theory, and by extension the Oedipus and Electra complexes, perhaps the most influential aspect of Freudianism, and one of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, in both medical and artistic terms, not to say common parlance, turns out to have the most unusual, tortured – and quite frankly improbable – genealogy. The inconsistencies in the genesis of the theory are blatant. Freud did not ‘discover’ early sexual awareness in his patients: he inferred or intuited or ‘guessed’ it was there. He did not discover the Oedipus complex from careful and passive observations of clinical evidence: he had a pre-set idea which he forced on the ‘evidence’, after previous ‘impositions’ had failed even to convince himself. Furthermore, it was a process that could not be reproduced by any independent, sceptical scientist, and this is perhaps the most damning evidence of all, the final nail in the coffin so far as Freud’s claim to be a scientist is concerned. What sort of science is it where experimental or clinical evidence cannot be replicated by other scientists using the same techniques and methodology? Anthony Clare, the British psychiatrist and broadcaster, has described Freud as a ‘ruthless, devious charlatan’ and concluded that ‘many of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis are phoney’.⁴¹ It is hard not to agree. Given Freud’s ‘pressure’ technique, his ‘persuading’ and ‘guessing’, we are entitled to doubt whether the unconscious exists. Essentially, he made the whole thing up.