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Freud's Fall from Grace
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C R Y P T  |  L I N K S | H O M E
Freud's Fall from Grace

I'm not an expert on Freud (far from it), but I stayed at a
Holiday Inn Express once (g). Actually I grew up on Freud and was so impressed I once spent
much more than I should to acquire his complete works for my personal library. I was
fascinating with his theories and his revisionist history, the way he described the "Old
Testament" stories and their real inner meaning. I was enthrawed with his psychological
theories about hysteria and our relationship to our parents. It did not occur to me that he
might be wrong. I was vaguely aware of his misogyny even before I knew the meaning of the
word, but it seemed less important that the morsels of wisdom I discovered reading all of
his writings. But the tide has turned. I still feel endebted to Freud and not for a minute
do I think the information in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism and other works are
not insightful and enlightening. They are. Many great thinkers fall victim to ideas which
are prevalent in their time and they add to them and rise above them as he has also done
even if not enough to satisfy all of his detractors. This is my crititism, although somewhat
limited by my study of him and what others are saying, but I hope it also will in some small
measure add to the discourse. Everyone can and should make up their own mind.

"The tide had already begun to turn in the 1970s. The first hint that Freud's reputation
was in trouble came from the new feminists. The year 1970 itself was particularly rough,
when, in separate books, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Eva Figes
all took Freud to task for his reactionary views on women. 1970 also witnessed the
publication of Henri Ellenberger's massive study The Discovery of the Unconscious, with its
irreverent chapter on Freud; a few years later Paul Roazen's Freud and His Followers
continued in a similar vein. Ellenberger and Roazen were significant precursors of the more
full-blooded criticism of the 1980s, but in retrospect they seem relatively mild and
conventional. The past decade, by comparison, has brought an avalanche of anti-Freudian
writings, their tone ever more hostile. Undeniably, Freud's reputation has undergone a sea
change." (Paul Robinson - Freud and his Critics - U of California Pr, 1993)
When Sigmund Freud was 39 years old in 1896, with six children, no money,
a struggling practice, deeply indebted and depressed, he had a theory
about the causes for neuroses, anxiety and hysteria. His conclusion was
all of these problems were a result of sexual abuse as a child.
His theory was the female complaint of hysteria was caused by something
done to her by a man, usually her father. His ideas were not accepted and
when he presented his thesis, his first lecture on the subject on April
21, 1896 to members of the Association of Viennese Neurologists and
Psychiatrists at their monthly meeting his presentation was met with
silence.
The chairman stated that Freud's idea "sounded like a scientific fairy
tale." Freud's hypothesis was not only rejected publicly, he continued to
be in his words, "despised and universally shunned" by the association and
local medical community.
A colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer speculated that Sigmund was "losing his grip
on reality." He was being ostracized, did not receive referrals that his
practice depended on and he became more impoverished. He decided his
theory was wrong and he believed, as he told his closest friends, that the
women who told him about being raped in her childhood must have been
lying. He reached the conclusion, he said, that the abuse never happened
and the women invented the stories of child sexual abuse by her father.
And when asked why the women would invent the story, his response was
terribly misogynist. He said, each women unconsciously wants to be raped.
"The woman's "memory" of having been raped by her father was actually a
fantasy of her own creation. "If a girl tells you she was raped in her
childhood, by her father, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary
nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it," Freud
wrote. The motive Freud had in mind was the girl's unconscious desire to
have sex with her father."  (Dr. Leonard Sax, a physician and psychologist
in private practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, writing in the
magazine, World and I, "The future of Freud's illusion.(Freud's theories
set psychiatry back one hundred years) - August 1, 2000)
Leonard Sax writes how astonishing a leap of logic this altering
conclusion was, the only reason for it of course, was to reingratiate
himself in his medical fraternity:
"Freud was now rejecting the same hypothesis that he himself had advocated
so forcefully just one year earlier. On what grounds? The only reason that
Freud himself gave was that his earlier hypothesis required one to believe
that many young girls are sexually abused. "Surely such a  incidence
of childhood sexual abuse is not very probable," he wrote. Freud had
interviewed thirteen such women before making his speech in April 1896. In
an astonishing leap, he decided in 1897 that not only these thirteen women
but all women everywhere in all cultures and in all times desired sex with
their father when they were young."
It is obvious that Freud, was damaged goods after presenting his
hypothesis and his only way back would be a refutation of his original
premise. This he did by discrediting his own witness to
familial rape and abuse.
Dr. Leonard Sax wrote, "One of the most respected physicians in the
Viennese medical community, Professor Eduard von Hofmann of the University
of Vienna, maintained that girls and young women had "a pathological
tendency to lie and exaggerate as well as an inability to faithfully
recall an event. This reveals itself in a partiality for sexual
accusations." The leading German authority on forensic medicine, Dr.
Johann Ludwig Casper, warned in the very first page of his textbook about
the "outright lies" of girls who accuse men of rape. In France, Professor
Alfred Fournier insisted that these girls were lying, even when there was
evidence of trauma to the genitalia. He wrote that he had seen "large
numbers of vaginal inflammations which appeared in young girls in an
absolutely spontaneous manner, apart from any possibility of sexual
assault." Paul Brouardel, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, had
written that "girls accuse their fathers of imaginary assaults on them or
on other children in order to obtain their freedom to give themselves over
to debauchery."
Not that it would excuse Freud, but there was nevertheless, the ubiquitist unfavorable
opinion if women in Freud's time.
The prevailing opinion was that women were liars and
not to be trusted. If you didn't go along with the prevailing view you were yourself suspect
and did not fit in. Sigmund Freud evidently chose acceptance over the truth and cowardice
over courage.  

The biblical view was also unfavorable. A women is afterall, in the
Judio-Christian-Muslim tradition only a rib and it was a women who is blamed for tempting
Adam to eat forbidden fruit and apparently that view, as ignorant as it is, is still held by
many in the religious community.  

Dr. Leonard Sax also refutated Freud's manufactured evidence about the "Wolf Man."
He says, "In fact, Freud never had such evidence. So he invented it. He published a
series of case histories in which he described patients with various minor psychiatric
problems whom he claimed to have cured using his technique, which he decided to call
"psycho-analysis." One of the most famous of these manufactured case histories was that of
the Wolf Man. Before evidence of Freud's duplicity in this case became widely known in the
1970s, Freudian theorists regarded the story of the Wolf Man as "no doubt the most important
of all Freud's case histories." The Wolf Man had come
to Freud complaining of depression and self-doubt (what we today would call "low self-
esteem"). At one point in the analysis--which was conducted daily over four consecutive
years--the Wolf Man recalled dreaming about wolves howling outside his window (hence Freud's
nickname for the patient). Freud decided that the dream must be an expression of the
patient's fear of being castrated by his father. Freud was convinced, furthermore, that
Pankeev must have witnessed his parents having sexual intercourse as a small child, and that
watching this act had triggered Pankeev's fears of castration, which Pankeev had then
suppressed. The repression had led to all his problems in adulthood, according to Freud.
Pankeev insisted that he had never witnessed his parents having sex, and that in any case he
had no fear of castration. Freud reassured him that after enough therapy, he would
eventually recall both his repressed fears of castration and his repressed memory of
watching his parents having sex. After four years of intensive psychoanalysis, Freud
persuaded himself that he had cured the Wolf Man. Pankeev's self-doubt and low self-esteem
were now a thing of the past, Freud concluded. Freud's vivid description of this case,
highlighting his own brilliant deductions regarding the hidden meanings of the Wolf Man's
dream, seemed to be substantial evidence supporting Freud's basic claim: that psychoanalysis
worked. Psychoanalysis had the power to cure." (Sax)

"When Pankeev was finally
interviewed by someone other than Freud--forty years later--he told quite a different story.
The whole thing was "a catastrophe," Pankeev said. "I am in the same state  as when I
first came to Freud." Freud's insistence that Pankeev must have witnessed his parents having
sex was implausible, Pankeev explained, "because in Russia [where Pankeev was raised],
children sleep in their nanny's bedroom, not in their parents'."Pankeev also mentioned that
he had dreamed of dogs, not wolves, outside his window. Freud apparently decided that wolves
added a more poetic touch to the story, so he changed the facts to suit his literary taste."
(Sax)  

"There's more. The Sigmund Freud Archives paid hush money to Pankeev for
years--decades--in exchange for his silence. "Instead of doing me good," Pankeev said in an
interview shortly before his death, "the psychoanalysts did me harm." Rather than a triumph
of analysis, the story of the Wolf Man "appears instead to have been a tacitly recognized
embarrassment whose true nature needed to be hidden by the arm-twisting and the financial
resources of the Freud Archives," wrote MIT neuroscientist Frank Sulloway. Seymour Fisher
and Roger Greenberg, after reviewing all of Freud's case histories, concluded that "Freud
chose to demonstrate the utility of psychoanalysis through descriptions of largely
unsuccessful cases"--because Freud had no successful cases to present." (Sax)

"Freud's fundamental belief- -after September 1897--was that psychiatric problems in
adulthood derive from repressed childhood sexual fantasies. Freud believed furthermore that
if the patient could be encouraged to remember those repressed fantasies, and be liberated
from that unhealthy repression, then the anxiety, hysteria, or neurosis would vanish. To the
extent that Freud could supply evidence of real people with real problems who had been cured
using this approach, it would be reasonable to give some credence to his theories." (Leonard
Sax)  
Freud also invented the famous "Oedipus complex." This theory, also now rejected, is that
ALL girls have this innate desire to kill their mother - AND to have sex with their father.
He also hypothesized that ALL boys have an unconscious desire to kill their father and have
sex with their mother.

Diane Jonte-Pace writes:
"A group of scholars in Jewish cultural studies, among whom are Jay Geller, Sander Gilman,
and Daniel Boyarin, has recently produced another set of important feminist analyses of
previous hit Freud next hit, gender, and religion. The work of these scholars has been
instrumental in demonstrating that previous hit Freud's next hit writings represent a
response to an anti-Semitic ideology widespread throughout Wn de sicle Europe within
which male Jews were coded as feminine, effeminate, or homosexual. previous hit Freud next
hit attempted to portray a masculinized Judaism, they suggest, in reaction against this
feminization of male Jewishness." (Diane Jonte-Pace - Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion,
Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts U of California Press, 2001)

"Michel Foucault has called Freud a "founder of discursivity," meaning by that someone
who has created a new way of speaking, "an endless possibility of discourse." Harold Bloom
asserts, "No twentieth-century writer, not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka, rivals Freud's
position as the central imagination of our age." Freud has fundamentally altered the way we
think. He has changed our intellectual manners, often without our even being aware of it.
For most of us Freud has become a habit of mind, a bad habit, his critics would be quick to
urge, but a habit now too deeply ingrained to be broken. He is the major source of our
modern inclination to look for meanings beneath the surface of behavior, to be always on the
alert for the "real" (and presumably hidden) significance of our actions. He also inspires
our belief that the mysteries of the present will become more transparent if we can trace
them to their origins in the past, perhaps even in the very earliest past we can remember
(or, more likely, not remember). And, finally, he has created our heightened sensitivity to
the erotic, above all to its presence in arenas, notably the family, where previous
generations had neglected to look for it. Exactly the Freud who has so invaded our minds is
dramatically absent in the writings of his recent detractors. With a poet's wisdom, W. H.
Auden more accurately captured Freud's historical stature in a poem commemorating his death
in September 1939:" (Robinson)  
     To us he is no more a person
     Now but a whole climate of opinion.
In spite of the growing body of criticism, the ideas of Sigmund
Freud still manage to live on and to influence us for his deep introspection and insightful
analysis into the depths of our psyche of what can only be called man's confusion about
his own mind.

Hank Roth
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