He Said, #Me Said

Sigmund Freud is one of those intellectual mountains that have to be scaled before anyone can call themselves an educated person. He is also one of my heroes. Whatever has happened to his myriad "theories" - which are nothing but empirical postulations based on extensive and documented study - about human psychology in the eighty years since his death, psychoanalysis is an important and legitimate field of scientific research largely thanks to Freud. Of course, it was not as Science that Freud's writings first attracted my interest almost 40 years ago. My mother had been the beneficiary of several years of psychoanalytic treatment, for reasons that are related to the point I wish to make.

In his great book, The Tangled Bank, Stanley Edgar Hyman examined four men, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, and their achievements as imaginative thinkers, as creative artists whose great leaps in the dark contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and our history. Whatever their specific scholarly and scientific contributions to their various fields, they were brilliant writers - managing to communicate in clear German and English prose the most complex concepts and ideas.

One of the hallmarks of a genius is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake and to at least attempt to correct it. One of the first theories put forward by Freud was based on the analysis of dozens of subjects, women suffering from some form of neurosis (or "hysteria" as it was called at the time). Freud discovered that one of the consistencies between almost every individual case was the sexual abuse of the women at an early age by a male family member, usually the father. The abuse was suppressed by the child, made into a great lifelong secret until the effects of its suppression, a traumatic childhood event, resurfaced in the form of neurotic mental problems in later life.

Freud called his theory, "The Seduction Theory" and his research into the subject was published in 1896. Not long after he posited this theory, however, Freud decided to amend it. He decided that the claims of sexual abuse made by many of his female patients were actually admissions of sexual fantasy: that the women had childhood fantasies of a sexual nature that they later regarded as inappropriate, suppressed them, and that, when the women reached maturity, these fantasies resurfaced as remembered events in their childhood.

Freud's alteration of his original theory has been interpreted by some scholars and psychologists as an act of moral and intellectual cowardice. They argue that Freud knew that his Seduction Theory would cause enormous controversy in genteel European society, especially among men who were fathers of daughters. They argue that, faced with an awareness of the controversy that his feminine neurosis theory might bring about, Freud decided to backtrack and redefine the basis of his theory.

The change in Freud's theory was tied to his broader "Oedipal Theory" that applied to both women and men. Children engage in sexual fantasies that involve the adults in proximity to them. With boys, it is the mother who invariably becomes their first object of sexual desire, and it affects their whole sexual lives. One-third of the subjects in his initial Seduction Theory study were men. But Freud then argued that it was the mother, not the father, who was the seducer, in fact or in fantasy, for both infant boys and girls. The simple fact that his theory was named for the character from classical Greek drama reveals the extent to which Freud's theories were embraced as confirmation of existing poetic concepts. Artists - poets, playwrights and novelists, painters, sculptors and architects, even composers - found their oldest understanding of human behavior reinforced by Freud's rich metaphors and symbolism.

With the establishment of women's rights and the rise of Feminism, however, the most serious challenges of Freud's theories have come to the forefront. And his alteration of the Seduction Theory, and its underlying motivation, has come under serious scrutiny. Some now see Freud's suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by the father as simply his reluctance to challenge the patriarchal structure of turn-of-the-century European society. His theories that sexuality and sexual desire (the "libido") were at the root of nearly all human behavior had been controversial enough. Now that his theories were becoming established as scientific fact, he didn't want to further threaten the status quo. So he came up with a different interpretation of the cause of adult neurosis.

Whatever the true reason for the change of Freud's theory, accusations of sexual abuse are by now taken much more seriously. The #MeToo movement has effectively ended the careers of powerful men - from A-List actors to Hollywood Mogul producers to senators - based on accusations alone, on what "She said." Some of the critics of the movement, forgetting about the impact of this Moment in our sexual history, wonder why the accusers waited so long to bring their charges forward, citing the legal statute of limitations. The statute exists because eyewitness testimony is fraught with errors even when it is fresh in the memory. Over time, especially over several years, such testimony is subject to further errors from the interplay of memory and experience.

Yesterday a woman who has brought charges of sexual assault against a nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court asked that before she subjects herself to a public hearing in which the accused will be present, the FBI should investigate her claims. Not to corroborate her story but to establish her veracity. According to the protocols of the #MeToo movement, the nomination should be withdrawn and another candidate selected. If the career of Minnesota senator Al Franken could have been ended by accusations of misconduct alone, then why is this Supreme Court nominee still under serious consideration? Of course the process has become "politicized" - it was politicized from the beginning. Everything is politicized now. Justice Kavanaugh's nomination is toast. Stick a fork in it.

[Postscript September 21, 2018.

Since making the above post I have heard two arguments in support of Justice Kavanaugh. The first came from a group of "Republican women" who were careful not to denigrate the woman making the accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh, but attacked "the Democrats" for waiting until the eleventh hour to produce her letter. Then they said that every man shouldn't be held responsible for acts they committed when they were 17, inferring that attempted rape is an act that all men commit at that age.

The second argument was that simply giving Kavanaugh's accuser a hearing will encourage other women to come forward with similar accusations every time a man is nominated or runs for public office, inferring that the accuser is an opportunistic liar

My answer to both of these arguments is NOMINATE/VOTE FOR WOMEN ONLY. They can be trusted because they don't have penises.]