The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Such procedures seem to be far away from the spontaneous volunteering of traumatic recollections. The available evidence indicates that Freud’s patients did not have such ‘memories’ before they had been reconstructed (or constructed) on the basis of indices, conjectures and interpretations, and they were often not convinced of the reality of such events. As Freud had to recognise later, he had communicated to them the content of the traumatic scene (in other words, his hypothesis and construction).

  Freud: It is true that in the earliest days of analytic technique we took an intellectualist view of the situation. We set a high value on the patient’s knowledge of what he had forgotten, and in this we made hardly any distinction between our knowledge of it and his. We thought it a special piece of good luck if we were able to obtain information about the forgotten childhood trauma from other sources – for instance, from parents or nurses or the seducer himself – as in some cases it was possible to do; and we hastened to convey the information and the proofs of its correctness to the patient, in the certain expectation of thus bringing the neurosis and the treatment to a rapid end. It was a severe disappointment when the expected success was not forthcoming . . . Indeed, telling and describing his repressed trauma to him did not even result in any recollection of it coming into his mind.117

  Even when some patients came to visualise or to ‘reproduce’ fragments of such scenes under Freud’s pressure, they refused to regard them as true memories. Freud’s colleague Leopold Löwenfeld saw this sentiment of irreality as the proof that these were false memories, suggested by Freud himself. As was well known, the Nancy school had experimented widely with the implantation of false memories under hypnosis.

  Freud: While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes.118

  Leopold Löwenfeld: These remarks [by Freud] show two things: 1. The patients were subjected to a suggestive influence coming from the person who analyzed them, by which the rise of the mentioned scenes was brought quite close to their imagination. 2. These fantasy pictures that had arisen under the influence of the analysis were definitively denied recognition as memories of real events. I also have a direct experience to support this second conclusion. By chance, one of the patients on whom Freud used the analytic method came under my observation. The patient told me with certainty that the infantile sexual scene which analysis had apparently uncovered was pure fantasy and had never really happened to him.119

  Why did Freud feel the need to rewrite history so as to imply that his patients had spontaneously volunteered their memories? Paradoxically, the fact that they didn’t recall the events in question would have fitted in better with his subsequent theory of repression. But not to have done so would have laid himself completely open to the charge of suggestion. To concede this here would be to raise the question whether the same was not true of his later theories of neurosis, obtained through the same ‘analytic’ method? Hence it was critical for Freud to conceal the fact that it was he who had speculated, imagined these scenes of sodomy,120 sadism, fetishism,121 analingus122 and fellatio, and taken them to be real, under the influence of his theoretical presuppositions of the moment.

  Freud to Fliess, 3 January 1897: The agreement [of my material] with the perversions described by Krafft[-Ebing]123 is a new, valuable proof of reality.124

  At the same time, through transforming his own hypotheses and conjectures into the ‘communications’ of his patients, Freud was able to wash his hands of this whole affair, as the onus of responsibility lay with his patients. His error had simply been one of having trusted their bona fides too much and hence having allowed himself to have been led astray by them. It also enabled him to give body and reality to his speculations, despite their erroneous character. With the seduction theory, Freud had put his scientific reputation on the line, and had failed. However, by converting his mistaken theories into communications received from his patients, he was able to use his new interpretive strategies upon what he now claimed that they had said to him. Rather than being explained as a technical failure due to the unwitting suggestive implantation of false memories, psychoanalytic theory could explain what had really occurred, and what lay behind his patients’ alleged communications. Better yet, Freud could now claim having observed something rather than nothing, even if it was only with hindsight that he realised its true significance. In effect, Freud had hypostatised and substantivised his own interpretations.

  Freud: By means of analysis, as you know, starting from the symptoms, we arrive at a knowledge of the infantile experiences to which the libido is fixated and out of which the symptoms are made. Well, the surprise lies in the fact that these scenes from infancy are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the historical truth. As you will see, this discovery is calculated more than any other to discredit either analysis, which has led to this result, or the patients, on whose statements the analysis and our whole understanding of the neuroses are founded . . . We are tempted to feel offended at the patient’s having taken up our time with invented stories . . . It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantasies for himself, and this fact is of scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had really experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess psychical as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.125

  Freud: Whence comes the need for these phantasies and the material for them? There can be no doubt that their sources lie in the instincts; but it has still to be explained why the same phantasies with the same content are created on every occasion . . . I believe these primal phantasies, as I should like to call them, and no doubt a few others as well, are a phylogenetic endowment . . . It seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy – the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather castration itself) – were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.126

  One sees here how Freud’s rewriting of history subtly objectivised what at the outset was only a set of highly speculative hypotheses, which in his own view were ultimately false. What he called his hunches ‘in neuroticis’127 became ‘scenes’ reported by his patients, then fantasies expressing their unconscious desires, and finally, through efficient recyling, products of phylogenetic inheritance and prehistoric reality. What this sequence neatly passes over is the status of the unconscious fantasies which Freud claimed to be behind the scenes of seduction which his patients confided in him. If such spontaneous recollections appear not to have taken place, what then of the unconscious fantasies they supposedly expressed? Do they not have a similarly questionable status? What fantasies did his patients actually have? Were the forced recollections which he subsequently claimed had been their unconscious fantasies simply responses to his investigative technique and conjectures? Without further historical records, such questions are difficult to resolve. However, what Freud’s narrative strategies achieved is clear: the supposition of spontaneous narration of events presented as memories which then came to be seen as fantasies lent credence to the notion of the existence of unconscious fantasies fuelled by infantile wishes. Far from having been based on the observation of facts which were correctly interpreted after a period of erring, the psychoanalytic theory of fantasy is an interpretation of interpretations, resting on Freud’s suppositions. The fact that it
has taken so long for this to be seen is testament to the rhetorical effectiveness of Freud’s rescripting of history.

  Should we then reduce the Freudian interprefaction of fantasies to a deception, to an effect of pure rhetoric? This is the perspective of a number of ‘revisionist’ scholars, such as Frank Cioffi, Han Israëls, Allen Esterson and Frederick Crews, for whom the account of the discovery of unconscious fantasies is a historical mystification which rests on nothing. From this perspective, the Freudian legend took hold because of our belief128 in the unconscious, which itself was a ruse of the great sophist. Hence the task of the historian should be one of unmasking the vacuity of Freud’s accounts, and with this of psychoanalysis itself. However, such a perspective, whilst unmasking Freud’s theories, still partakes of a similar positivism.

  Indeed, in many respects, historical demystification has been unable to undo the effects of legendary interprefaction. In recent years, we have seen that despite an increasing number of works of historical criticism, in psychoanalysis it is often ‘business as usual’. Individuals continue to confess their fantasies, to rescript their lives in terms of Oedipal conflicts, or to recover repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse, and practitioners continue to conduct their trade in good faith. Is this simply due to human, all too human credulity (‘mundus vultus decepit’)? Or because psychoanalysts have maintained a still powerful authoritative position in the media, health services and human sciences? Such a perspective would be too simple, and would also fail to account for the success of other psychological theories and other psychotherapeutic systems which have also flourished. In our view, it is important to grasp the productive nature of interprefaction, and the manner in which it has fashioned new forms of self-experience while giving rise to new realities or optional ontologies.

  G. K. Chesterton: Psychoanalysis can no longer be dismissed as a fad; it has risen to the dignity of a fashion, and possesses all that moral authority and intellectual finality which we associate with a particular pattern of hats or whiskers . . . But in any case, a theory is only a thought, while a fashion is a fact. If certain things have really taken hold of the centres of civilization, they play quite as much a part in history whether their ultimate origin is a misapprehension or not.129

  This returns us to the two ways of comprehending interprefaction. Revisionist historians have had good grounds for stressing the fabricated character of the so-called psychoanalytic ‘evidence’, but some have too quickly ended here, as if it were simply a question of denouncing an illusion. What is critical to grasp is that interprefaction does something to people. Individuals respond to the interpretations of their analysts and suggestive effects of cultural milieux, and many have rescripted their lives on this basis. As a result, new realities have been fashioned. In other words, there is a becoming-fact of fiction or legend becoming a fact, which escapes the simple opposition of true or false, of the given or constructed, of the real and illusory.

  To return to the scenes of seduction, it is evident from Freud’s own accounts that his patients did not initially have any recollections. However, this does not exclude the fact that they may have accepted the possibility of entertaining them and followed Freud in his hypotheses. It is otherwise hard to grasp why they would have continued treatment with him (some among them, like Emma Eckstein, Elise Gomperz and Oscar Fellner,130 had been long-term patients, and had valiantly followed Freud through a number of theoretical turns). From this perspective, one need not evoke transference or suggestibility or the credulity of patients towards Freud for having taken up the constructs he proposed. They played the therapeutic game which he proposed, just as experimental psychology subjects or participants of seances have done in their respective settings. It is likely that the more they joined in the game, the more it became serious, and the more it took on shape and reality. Suddenly, the past was no longer the same; innocent memories of childhood were transformed into ‘screen-memories’ for more embarrassing or sinister events. Dreams could become confirmations of new realities, and symptoms could take on new significations. Patients themselves could take on the task of reinterpreting their lives through a previously unremembered traumatic event which seemed to offer the hope of explanation and liberation. Hence it is not surprising that scenes of seduction would emerge, just as Freud predicted.

  In 1925, in his ‘autobiographical study’, Freud wrote that ‘under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by some grown-up person’.131 There is no reason to doubt this, though it is important to emphasise that these recollections do not appear to have been spontaneous recollections, but rather small psychodramas which mimed Freud’s intentions. As Jean Schimek has noted,132 the technical procedure which Freud used at that time (the ‘pressure method’, consisting in pressing the forehead of patients and asking them to evoke an image or idea) was not greatly different from the hypno-cathartic method described in Studies on Hysteria, in that the objective continued to be one of provoking the re-emergence or an intense visualisation (a hallucination) of the traumatic event. Since Freud recounts that he had to retrieve the memory ‘piece by piece’, it is clear that such reproductions were fragmentary, or at least were so initially. But judging from his letters to Fliess, it also seems that some patients ended by offering Freud almost complete scenes, exactly conforming to his expectant attention.

  Freud to Fliess, 24 January 1897: Thus I was able to trace back, with certainty, a hysteria that developed in the context of a periodic mild depression to a seduction, which occurred for the first time at 11 months and [I could] hear again the words that were exchanged between two adults at that time! It is as though it comes from a phonograph.133

  Freud to Fliess, 22 December 1897: The intrinsic authenticity of infantile trauma134 is borne out by the following little incident which the patient claims to have observed as a three-year-old child. She goes into a dark room where her mother is carrying on and eavesdrops. She has good reasons for identifying herself with this mother. The father belongs to the category of men who stab women, for whom bloody injuries are an erotic need . . . The mother now stands in the room and shouts: ‘Rotten criminal, what do you want from me? I will have no part of that. Just whom do you think you have in front of you?’ Then she tears the clothes from her body with one hand, while with the other hand she presses them against it, which creates a very peculiar impression. Then she stares at a certain point in the room, her face contorted by rage, covers her genitals with one hand and pushes something away with the other. Then she raises both hands, claws at the air and bites it. Shouting and cursing, she bends over far backward, again covers her genitals with her hand, whereupon she falls over forward, so that her head almost touches the floor; finally, she quietly falls over backward onto the floor. Afterwards she wrings her hands, sits down in a corner, and with her features distorted with pain she weeps.135

  One may ask whether the patients themselves believed in the scenes which they reproduced so impressively? From the moment when patients no longer considered their memories as real, it is possible that they may have viewed them as simulations or role plays: ‘as if’ enactments to test Freud’s hypotheses. This would not have stopped them from having simulated these scenes with conviction, and consequently they would have been convincing enough for Freud to take them as confirming his hypotheses. Freud would have been presented with the scenes which he predicted unfolding before him with a hallucinatory exactitude, presenting what appeared to be total confirmation of his theories. It is not surprising that there would have been a temptation for him to continue to press his point and induce his patients to produce more proof.

  In the end, it is undeniable that Freud truly ‘observed’ something, and that his patients sometimes presented scenes of seduction.136 In this regard, it is impossible to reduce his later accounts to a lie, as some have argued: he did indeed sometimes hear from his patients what h
e claimed to have heard. The problem is that we are not informed as to when he heard such statements. It rather appears that they retrospectively confirmed his theoretical hypotheses, only after after he had suggested the latter by insistent questions, encouragements, admonishments and the reframing of reality.137 In presenting the scenes enacted by his patients as spontaneous confessions, the legendary narrative short-circuits the time which was necessary to obtain them. It makes one forget how they became real, the process of their production. These scenes were not waiting to be uncovered by Freud: they were produced, co-produced through a negotiation between the doctor and his patients, between the theory and those who were supposed to ratify it, to make it real. The Freudian legend obliterates this consensual fabrication of reality in favour of indisputable ‘facts’, ‘givens’ and ‘observations’. By contrast, it appears that what were in play here were realities which were negotiated and subject to revision at each moment.

  One sees here how a technical reading of the process of interprefaction, attentive to the procedures through which psychic reality was produced, is quite distinct from a purely critical reading, attempting to arrange everything under the columns of true or false, fact or artefact. Whilst it appears that the scenes and the phantasms invoked by the Freudian legend were initially fictions, they became real for the patients once they accepted them. The patients reproduced traumatic ‘reminiscences’ between 1889 and 1895, then scenes of infantile sexual abuse between 1896 and 1897, and then they stopped, once Freud asked them instead to produce Oedipal fantasies or memories of ‘primal scenes’. Each time, a new reality was produced, with its own rules and characteristics. Had other hypotheses and theoretical demands been given, other psychological realities and therapeutic worlds may have resulted – which was exactly what took place at the turn of the century in the myriad other schools. Like many other psychotherapies and psychologies, psychoanalysis was an ontology-making practice, which recreated the world in its image.