Advocacy and Ambition: A Dangerous Cocktail
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
CW: sexual abuse
Why would a man believe a survivor and then later change his mind and disbelieve the survivor? The story of Sigmund Freud’s early career illustrates one answer: there is a common temptation for those who perceive a dilemma between believing victims and maintaining their power.
If you tuned out as soon as I mentioned Freud, I understand. Why be interested in secular, atheistic Freud and his weird theories about sexuality? Keep reading and I trust you’ll see the relevance for the Thesis 96 part of this Substack, which, as a friendly reminder, focuses on apologetics for the abused: defending the faith by defending the sheep.
To Believe or Not Believe?
Diane Langberg often tells the story of her early years as a new therapist treating sexual abuse survivors. That subject wasn’t a part of her training, and so she turned to her supervisor for help:
“He [the supervisor] explained that women sometimes tell these hysterical stories. My job was to not be taken in and that I should not believe them. ‘Such women are looking for attention,’ he explained. ‘If you give it to them, you’ll only contribute to their pathology.’ As time passed, I began to hear other women tell stories of sexual abuse. I made a decision. I would listen to these women, rather than my supervisor.”
I have heard Dr. Langberg’s story many times, but only recently realized that her supervisor’s advice was standard policy going back to Sigmund Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement. However, Freud was initially like Langberg, inclined to believe his patients’ stories of sexual abuse. Unlike Langberg, unfortunately, he did not persist in that belief but instead chose to view his patients’ stories as made up fantasies. His job in treating them was to explain and resolve the underlying needs that led to these made-up stories.
This history is helpfully outlined in the first chapter of Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.1 I recently read a more detailed account from Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. As this piece grew, I decided to break it up into two parts. In this post, and a little in the next, I will explore Masson’s and Herman’s answers for why Freud did not persist in believing victims of sexual abuse. In the second post we will look at one of Freud’s disciples and close friends who made the opposite choice as Freud, deciding to believe victims, and the negative consequences he faced that Freud managed to avoid.
Hysteria: Fact or Fiction?
On April 21, 1896, at the age of 30 and early in his career as an ambitious neurologist, Freud presented a paper titled “The Aetiology2 of Hysteria.” He made what was a “dramatic claim” for that period:
“I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom [ie cause] of every case of hysteria3 there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili[source of the Nile] in neuropathology” (Quoted in Herman, 18).
Freud later repudiated that theory, gradually at first, and then emphatically. According to Masson,
“what Freud had uncovered in 1896—that, in many instances, children are the victims of sexual violence and abuse within their own families—became such a liability that he literally had to banish it form his consciousness.” (Masson, xx).
It is worth quoting Masson’s introduction at length:
“The prevalent opinion in psychotherapy was that the victim fashioned his or her own torture. In particular, violent sexual crimes could be attributed to the victim’s imagination, a position held by Freud’s pupil Karl Abraham and [later] enthusiastically accepted by Freud himself. It was a comforting view for society, for Freud’s interpretation—that the sexual violence that so affected the lives of his women patients was nothing but fantasy—posed no threat to the existing social order. Therapists could thus remain on the side of the successful and the powerful, rather than of the miserable victims of family violence” (xx-xxi, emphasis added).
Masson’s own claim, which amounted to siding with victims, cost him his job as the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, as well as his reputation among “the successful and the powerful” in the psychoanalytic community. But he did not make criticism against Freud lightly. His book Assault on Truth arose from meticulous research of Freud’s private letters which were intentionally omitted by those who published them, including Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter Anna Freud.
While we are implicitly asked to trust that historians such as Masson are objectively interpreting the data, it helps to see the data ourselves and double check their interpretation. So I will be including a number of quotes so we can hear Freud and his contemporaries in their own words, starting with Freud’s private communication to his closest confidant Wilhelm Fliess. These show Freud’s early conviction and then later ambivalence over the truthfulness of his patients’ alleged sexual abuse.
Just thirteen days after he delivered his Aetiology of Hysteria paper, Freud wrote this to Fleiss on May 4, 1896:
“I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me” (Masson, 10).
A few weeks after that, Freud published his paper and wrote this explanation to Fleiss:
“In defiance of my colleagues I have written down in full my lecture on the aetiology of hysteria” (11).
Part of this “defiance” was in the face of silence that followed Freud’s lecture. Where there would normally be mention and discussion in literary journals shortly after such a lecture, Freud’s lecture went comparatively ignored. Not criticized or disproved—which would have been more tolerable for a man of science—but ignored.
More than that, though, the defiance was necessary in view of the prevailing theory that accusations of sexual violence were typically false and fabricated. For example, Paul Garnier (1819-1901), chief physician of the Paris police hospital, wrote an article titled “Hysterical Women Who Accuse,” published posthumously in 1903. One case that Garnier presented involved
“a tall, elegant, beautiful woman of twenty-two, Camille, who was intelligent and articulate, but, alas, a hysteric. Her father, Garnier assures us, was “un homme fort honorable” [a very honorable man]. Thus when Camille accuses him of incest, ‘the enormity of the accusation destroys its probability’” (Masson, 49).
Another example: Claude Bourdin (1815-1886), commenting on the claim that hysterical women lie and accuse, stated, “It seems to me that all psychiatrists agree with this opinion” (49).
The Ideology of Doubt
Herman was right to describe Freud’s 1896 lecture as a “dramatic claim”, for he was going against the established view of the male-dominated elite among psychiatrists, physicians, and medical-legal pathologists. Herman explores these systemic/cultural dynamics in more detail in Trauma and Recovery. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was a French neurologist and a pioneering researcher into the nature and treatment of hysteria. While he and others may have had genuine interest in healing individuals (mostly women) who were typically seen as untreatable, there was more going on socially in 19th century France. In short, it was a new day: the Church was out, Science was in, and science had—or would discover in time—the answers for society’s ills. Herman’s explanation is very relevant to social factors affecting church-related abuse reforms, so I’m quoting her at length:
“While these men of science saw themselves as benevolent rescuers, uplifting women from their degraded condition, they never for a moment envisioned a condition of social equality between women and men. Women were to be the objects of study and humane care, not subjects in their own right. The same men who advocated an enlightened view of hysteria often strongly opposed the admission of women into higher education or the professions and adamantly opposed female suffrage” (Herman, 23).
Herman continues:
“By the turn of the century, the political impulse that had given birth to the heroic age of hysteria had dissipated; there was no longer any compelling reason to continue a line of investigation that had led men of science so far from where they originally intended to go. The study of hysteria had lured them into a netherworld of trance, emotionality, and sex. It had required them to listen to women far more than they had ever expected to listen, and to find out much more about women's lives than they had ever wanted to know. Certainly they had never intended to investigate sexual trauma in the lives of women. As long as the study of hysteria was part of an ideological crusade, discoveries in the field were widely applauded and scientific investigators were esteemed for their humanity and courage. But once this political impetus had faded, these same investigators found themselves compromised by the nature of their discoveries and by their close involvement with their women patients” (24).
It is in the face of all of these societal and ideological pressures that Freud’s defiant confidence failed. We will pick this up next time to discuss two of Freud’s closest friends and their opposite positions on Freud’s eventual decision to disbelieve victims. For now, consider Herman’s remarks on the complex situation for men who are positioned to advocate for women. From the male leader’s perspective, it’s often not just as simple as seeing a survivor in need and helping her. This advocacy can become part of “an ideological crusade.” That phrase will likely resonate for readers familiar with abuse reform efforts in the SBC, PCA and other denominations. With position comes power, and that power can be used to speak for those with less power and less voice. But to the degree such aid is tainted by ambition, a dilemma can be created: listen to women too much, descend too far into the land of untethered empathy, and you’re elite male friends will shun you.
Freud was afraid of that shunning happening to him. As will see next time, Freud himself ended up doing the shunning to others.
Until then, you can read about similar Thesis 96 themes in these posts: Ladies Lie, Speech Will be the Business of Men, and Grassroots Reformation vs Societal Denial.
1 That chapter alone, “A Forgotten History,” is worth the book, but I haven’t found it anywhere as a standalone article.
2 Aetiology, or etiology, means study of causation.
3 Today hysteria would fall under the category of traumatic stress and dissociative disorders. See this overview: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-hysteria-2795232.