TRANSCRIPT
I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine who is undergoing psychoanalytic training. That is, he’s training to become a psychoanalyst. He was telling me how impressed he is with some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When I heard this, I pulled back a little bit because I tend to have mixed or kind of negative feelings about Freud.
Interestingly, the day before my conversation with my friend, I had been reading an Alice Miller book, The Body Never Lies, and in her chapter on Virginia Woolf, she talks about Freud. Also, the story of Virginia Woolf is that when she was a child, she was sexually abused on a long-term basis by two of her older half-brothers. She tried to come to terms with this throughout her life, and it was extremely painful and extremely difficult.
Part of what happened that made it even more difficult for her to come to terms with it is she took Freud to be an authority on these subjects. What she read in Freud was his Oedipus complex, his drive theory, and what she found there is his idea that people who feel they’ve been sexually abused as children are actually just fantasizing it. That this is actually their wish for what they wanted to have happened.
So when Virginia Woolf read this, it totally messed her up even more than she was already messed up and made it very, very hard for her to believe herself, to believe that what actually had happened, that what she remembered happened, actually did happen. According to Alice Miller, this was one of the contributing factors that led Virginia Woolf to kill herself. It kind of makes sense because it’s like she lost hope. It was terrible for her.
Well, the story with this, with Freud, is pretty well known. Actually, in 1896, when he first started writing about sexual abuse, he wrote about what he heard repeatedly from lots of patients of his, and mostly women, that they had been sexually abused by their fathers when they were kids. These were women who had what was so-called “hysteria.” They’ve had all sorts of body problems, parts of their body were basically paralyzed for unknown reasons. What he found by digging into it, by listening to them, was yeah, they had been sexually abused, often pretty brutally, as children, and there was no acknowledgment of that in their families. They had nobody they could talk about it with, so they split it off.
Freud wrote about it, and it caused a lot of uproar. Well, within a year, by 1897, he took back the idea. He said, “No, no, no, actually I was wrong. That isn’t what happened to these women.” And guys, to what he said was actually… well, later he came out with the theories of the drive theory, the Oedipus complex. This is what they actually fantasized had happened. So he totally sold them out. He threw them under the bus.
Part of what it was is it was just completely overwhelming for him to consider the possibility of what this was. He even wrote about this to a friend. He said that actually what this says is that a huge number of these men, these fathers in society, are totally perverse. He even said, “My own father would have been accused of this if this is true.” He just couldn’t handle it. So it sounds like emotionally and societally, it was just way too overwhelming for him to consider the actual reality of his observations, so he took it back.
So me, I have just felt very mixed about him. So when my friend, who’s in psychoanalytic training, told me that he’s actually really impressed by ideas that Freud had, I was like, you know, I actually just want to listen. I want to see what arguments he has because what did this guy say that was any good? I haven’t really been able to get much good out of him.
So what my friend told me, he said the first thing he says is just some of Freud’s categorizations of people were brilliant, better than so much of what’s out there today. Again, I was like, okay, let me hear what you have to say. He said, well, take his idea first on hysteria. He said it was so advanced at the time, the idea that people could take unresolved memories, unresolved traumas, and just put them in the part of their body, in a wrong place in their body. Like first they put it in their arm or put it in their leg and just put the memory there and physically act it out. He said nobody thought of that before Freud, and it’s like it was revolutionary.
And then I thought, you know, actually considering the number of people I know who do that, who are talking about that, who struggled to come to grips with things like this, it actually still is revolutionary. No, I don’t like the name hysteria, but that’s just a word, a label that gets pinned onto it. It’s like you could call it now more realistically summarization or something like that. But the idea that it came from Freud, it’s like, well, he’s the first one to think of it, and it really is a revolutionary concept in thinking about human suffering.
So I was like, okay, I’m gonna concede that point. If he really was the first to think about it, that’s actually very brilliant and original. So that was one. I was like, other others? ‘Cause yeah, try his idea on narcissism. I was like, okay. He goes, listen to what Freud said. When he was coming up with his ideas on narcissism, he talked about a certain type of people who really couldn’t love anybody. They only couldn’t look at other people as people who could meet their needs, and they only seemingly gave love to people when those other people met their needs. So basically, they looked at other people as extensions of them.
So my friend said this, and I thought, hmm, that’s still actually a revolutionary concept for a lot of people to consider. This is stuff that’s like cutting edge for a lot of people. And then I said to my friend, actually, so basically Freud came up with the idea of boundaries. And my friend’s like, exactly, that’s what it is. When people don’t have a clear idea of where they end and where other people begin, when they see other people as extensions of them, they have really poor boundaries.
And when people work this out and they’re able to see other people as individual entities and themselves as individual entities, when they can actually love people for who they are, not what other people are going to do for them, they have boundaries. They have that distinction between themselves and others. And my friend said, yeah, exactly. And this is an idea that originally came from Freud. Nobody thought of this beforehand. And I thought, you know, I got to give him credit, gotta tip my hat to him.
So even if he did change his ideas and he sold things out, you know, he sold out sexual abuse survivors, he actually did originally come up with some ideas that were quite new.