Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [114]
But these works dealt with adult sexuality; children were thought to be innocent, pure, and untouched by sexual desires or experiences. Freud, however, had repeatedly heard patients recall, after much effort, that they had had sexual feelings in childhood and, astonishingly, that they had been sexually molested by adults, their experiences having ranged from being fondled to being raped. Hysteria was one outcome; obsessional neuroses, phobias, and paranoia were others. The guilty adults were nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants, teachers, older brothers—and, most shockingly, in the case of female patients, fathers.25
Freud was amazed, and thought he had made a major discovery. By 1896, after half a dozen years of hypnotherapeutic and analytic experience, he announced his so-called seduction theory in a published paper and in a lecture before the local Society for Psychiatry and Neurology presided over by the great Krafft-Ebing.26 The lecture was received icily, and Krafft-Ebing told him, “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.”27 In the weeks and months after the lecture Freud felt shunned by the medical community and totally isolated, and referrals of patients fell off alarmingly. But although he clung to his belief in his discovery for a while, eventually he too reluctantly began to doubt its validity.
For one thing, he was having only partial success treating patients who had unearthed recollections of molestation; some, in fact, who he thought were doing best, broke off treatment before being cured. For another, he was finding it ever harder to believe that perverse acts by fathers against their daughters were so widespread. Since there was no unarguable indication of reality in the unconscious, these recollections of seduction might actually be fictitious.28 This was a depressing thought; what he had considered a major discovery and “the solution of a thousands-[of-]years-old problem” might be an error.
Although he had recently been able to move his growing family to a spacious apartment at Berggasse 19 and was doing well enough to indulge in his keenest pleasure, an annual trip to Italy, he had many other reasons for being depressed and anxious. His father’s death, in October 1896, had affected Freud far more deeply than he had anticipated (he felt “torn up by the roots”); his long friendship with Breuer, who had been so helpful to him but who would not accept his increasingly radical ideas about neurosis and therapy, was disintegrating; and although he had held the unpaid but prestigious position of Privatdozent (lecturer) in neuropathology at the university for nearly a dozen years, he still had not been appointed a professor, a far more prestigious status that would have aided his career. For all these reasons, Freud’s neurotic symptoms became exacerbated, particularly his worries about money, fears of heart disease, obsession with thoughts of death, and a travel phobia that made it impossible for him to visit Rome, which he desperately wanted to do but the thought of which filled him with inexplicable fear.
In the summer of 1897 the forty-one-year-old Freud began to psychoanalyze himself in an effort to understand and combat his own neurosis.29 To a degree, he had already been doing this by analyzing some of his dreams, but now he subjected himself daily to his own scrutiny in a rigorous, systematic fashion. Descartes, Kant, and James—even, perhaps, Socrates—had examined their conscious minds, but only Freud sought to unlock the secrets of his unconscious mind.
Self-analysis may seem a contradiction in terms. How can one be guide and guided, analyst and analysand, at the same time? How can one be the patient and also the therapist onto whom the patient transfers feelings that he then analyzes? But no one else was trained or able to serve as Freud’s analyst, and