Questions about Freud Prompted by Binion

Drawing on his extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis and his long-standing interest in trauma, Rudolph Binion provides a trenchant explication of Sigmund Freud’s approach to trauma. Binion artfully points out the inconsistencies and shortcomings of Freud’s approach, and I have no substantial differences with him.

In looking at the development of Freud’s ideas, Binion asks or implies several questions. Why is it that Freud’s generalizations at times seem to be not “fact but theory-driven?” In other words, Freud seems to come to conclusions that do not appear to be supported by his observations. What is the meaning of Freud making it a “requirement” that “every neurosis” has “an infantile original?” Why was it that Freud made an “about face on child abuse in childhood?” Freud scrapped his claim that neuroses were the result of childhood sexual abuse and replaced it with what he called his “neurotica,” his theory of neurosis that Binion does not describe in this article. In my view, a brief analysis of Freud’s theory of neurosis, and of the process by which he developed the theory, suggests answers to these questions.

Freud’s theory rests on two concepts, the Oedipus complex and compromise formation. One cannot overstate the importance that he gave to the Oedipus complex. He referred to it as the “nuclear complex,” with the meaning that he saw it as being at the heart of all, or virtually all, neuroses. The second concept is that of “compromise formation;” he saw a neurosis as being the result of an unconscious conflict: a wish or desire comes into conflict with an inhibiting factor.

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By way of illustration, I turn to Freud’s case of a 53-year-old woman whom he saw as “suffering from delusional jealousy.” According to Freud’s analysis, which I do not necessarily accept but will not dispute here, the woman was tortured by her belief that her husband was cheating on her. The belief was a neurosis because it was not grounded in reality. She was convinced intellectually that her husband was faithful to her, and all the evidence demonstrated that her belief in his cheating was wrong. Her neurosis, the false belief, is a compromise formation. According to Freud’s analysis, her unconscious desire is her illicit sexual desire toward her son-in-law. This desire comes up against the inhibiting factor, her view of it as wrong. Such a desire would be “monstrous” to her. Not only would she consider it unacceptable to cheat on her husband with another man, but an affair with this man, her daughter’s husband, would be incestuous. Therefore she displaces the desire onto her husband. It was not she but her husband who was guilty of unfaithfulness. “Her illicit desire’s ‘mirror-reflection,’ which brought her such an advantage, now became conscious as an obsession and delusion,” Freud notes. She gained relief from her unacceptable wish by way of her delusional jealousy (Freud, 1917, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” Standard Edition, XVI, pp. 248-253).

While Freud did not explicitly bring up the Oedipus complex in this brief case discussion, its role is obvious. He would have viewed the woman’s illicit, and incestuous, desire for her son-in-law as having been grounded in her illicit, and incestuous, desire for her father in childhood. Her wish for her father fueled her wish for her son-in-law. Freud would have considered her neurosis as being grounded in her Oedipus complex.

It is especially fit here in Clio’s Psyche, which features psychohistory, to consider the personal side of Freud’s development of his theories. As Freud professed that the

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Oedipus complex is universal—that everyone is gripped by it—we can be sure he believed that he himself had this complex. When he was just discovering the existence of the complex, he was carrying on a self-analysis. He wrote in a letter to his close friend, Wilhelm Fliess, “I have found, in my own case too, being in love with my mother and jealousy of my father.”

Similarly, there was a personal factor in Freud abandoning his view that all neuroses stemmed from sexual abuse. In specifying his reasons for changing his mind, he noted in a letter to Fliess that such a view required “that in all case the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.” He doubted that his own father could have been a child abuser. Another passage suggests that he may have had his two sisters and his brother in mind, all of whom had neuroses, but he probably also was thinking of himself; he was aware of his own neurotic symptoms, and he was coming to see his Oedipus complex as the childhood forerunner of his symptoms, not an experience of being molested in childhood.

Now it is possible to return to the questions raised by Binion’s article. Why is it that Freud’s generalizations at times seem to be not “fact but theory-driven?” My answer is that his generalizations, in the final analysis, were based on himself. Because it seemed so true in his own experience that neurotic symptoms were compromise formations and derived from a childhood complex, he became convinced that the same thing was true for everyone with neurotic symptoms, and hence he was quick to see these conclusions as applying to his patients even when he did not have ample evidence.

What is the meaning of Freud making it a “requirement” that “every neurosis” has “an infantile original?” Freud is saying simply that a neurosis is grounded in a

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childhood difficulty, almost always the Oedipus complex.

Why was it that Freud made an “about face on child abuse in childhood?” Freud certainly would have accepted that sexual abuse is harmful to children; it’s just that, in his view, it did not cause neurosis. Neurosis is something specific; it is characterized by a symptom, such as irrational jealousy or a phobia, which does not seem to make sense because it stems from events that are going on unconsciously. Freud simply did not pay attention to child abuse, because he became focused on neuroses, and he believed that neuroses always fit his formula of the compromise formation. A key part of the compromise formation is the illicit desire, which is grounded in the ur-illicit desire of childhood, desire for the parent of the opposite sex. The pathogenic factor was the child’s, and later the adult’s, illicit desire. Whether or not sexual abuse occurred—and Freud well knew that it occurred at times—and whatever negative effects it might have, it did not form the precursor of neurosis. Freud was developing something specific, a theory of neurosis, not a comprehensive theory of all forms of psychological disturbance.

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