Psychiatric Experiences on Reliving Trauma: Freud, Binion, and Jos. Smith

Applying Freudian Concepts of Traumatic Reliving in Practice

As a clinician and scholar of Joseph Smith, I have significantly gained from Freud’s ideas. Yet, I am a healer who questions the dogmas of both the Church of Latter-day Saints and orthodox Freudianism. My interest is in applying Freud’s ideas to human understanding, rather than how it fits an exercise of intellectual history.

Working in the psychiatric trenches for 46 years, I can say that I have lived through parts of what Rudolph Binion writes in “Traumatic Reliving with Freud.” In the beginning it was reading Freud and his colleagues during psychiatric residency, and later in studies at a psychoanalytic institute. The volume of material was unending and massive, written by intelligent and well-intentioned men (and a few women). A certain validity was supported by the sheer volume of writing, but in practice one looked for the underlying childhood conflicts that created most adult problems. There was a degree of certainty in the theory that made it seem like doctrine, and it was doctrine that I sought to get away from. Through the years, what I learned and experienced contradicted some psychoanalytic theories. I was told that prescribing anti-depressants would interfere with proper treatment, while a senior psychoanalyst described five years of treating a dentist in analysis resulting in “no effect at all.” Another psychoanalyst gave ten lectures on treating schizophrenia and a formulation of a patient’s illness by Kohut, whose use of Freud’s libidinal theory was so convoluted to be disingenuous.

Despite these concerns, my own prolonged analysis

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helped me understand the patterns of my own unconscious impulses: over time I learned to listen carefully to patients. During the time of the growing insurance and pharmacology industries (in the 1980s), I evaluated about 400 Vietnam veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder. Here, the issue was the traumatic experience, and the results of the single adult experience were devastating and sometimes suicidal. Looking for the required childhood precedents had little meaning. But even here, at least sometimes, the veterans’ background and earlier experiences seemed to play a part in the severity and persistence of the effect of a trauma. My training in psychoanalysis contributed to thoughts and ideas with patients that I would not have had otherwise.

Today, I spend one day a week in an inner-city mental hygiene clinic, prescribing overrated medications and doing one or two initial assessments. The criticism that Freud somehow diminished childhood sexual trauma by conflating it with fantasy has some validity. In this population, I deal with a majority of women who have experienced some type of sexual abuse, frequently in childhood, and sometimes severe and repetitive. It is the topic they do not wish to discuss (frequently saying they have never discussed it), and when I press for some specifics, they begin to disintegrate.

My work in the clinic is, as is typical for psychiatrists today, limited to evaluating patients and prescribing medication. But even if some aspects of psychoanalytic doctrine were overrated, so is the new “doctrine” of prescribing medicines. It is as if psychiatry has lost its soul through various pressures and gave it to psychologists and social workers. It has taken three generations to unravel the blind path of understanding trauma that Freud put us on and Binion so carefully elucidates.

If I was misguided and needed correction in the area of episodic traumatic reliving, I was also misguided in the

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area of pseudo-historical religion, and I needed to replace it with history, using the Freudian aim of uncovering its inner workings. Because of my religious background, I have a special interest in the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. In this case, understanding the effect of a childhood trauma on a historical figure has been critical.

Reflections on Joseph Smith’s Traumatic Reliving of a Childhood Operation

In the late 1820s, Joseph Smith, an unlettered 23-year-old farm boy, dictated to scribes the 588-page, 275,000-word Book of Mormon, reporting that an angel guided him. He used the improbable means of looking at a magical stone in a hat, with his face buried in the hat to exclude all light while he read off the translation he envisioned. The book he produced was a supernatural Christian history of the Americas before Columbus, mostly covering a thousand-year history from about 600 B.C.E. to 400 C.E. That book led to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, now with 13 million members (about half in the United States), which has more political power than anyone would have anticipated, including presidential aspirant Mitt Romney and converts Harry Reid and Glen Beck. It was a major force in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment (1982) and, recently, Proposition 8 in California. Today, that book continues as canonized scripture to the “LDS,” “Latter-day Saints,” or “Mormon” Church and is treated as a companion book of scripture to the Bible.

Skeptics did not believe he could have written it. For 50 years, the foremost explanation, which still has adherents, was that he had stolen the fantasy writings of a dead Protestant minister. Psychological theories have ascended in the last 60 years, proposing Smith’s own imaginative genius as the source. Rather than being a book of love, the Book of Mormon reveals a preoccupation with violence in the mind of its author; it is a book of delight in terror, hatred, and de-

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struction, filled with unending warfare and the destruction of whole civilizations in hand-to-hand combat. In it even Jesus had a destructive hand, for in the book, he destroyed 17 “great” and ordinary cities at the time of his crucifixion in Palestine, and documented his acts when he, as a resurrected person, visited the Americas for a few days. It is the first story in “the Book” that gives a beginning clue as to what was going on in Smith’s mind. Here, a heroic prophet takes a sword off of a dead-drunk, powerful, wealthy, thieving, would-be murderer, and decapitates him with it. He then disguises himself by wearing the clothes of the dead man. The sword, given a name and replicated in the book, becomes central to the first chapters in “the Book” and sword fighting continues throughout, with another detailed decapitation near its ending.

William Morain’s The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr., and the Dissociated Mind (1998) and my own work unite in concurring that the source of this violence was an illness and a childhood surgery Smith experienced when he was between five and seven. His poverty-stricken family was attacked by a typhoid epidemic, and the infection settled in little Joseph’s leg bones. He was doomed to die a prolonged and horrible death, perhaps by amputation, but was saved by a heroic surgeon who cut into his leg with his surgeon’s knife, bored into the bone, and chipped out segments so the infection could be released. The description of this surgery, given by his mother 35 years later, after his murder at the age of 39, is horrific.

We will never know if Joseph Smith qualified for the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder in childhood, for there was no diagnostic interview. I doubt he qualified for the diagnosis as an adult because he does not seem horrified by his imagery of mayhem but was actively elaborating it for his own developing power as he put on the guise of a prophet. The two parts of the childhood trauma that we can

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document into his adulthood were the relentless imagery of surgical horror and the search for power. He would never be helpless again. Where religion is involved, the correction of what Binion calls pseudo-history by real history is a slower process than is psychoanalysis.

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