The Internal and External in Freud

For those of us drawn to Freud, it is often more to certain sides of his work than others. Given Rudolph Binion’s focus on episodic traumatic reliving, it is not surprising that he would examine the fluctuations in Freud’s theories of trauma. In 1896, the then 40-year-old physician had proclaimed that the aetiologyof neurosis, as Binion says, was caused by “early sexual abuse by elders.” The very next year, Freud altered his theory of the origin of neurosis by saying it was caused more by the child’s fantasies than reality. Binion claims that Freud’s partial reversal was made “for reasons theoretical rather than empirical.” From then on, Freud was tied to his belief in unconscious fantasy and the infantile sexual origin of neurosis. The results of these psychoanalytic convictions, to Binion, were that Freud’s ability to under-

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stand traumatic reliving was curtailed. In psychohistory, when the evidence warrants, it is not only ideas that are analyzed, but their relationship to the individual’s mental and emotional life. To supplement what Binion asserts, I will show that the ideological reasons for Freud’s abandonment of the trauma theory were deeply personal, how they manifested themselves in keeping external causes for neurosis at bay, and that Freud did not quite convince himself of his own ideas.

The place to begin is in an ambiguity in the word “elders,” which Binion uses in identifying the agents of abuse. Elders can mean anyone older or it can mean someone significantly senior or higher in rank. In his 1896 articles on hysteria, Freud said that most of the sexual abusing of girls was committed by “a boy a little older (most often her brother)” (S. E., Vol. III, p. 152). Technically, these young males are elders, but they are not the adults Freud would next accuse. In February 1897, just four months after his father died, in letters but not in publications, Freud identified fathers as those who committed sexual abuse. This included his own father, Jacob, of whom the son wrote, “was one of those perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother…and those of several younger sisters” (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, 1985, pp. 230-231).

These accusations set off an internal crisis of filial loyalty and rebellion in Freud that contributed to both his abandonment of the trauma theory and the development of more purely psychoanalytic notions. Adding to this mix was Freud’s dream of having “over affectionate feelings for” his daughter, “Mathilde” (Freud-Fliess, p. 249). In a September 1897 letter, when Sigmund announced he no longer believed his seduction theory, he excused fathers, including his own, from being at fault. Freud was caught in a blame and exoneration game, and kept vacillating between who was the

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agent and who the victim; he had trouble finding a middle ground. Since, to Freud, widespread perversion by fathers “against children are not very probable,” they could not generally be the perpetrators. He then attributed neurosis to “the unconscious…sexual fantasy” of children (Freud-Fliess, p. 264). In this way, the 41-year-old son and father of three daughters was letting his and other fathers, including himself, off the hook.

Freud did not yet fully believe his own claims. At the time of these renunciations and discoveries, he was in the midst of a self-analysis to uncover the roots of his “little hysteria” (Freud-Fliess, p. 261). Even though Freud had supposedly jettisoned the seduction theory, he was still searching for someone who abused him. Freud soon found a new “prime originator” of his case, his nanny, who taught him about sex. To him, this proves “that the old man plays no active part in my case” (Freud-Fliess, p. 268). Less than two weeks later, he formulated the Oedipus complex and now for all of humanity, including him, neurosis originates in the desire for the mother and jealousy of the father (Freud-Fliess, p. 272). The shift has been made; sexual trauma is not the primary cause of emotional disturbances, but neurosis is generated from the desires and fantasies of the child. Whatever hostile or perverse actions may motivate a parent are not given equal weight with the internal drives of the child. An interactive conception of how psychological problems are generated is not central to his theories.

On one hand, it is easy to see that Freud’s personal anxieties helped stimulate the development of some quite innovative ideas. On the other hand, Freud never fully convinced himself that neurosis primarily begins from within. At times, he would seem to leave the door wide open for the importance of what he called accidental experience; at other times, he would close the door, and then he could also develop new theories that expanded his horizons.

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Particularly, the universal, positive Oedipus complex involves love for the mother and jealousy of the father. What happens if the home consists exclusively of only one parent and one child, and there are no parental substitutes available? He writes, “primal phantasies…are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the individual reaches beyond his own experience into primeval experience” (S. E., Vol. XVI, p. 371). Freud adds, “Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodeled in the imagination” (S. E., Vol. XVII, p. 119). Therefore, the absence of a father would not inhibit jealous feelings towards an imaginary male rival. Freud knows that science rejects the validity of such phylogenetic ideas. He admits, “I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution” (S. E., Vol. XXIII, p. 100). As he told Joseph Wortis, “Of course, if one didn’t believe in inheritance, there would be a great deal we could not explain” (Joseph Wortis, “Fragments of a Freudian Analysis,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. X, 1940], p. 847). Freud’s adherence to phylogeny deflected him from recognizing that family structure might play a part in Oedipal dynamics; it also kept him from having to face that the Oedipus complex may not just be generated from the child, but could be an interactive situation where others may also have sexual desires. Freud could recognize parental desires for the child, but he separated them from having aetiological significance.

Paradoxically, even as he used phylogeny to ward off threats to certain parts of the Oedipal theory, he came up with the negative Oedipus complex where the son, for instance, desired the father and saw the mother as the rival, and the complete Oedipus complex which combined the positive and negative. The complete Oedipus complex focuses on the child’s wishes, not the dynamics between parents and the child. Freud’s predilection for stressing one side of an interpersonal dynamic limited his ability to understand traumatic

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neurosis.

The traumatic neurosis of World War I presents a specific case. Freud initially concluded that this neurosis was triggered by adult experience of combat. He uncomfortably admitted that there is no proof that the war neurosis has any connection to sexual instincts. This does not mean, Freud asserts, that it has been shown that the sexual theory “is incorrect” (S. E., Vol. XVII, p. 208). But later, he inaccurately says, “with the end of the war the war neurotics too, disappeared.” This is “impressive proof of the psychical causation of their illnesses.” To Freud, this meant that “shell shock” was not a true traumatic neurosis caused by external events, but was often motivated by the desire to be out of harm’s way (S. E., Vol. XVII, pp. 215, 212). As such, these disturbances were not adult traumas and therefore no longer a threat to the correctness of the sexual and infantile causation of neurosis. Yet after his defensive posture towards his sexual theories, he soon added aggression to the basic drives. Freud’s ways of finding paths around threats to the universality of his cherished ideas and forging new concepts that alters what he was defending testify to his contradictory internal self-dialogue. He would frequently firmly reject certain ideas, then find ways to accept part of what he had just vehemently opposed. His theoretical divisions and restlessness could mean both that he could stop himself from exploring the notion of traumatic reliving and that Binion’s development of that concept is derivative from Freud’s defensive and creative mind.

There is an odd lesson to be learned from this brief sojourn into aspects of Freud’s mental life. The vacillations, gaps, and reversals within his theory as to the role of the event and the role of the individual have relevance for the theory of trauma. We know traumatic events threaten life and limb, but researchers of post-traumatic stress disorder have not been able to adequately explain why some exposed

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to the same horrifying events are psychologically scarred and others fail to develop symptoms of disturbance. Any theory of trauma or traumatic reliving needs to examine the personality and the event. Given the mixture of human variability and commonality, any theory, whether it is about traumatic reliving or the sexual-aggressive drives, cannot be separated from how it is processed in the complex personhood of each individual.

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