Hysteria and the Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church

The sexual abuse crisis that has roiled the Catholic Church in the United States has elicited a range of emotions. Initial attention to the fact of priestly abuse and the plight of victims was accompanied by shock, dismay, and heartfelt sympathy. This quickly yielded to anger as attention shifted from priests and their victims to bishops. Many are incredulous that men of intelligence and experience could be blind to the truth, turn a deaf ear to reports of clerical abuse, be paralyzed by fear of scandal and litigation, and inure themselves to the suffering of victims while providing implausible

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justifications for their actions. Stumbling and inarticulate at points, the Church seems to be in the throes of a puzzling and troubling paroxysm threatening its vitality. Yet it is possible to understand this crisis in light of a controversy about sexual abuse to which Freud was a party more than a century ago. Doing so suggests that what appears to make little sense in itself is understandable as an institutional expression of hysteria.

In April 1896, Freud addressed the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology, and outlined his theory that hysterical neuroses were caused by early and traumatic sexual experience. “The Aetiology of Hysteria” drew upon Freud’s clinical work with highly intelligent and otherwise sympathetic young women who manifested a puzzling though characteristic set of symptoms that he and Josef Breuer had described in their Studies on Hysteria (1895). According to Freud and Breuer, hysterics commonly demonstrated disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech; paralysis and rigidity of the muscles; alterations of consciousness, including emotional indifference and numbing; problems eating and sleeping; and a tendency toward delusional and hallucinatory experience. What is striking about these symptoms is that, although they occasionally could be life-threatening, they were because of no physical or functional abnormality, and the young women were in other ways quite healthy.

Freud argued that these symptoms could be traced back to traumatic sexual experience in early childhood, be it seduction by an adult or older child, or rape. Indeed, he went further and argued that these symptoms were themselves evidence of the trauma because they constituted mnemic symbols, that is, they were a form of memory and history. The hysteric’s inability to speak, for example, was a re-enactment of the young girl’s inability to tell anyone what had happened to her, even as the young woman’s blindness represented her desperate need not to see and admit tire horror that had befallen her. Symptoms were therefore clues to an underlying truth too awful to acknowledge directly, but one that could find expression in disguised and distorted form. Given the frequency of hysterical symptoms among Freud’s and others’ patients, the implication was clear, namely, that children were subject to sexual trauma far more often than anyone might have expected or cared to acknowledge.

As Peter Gay has noted in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), the reaction to Freud’s theory was swift and negative. For reasons that remain debated, Freud subsequently revised his theory and discounted tire role of sexual trauma in the etiology of psychopathology. Yet as Judith Herman has argued in Trauma and Recovery (1992), Freud’s original insight about the relationship between trauma and symptom expression returned in different guises throughout the 20th century. These include descriptions of shell shock and battle fatigue in young men at war that bear a close resemblance to the symptoms of Freud’s hysterics, suggesting that in the prototypical male and female arenas of war and domestic abuse, respectively, the relationship between trauma and symptom is the same. In both contexts, what distinguishes the symptomatic is not their pre-morbid functioning but their exposure to trauma.

Although inferences about social institutions made on the basis of individual clinical experience are fraught with risks and limitations, it is worth considering whether the current crisis in the Catholic Church is not merely an expression of the individual psychopathology of abusers and presumed prevarication of bishops, but is a variant of hysteria. The symptoms of Freud’s patients and the behavior of Church leaders bear a certain resemblance, as in both instances sight, hearing, and speech are impaired; volitional movement is inhibited; emotional responses are blunted and dulled; and explanations for behavior strain credulity. Similarly, just as Freud’s patients were intelligent and accomplished, so are the bishops, and as the young women’s health was imperiled by symptoms without organic basis, so the well-being of the Church has been put at risk by behaviors peripheral to its core mission and identity. Most importantly, even as the young women’s symptoms were a disguised expression of an unwelcome truth, so it is possible to view the actions of Church leaders as an unwitting confirmation of what they were consciously denying: that the abuse was real and extensive, that they knew about it, and that they are, as is any survivor of trauma, deeply conflicted about what they did and did not do, and the level of responsibility they bear for what transpired.

To say as much is not to excuse what is inexcusable or to blur important distinctions between powerless children confronted with events beyond their ken and powerful men who could have and should have known better. It is rather to suggest that sexual abuse now, as in Freud’s day, provokes powerful emotions and complex psychological responses, and that the truth of such abuse often

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finds only a disguised, torturous, and convulsive acknowledgement. It is also to suggest that Freud’s original insight should not be lost and that the intimate relationship between trauma and symptom must be acknowledged. To fail to do so is to be deceived by appearances and to put still another generation at risk.

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