Binion’s Probing of Freud’s Shifting Theories

As a practicing psychoanalyst and teacher, I must admit that I have struggled with Freud’s theoretical legacy. Alongside my many comrades, we admire and readily use Freud’s clinical model such as the use of the couch, free association, dream analysis, interpretation, transference, resistance, unconscious motivation, etc. On the other hand,

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Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and origins of psychopathology have been regularly challenged and are still debated. Thus, Dr. Binion’s article “Reliving with Freud” inspired me to consider Freud’s theoretical legacy and how I interpreted it.

Dr. Binion approaches Freud’s early cases, with a keen eye, much like a detective uncovering evidence at a crime scene. Binion suggests Freud’s crime, so to speak, had been the abandonment of the clinical actuality of his patient’s traumatic recollections and reenactments otherwise known as reliving, in favor of reconfiguring the material (from history to pseudohistory) to fit his emerging theory of the psychosexual origin of neurosis. As Binion writes, “I propose to show that he did so for reasons theoretical rather than empirical…”

With his proposal Binion identifies the numerous incongruities and inconsistencies in Freud’s analyses. For example, Freud’s patients showed only partial remission or no cure at all from the talking therapy, and they rarely directly mention infantile sexual material. Binion falls short of Jeffery Masson’s highly critical work, Assault on Truth, (1985) whereby Masson viewed Freud as purposely covering up the sexual abuse of his patients.

Freud himself was aware of the shifts in his thinking, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), in relation to what he describes as “an interesting episode in the history of analytic research” “In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from “real occurrences.”

Binion effectively points out this shift in Freud’s theory had significant ramifications by placing on equal ground

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fantasized recollections of sexual abuse with actual ones. The key element in Binion’s review that Freud remained forever convinced of the early childhood location of the neurosis whether real or imagined. He views Freud as being on the right track pre-1900, “…his decipherment of symptomatic behavior as remembrance in action was precisely suited to make sense of episodic traumatic reliving.”

I feel that Binion sometimes doesn’t consider the speculative nature of Freud’s work at this juncture, that Freud was deeply committed to exploring psychophysics, in other words, how the mind energetically operated, how it remembered, constructed ideas, how it perceived reality, dealt with conflicts, and dreamt at night. In other words, Freud was searching for a grand organic scheme, much akin to Darwin’s notion of natural selection. As Makari wrote in Revolution in Mind (2008), “Sigmund Freud worked feverishly to pull together a grand theory of mental functioning…he sought to integrate physics, biology, neurology and psychology.”

It is an interesting element within Binion’s article that illustrates Freud’s theory of infantile origins of neurosis, which Freud never fully evidenced in his case presentations, actually resulted in creating a schema that fortified the denial of the truth of his patient’s traumatic recollections and the understanding of how his patients’ symptoms reflected reenactments of the earlier trauma (repetition compulsion) aka episodic traumatic reliving. This was at the centerpiece of a well-regarded series of articles by William Niederland (1951, 1959, 1960) though which he deconstructed Freud’s analysis of a patient (actually a memoir analyzed by Freud) called “Dr. Schreiber.” Freud ascribed Schreiber’s paranoia as a product of unconscious repressed homosexual fantasies, although Niederland effectively demonstrated that Schreiber’s early childhood parenting was fraught with systematic paternal abuse which directly corresponded to his symptoms.

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At the end of his article Binion reveals his intention, “The psychohistorian’s task is to replace such pseudohistory by history with the same Freudian aim of uncovering its inner workings.” I don’t believe Freud intended to create a “psuedohistory” for his patients. The actual historical record indicates that he was a pioneer, in search of some truth that would unravel the mysteries of the mind. Opposite to what Dr. Binion suggests, Freud’s case material reveals his truth, his struggle, and observations which led to his conclusions. Right or wrong, that is what happened, thus there is nothing “pseudo” in that. Furthermore there is no mention of Freud’s extensive self analysis which also profoundly influenced his theoretical direction as much as his clinical work (Anzieu, 1986).

Despite the inconsistencies and incongruities, and even misinterpretations, and false claims of curing his patients (Wolf Man), Freud’s contributions have stood the test of time, even though his writing didn’t quite make the case scientifically. As a clinician I feel deeply indebted to Freud. So I am inclined to approach his work empathetically, that is, sensing what it must have been like to be at the precipice of this great knowledge while living in a culture that was as fertile as it was repressive. His comprehensive theory of pathology, treatment and childhood development remain cornerstones in the understanding of mental processes. He may have downplayed the effects of actual trauma in the service of his theory, as Dr. Binion points out, but when he instructed his patients to “say everything,” he opened the door to countless other researchers and clinicians that has led us closer to the grand scheme that Freud was searching for.

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