The M em ory Wa

P R E U D 'S
LEGACY IN

Frederick Crews
AND HIS CRITICS
A MewlZb]:^Review Book
 $31.50 Canada

In 1993 and 1994, The New York Review

o f Books published two tenaciously argued
essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian
psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-
called recovered memory movement. The
first reviewed a growing body of evidence
indicating that Freud doctored his data and
manipulated his colleagues in an effort to
consolidate a cult-like following that would
neither defy nor upstage him. The second,
published in two parts, challenged the scien­
tific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly
growing recovered memory movement,
maintaining that its social effects have been
devastating. Crews traced that movement to
Freudian precedent— not just to Freud’s aban­
doned “seduction theory” but also to the most
essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself
The response was tremendous: issues flew
off the stands, and therapists, patients, scholars,
philosophers, and others whose lives had been
touched by Freud’s ideas responded in one of
the largest waves of letters the Review had ever
seen. Twenty-five of these were published, with
Crews’s deft and forceful replies. Most are
gathered here, together with Crews’s original
essays, a new introduction describing the gene­
sis of his pieces, and an epilogue considering
the debate and its reverberations. The result is
a fierce, contentious, and startling book that
rocks the foundations of one of the century’s
governing ideas.
T he M em ory W ars
 T he M em ory W ars

pR EU D 'S LEGACY

IN D ISPU TE

Frederick Crews
and

H a ro ld P. B lu m M o rtim e r O sto w

M arcia C avell B ern ard L. Pacella

M o rris E agle “ P en elop e”

M a tth ew H u g h E rdelyi H erb ert S, Peyser

A llen E sterson C h a rlo tte K rau se P rozan

R o b ert R. H o lt T h e re sa R eid

Ja m e s H o p k in s Ja m e s L. R ice

Lester L u b o rsk y J . S c h im e k

D a v id D . O ld s M arian T o lp in

A N ew Y o r k R e v ie w Book

N ew York
Copyright © 1995 NYREV, Inc.

All rights reserved, including translation into other languages,

under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States and C anada by:

The New York Review o f Books
250 West 57th Street
New York, N Y 10107

“T h e Unknown Freud,” “T h e Revenge o f the Repressed,”

and the subsequent exchanges were first published in
The New York Review o f Books,
“C onfessions o f a Freud Basher” was first published in The
[London] Times H igher Education Supplementy M arch 3, 1995,
in a slightly different form.

Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

T h e m emory wars : Freud s legacy in dispute / Frederick Crews . . . [et al.].

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
IS B N 0-940322-04-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Repression (Psychology) 2. Freud, Sigm und, 1856-1939.
3. Memory. I. Crews, Frederick.
B F 1 7 5 .5 .R 4 4 M 4 6 1995
1 5 0 .1 9 ’5 2 — dc20 95-37847
C IP

First edition
Printed in the United States o f America on acid-free paper
Frederick Crews dedicates his portion o f this book to
Peter Swales
demon researcher, free spirit, loyalfriend
 (C O N T E N T S

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii A NOTE ON NOTES

1 INTRODUCTION

31 THE UNKNOWN FREUD

75 Exchange

157 THE R E V E N G E OF T H E REPRESSED

225 Exchange

285 a ft e r w o r d : c o n f e ssio n s of

A FREUD BASHER
 KN O W LE DG M E N T S

This book is heavy in indebtedness. To begin with, it would

not have come into existence at all without the prompting of
the editors of The New York Review ofBooksy who saw an edi­
fying debate where others, including me, saw only the smoke
of battle. The teeny-bopper adjective “awesome” borders on
understatement when applied to Robert Silvers’s editorial
acumen, courage, and all-around wisdom. And as the book
project’s editor, Ann Kjellberg has been astute, resourceful,
reliable, and cordial. I will miss working with her.
Special thanks are due the correspondents who agreed to
have their critical letters to The New York Review o f Books
reprinted here, knowing full well that I would get the first and
last words. That is sportsmanship! But 1 also want to thank the
other correspondents who are represented only in summary.
Understandably, they did not wish to contribute actively
to a book whose main emphasis struck them as mistaken.
Nevertheless, they earned my gratitude by engaging important
issues in a lively manner. Although no intention could have
been farther from their minds, they, too, played an essential
role in making The Memory Wars a reality. I should mention as
well the many concerned readers whose letters never saw pub­
lication. Few of those letters were complimentary, but most of
them were thoughtful and challenging.
Several factual errors in my own work have been silently
corrected; the changes have no bearing on the letters repro­
duced and summarized here. For having pointed out inaccu­
racies, I am grateful to Rolando A. Amador, Ross Cheit, Marie
Kann, Cyrille Koupernik, John Richardson, Anthony Stadlen,
and Robert Wilcocks. At Professor Cheit s request, his letters
to The New York Review and my replies have been omitted.
For various kinds o f encouragement and/or informa­
tion, I owe thanks to Robyn Dawes, D. A. Begelman, Henry
Cohen, Joseph C. Doherty, Borden Elniff, Barbara Epstein,
Edward Erwin, Allen Esterson, Pamela Freyd, Peter Freyd,
Brina Gehry, Alison Gopnik, Phyllis Grosskurth, Adolf
Griinbaum, Han Israds, Bart Johnson, Michael G. Kenny,
John F. Kihlstrom, Ronald Lehrer, Elizabeth Loftus, Malcolm
Macmillan, Gary Saul Morson, Richard Ofshe, James
Okerblom, Mark Pendergrast, Russell A. Powell, Paul Preuss,
James L. Rice, Barbara Riebling, Bernard Rimland, Jim
Schnabel, Daniel Simon, Richard Skues, Frank J. Sulloway,
Catherine Tice, Peter van Sommers, Richard Webster, and
Robert Wilcocks. I was unacquainted with most of those peo­
ple before writing the essays that appear below; my contact
with them has been enriching.
Two other individuals must be singled out for praise.
Elizabeth Crews has been, for thirty-six years now, my best
critic as well as my clearest friend. And Peter Swales, to whom
my share of The Memory Wars is dedicated, gave me extraordi­
nary help when 'The Unknown Freud” was under attack from
many sides. Freud scholars, but too few others, know that Peter
is a living treasure. I look forward to the day when his unique
essays on the early Freud are available within one set o f covers.
Finally, 1 thank the editors of The [London] Times
Higher Education Supplement for permission to reuse the essay
that forms the afterword to this book.

FREDERICK CREWS
 ^ ISJO TE O N JSJO T E S

To avoid redundancy, the original citations that appeared in

the following essays and letters have undergone some consoli­
dation. Shortened parenthetic references, as follows, will be
used for the two most commonly cited texts:

SE: The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works

o f Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, translated by James
Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1953-1974)

Freud-Fliess Letters: The Complete Letters o f Sigmund Freud to

Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, translated and edited by Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson (Harvard University Press, 1985)
INTRODUCTION
No book was ever less premeditated than this one. Its germ,
back in December o f 1992, lay in my proposal to The New York
Review o f Books that I review James L. Rices useful source
study, Freud's Russia, which a Berkeley colleague had passed
along to me in manuscript. Although other works pertinent to
psychoanalysis then kept coming to my notice, expanding the
scope of what, in November 1993, became “The Unknown
Freud,” I myself had no eventual book in mind. My intention,
as it crystallized, was simply to convey a sense of how radically
our idea o f Freud and psychoanalysis has been changing under
the pressure exerted by surprising biographical revelations on
the one hand and rigorous methodological critiques on the
other. I sensed, of course, that my article would arouse contro­
versy, but not that it would make my name a household epi­
thet among Freudians across the United States and elsewhere.
Later, it was The New York Reviews idea that I write a sec­
ond piece discussing several new books that examined the
practice of so-called recovered memory, a therapeutic innova­
tion that, since the mid-1980s, had been producing major
social effects in a number of English-speaking countries. By
then I was fully aware of the attention aroused by “The Unknown
Freud.” When my new review essay, “The Revenge of the
Repressed,” appeared as a two-part article in November and
December of 1994, I knew what kind of reaction to expect.
But only after several heated rounds of published correspon­
dence, representing just a sampling of the passions aroused by
my articles of 1993 and 1994, did the editors of The New York
Review suggest that the whole protracted debate might consti­
tute the makings of a book. By then, little remained for me to
do but write this introduction and append a personal afterword
about the Freud uproar, originally commissioned by The
[London] Times Higher Education Supplement.
This is not to say, however, that my portion of The
Memory Wars lacks a unifying perspective. As a one-time Freudian
who had decided to help others resist the fallacies to which I
had succumbed in the 1960s, I had long before articulated the
critique of psychoanalysis that undergirds “The Unknown
Freud.” ^ Nor was I ever in doubt about the perniciousness of
the recovered memory movement—a frenzy that is now
deluding countless patients (mostly women) into launching
false charges of sexual abuse against their dumbfounded and

1. See especially the first five chapters o f my book Skeptical Engagements (Oxford
University Press, 1986). Relevant essays from an earlier period, when I was still
attempting to see what I could retain o f the Freudian heritage, appeared in Out
o f My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and C ritical Method (Oxford University
Press, 1975).
mortified elders—or about the ultimate origin of that move­
ment in Freudian assumptions. In my view, the relatively
patent and vulgar pseudoscience of recovered memory rests in
appreciable measure on the respectable and entrenched pseudo­
science of psychoanalysis. Thus, even though “The Revenge of
the Repressed” was not even a gleam in my eye when I was
writing “The Unknown Freud,” the closing paragraphs of the
latter essay sound like a preview of its successor.
As a debate, however, The Memory Wars is necessarily a
vortex of dissension. In introducing that debate, I cannot pre­
tend to be speaking for its other participants—some o f whom
are represented only in summary, since they declined the
opportunity to have their letters reprinted here. And I feel a
reluctance, in any case, to take the measure of a multifaceted
quarrel that continues to expand and evolve even as this book
goes to press. As I will show, crucially pertinent events have
occurred since the last exchange recorded here, placing both
my articles and some of the letters in a significantly new light.
What follows will thus be less an introduction than an update
that is intended to advance the existing dialogue from the only
perspective I can honestly represent, my own.
First, however, it may be useful to summarize the ways
in which my articles on Freud and on recovered memory ther­
apy—hereafter designated by the acronym RM r —have proved
controversial, not just within the covers o f this book but well
beyond it. The areas of conflict are these six:
1. Freud s character and career. “The Unknown Freud
maintains that Freuds drive for renown repeatedly goaded
him to generalize from an inadequate or even imaginary base
of observation and to rule his international movement more
like a petty generalissimo than like a discoverer of replicable
knowledge. Did I represent him fairly, and do my conclusions,
if they are to be accepted, have any bearing on questions of
theory that are still at issue?
2. The credibility of contemporary psychoanalysis. Has
Freud’s movement by now evolved into a genuine discipline
whose knowledge claims deserve our respect? Or, as I believe,
does psychoanalysis merely adapt itself resourcefully to
changes in public sentiment, meanwhile remaining enmired
in the same deep methodological errors that attended its birth
in the 1890s?
3. The nature of RM T. Is it the disgrace that I take it to
be, the most destructive episode in the entire history of pro­
fessional psychotherapy? Or, at the opposite extreme o f per­
ception, is it a needed balm for “survivors” —real victims of
childhood sexual molestation who previously found no one to
elicit and believe the dreadful stories they had hidden even
from themselves?
4. The share o f responsibility, if any, that Freudianism
bears for the rise and rapid spread o f RM T. Isn’t it willfully
foolish on my part to blame the errors of one psychological
school on an earlier one that has taken a directly opposite view
of children’s sexuality and the causes of adult neurosis?
5. My qualifications for making pronouncements about
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy without benefit o f analytic
training or even of a personal analysis, or of experience in
administering therapy of any kind. And
6. The extent to which my critique of psychoanalysis
can be dismissed as a personal vendetta against a system of
thought that I once found intellectually attractive.
 On points 1 through 3, the main body of The Memory
Wars provides ample material, pro and con, for readers to form
opinions of their own. But I will necessarily revert in this
introduction to point 4, the relationship between RM T and
psychoanalysis, since that is where new evidence has come to
my attention. As for points 5 and 6, which boil down to
whether my criticisms need to be taken seriously at all, I may
as well deal with them here at the outset.
The issue of my lack of professional experience tends to
be raised not by recovered memory therapists, many of whom
could not withstand much scrutiny of their own credentials,
but by psychoanalysts, and it takes a form that has been usual
since Freud himself first began trying to one-up his detractors.
Those who haven’t been analyzed, the argument goes, simply
don’t know enough about the therapeutic process to criticize
it, and those who haven’t accumulated clinical experience as
therapists necessarily lack the solid basis o f observation on
which Freudian tenets reside.
My response to this argument is that it is altogether
question begging—the question being whether “clinical expe­
rience” constitutes a trustworthy test of the clinician’s theoret­
ical armamentarium. It is easy to show that this couldn’t
possibly be the case. Literally hundreds of psychotherapeutic
schools propound mutually incompatible theories about the
causes and cure of neuroses, yet each school finds its theory
“confirmed” in dealings with patients. Thus clinical experi­
ence, standing alone, is not a probative tool but an induce­
ment to complacency and tunnel vision. For testing and
evaluating psychological theories, a point of vantage outside
the consulting room is required. Likewise, it won’t do to say
that only the analyzed can judge whether psychoanalysis offers
its clients veridical insight or merely the illusion of it. Though
difficult to resolve, such matters lie in the public domain; and
members of the public had better address them, because it will
be a long while before analysts and other psychotherapists are
ready to do so without prejudice.
It is equally question begging for Freudians to say, as
they do both publicly and (much less politely) among them­
selves, that my animadversions against psychoanalysis can be
set down to neurotic traits and scarring experiences—a per­
sonal analysis that went awry, a rejected application for candi­
dacy to become a lay analyst, and so forth. The fact that those
rumors are false is only part of what is the matter with them;
the larger failing is the evasion of criticism by recourse to ad
hominem gossip. Let me say for the record, however, that my
loss of intellectual trust in psychoanalysis came about in the
most mundane way, through reading, and that other readers
of the same texts might well find them compelling in just the
way that I did.
Back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, a collision with
the writings o f philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, Karl
Popper, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel brought me to the
painful realization that Freudianism in its self-authenticating
approach to knowledge constitutes not an exemplification of
the rational-empirical ethos to which I felt loyal, and to which
Freud himself had professed allegiance, but a seductively
mythic alternative to it.^ Only much later did it dawn on me

2. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knoudedge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy,

revised edition (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Karl R. Popper, Conjectures
that psychoanalysis is the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our
epoch—one that deserves to be addressed not in the thrifty
spirit of ‘‘What can \ve salvage from Freud?” but rather with
principled attention to its faulty logic, its manufacturing of its
own evidence, and its facile explanation of adult behavior by
reference to unobservable and arbitrarily posited childhood
fantasy. This belief on my part may be mistaken, but it was
reached after much uncomfortable deliberation, and it is
shared by others who cannot be accused of lurching compul­
sively from one extreme position to its opposite.
Indeed, there is nothing especially original in my appre­
hension of Freud and psychoanalysis. I have done little more
than synopsize the work of herculean scholars like Henri
Ellenberger, Frank Sulloway, and Malcolm Macmillan and of
persistent philosophical inquirers like Adolf Griinbaum and
Frank Cioffi.^ To be sure, some of those authors—Ellenberger,

and Refutations: The Growth o f Scientific Knowledge (Basic Books, 1962);

Psychoanalysis: Scientific Method and Philosophy; A Symposium^ edited by Sidney
Hook (New York University Press, 1959); and Ernest Nagel, “Methodological
Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Hook, pp, 38-56.
3. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery o f the Unconscious: The History and
Evolution o f Dynamic Psychiatry (Basic Books, 1970); Frank J. Sulloway, Freud,
Biologist o f the M ind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979; revised edition.
Harvard University Press, 1992); Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The
Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991); Adolf Griinbaum, The Foundations o f
Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (University o f California Press, 1984);
and the following articles among others by Frank Cioffi: “Wittgenstein’s Freud,”
in Studies in the Philosophy o f Wittgenstein, edited by Peter Winch (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 184-210; “ Freud and the Idea o f a Pseudo-
Science,” in Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, edited by Robert Borger
and Frank Cioffi (Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 471-499; and
“ Wollheim on Freud,” Inquiry, Vol. 15 (1972), pp. 171-186.
Sulloway, and Griinbaum—initially couched their findings
more tentatively and tactfully than I have done. It has gone
largely unremarked, however, that their later development
has been toward greater adamancy."^ As for Cioffi and
Macmillan, my judgment of Freuds work concurs with theirs in
every detail.
Note, for example, the finale to Macmillans exhaustive
and learned Freud Evaluated, the most recently published of
the major studies in the field:

Should we therefore conclude that psycho-analysis is a

science? My evaluation shows that at none of the differ­
ent stages through which it evolved was Freuds theory
one from which adequate explanations could be gener­
ated. From the very beginning, much o f what passed as
theory was found to be description, and poor descrip­
tion at that__ In every one of the later key develop­
mental theses, Freud assumed what had to be explained.

4. Compare, for example, Ellenberger’s chapter on Freud in The Discovery o f the

Unconscious with his subsequent article, “The Story o f ‘Anna O ’: A Critical
Review with New Data,” Journal o f the History o f the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 8
(1972), pp. 267-279. Note, too, the preface to the 1992 edition o f Freud:
Biologist o f the M ind, where Sulloway, citing his agreement with my own cri­
tique o f his book, concludes that “the whole process” o f Freudian interpretation
“was essentially circular” (p. xiv) and that Freud’s cliquish approach to knowl­
edge has been “largely fatal” to the scientific standing o f psychoanalysis (p. xv).
Even Griinbaum, whose logical allowance for a “serendipitous” future confirma­
tion o f unspecified Freudian ideas is often held up as a rebuke to my own pre­
mature cynicism, now poses the key question and offers a somber prediction:
“ Does Psychoanalysis Have a Future? Doubtful,” H arvard M ental Health Letter,
Vol. 11, No. 4 (October 1994), pp. 3-6.

10
 ... None of his followers, including his revisionist
critics who are themselves psycho-analysts, have probed
any deeper than did Freud into the assumptions un­
derlying their practise, particularly the assumptions
underlying “the basic method” —free association. None
question whether those assumptions hold in the thera­
peutic situation; none has attempted to break out of the
circle.^

This is exactly my own position—but it is supported in

Macmillans case by the most meticulous scholarship ever
bestowed on Freud’s claims.
Again, readers who examine Frank Cioffi’s trenchant
papers dating back to 1969 will perceive that what critics
have called my “absolutist” and “vindictive” brief against
Freud is only a long footnote to his own conclusions. As
a matter o f fact, my assessment o f Freud’s perverse achieve­
ment could be regarded as a gloss on just two sentences of
Cioffi’s:

It seems that Freud stood to his patients’ associations,

dreams, symptoms, reminiscences and errors more as a
painter to his pigments than as the sleuth to his traces of
mud and cigar ash.
The implications of this are that instead of seeing in
“condensation,” “displacement,” “representation by the op­
posite,” etc., etc., laws governing unconscious processes.

5. Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, pp. 610-612.

11
 we recognize them as recipes for the construction of associ­
ative chains to preselected termini; not mechanisms by
whose operation the symptom, dream, etc., was con­
structed, but rules for “working a piece of fancy into it.”^

In this view, entities like the psychic troika of id, ego,

and superego deserve to be regarded not as discoveries like
radium or DN A, nor even as mistakes like ether or animal mag­
netism, but as pure inventions like Esperanto, Dungeons &
Dragons, or, closer yet, Rube Goldberg algorithms for making
something happen with maximum complication. In short,
Freudian theory is a display o f ingenuity unencumbered by
recalcitrant data. As Cioffi cryptically puts it, “What a psycho­
analytic explanation tells us is itself.”^
Cioffi s insight, once fully absorbed, alters the landscape
of Freud studies beyond recognition, even mooting a good
deal of negative commentary that grants Freud his pose as a
sincere empirical psychologist. We begin to grasp that the
deviser of psychoanalysis was at bottom a visionary but end­
lessly calculating artist, engaged in casting himself as the hero
of a multivolume fictional opus that is part epic, part detective
story, and part satire on human self-interestedness and ani­
mality. This scientifically deflating realization, not my personal

6. Cioffi, “ Wittgensteins Freud,” p. 205.

7. “Wittgenstein’s Freud,” p. 194. See also, in this connection, Edward Erwin,
A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Em pirical Issues in Freudian Psychology
(M IT Press, 1995, forthcoming) and the extraordinary debunking effort by
Max Scharnberg, The Non-Authentic Nature o f Freud's Observations, 2
volumes (Uppsala, 1993). Scharnberg promises further studies under the
same title.

12
urge to broadcast it, is what the Freudian community needs to
challenge if it can.^
Diverse though it is in authorship, subject matter, and per­
spective, The Memory Wars does amount to a coherent debate
that makes certain issues stand out boldly. From my point of
view, the hostile letters republished and summarized here are
themselves an integral, if dialectical, element in a larger demon­
stration. Beyond their usefulness in pressing me to clarify my
position and meet objections that will have occurred to other
readers, the letters illustrate some o f my contentions more
vividly than I could have done myself. Thus the briefs for Freud
show, by their marked inconsistency with one another, that con­
temporary psychoanalysis possesses neither a core of accepted
doctrine, nor an agreement over Freuds hits and misses, nor a
common goal of treatment, nor a cogent account of why the
therapy sometimes “works” but sometimes doesn’t. Such disarray
points unmistakably toward my main contention about

8. The most recent and most promising development in Freud studies is the
articulation o f just this understanding o f Freud as a self-dramatizing rhetorician.
Not surprisingly, it is literary critics who are leading the way. See, e.g., Robert
Wilcocks, M aelzel’s Chess Player: Sigm und Freud an d the Rhetoric o f Deceit
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1994); Alexander Welsh, Freud’s Wishful Dream Book
(Princeton University Press, 1994); and John Farrell, Freuds Paranoid Quest:
Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (New York University Press, 1996, forth­
coming). One prototype for such efforts, and a cause for hope that professors o f
literature will finally develop qualms about swallowing Freudian theory as a lax­
ative for the unobstructed flow o f their discourse, can be found in Stanley Fish’s
Times Literary Supplement essay o f August 29, 1986, “Withholding the Missing
Portion: Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in Freud’s ‘The Wolf-Man,’ ” revised
(to its detriment) in Doing What Comes N aturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the
Practice o f Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Duke University Press, 1989),
pp. 525-554.

13
psychoanalysis: that it lacks any semblance of a shared empirical
basis for resolving differences of theory and interpretation, and
thus that its pretensions to tested knowledge are hollow.
An even wider divergence of judgment characterizes the
included and summarized letters about the recovered memory
movement. O f course, this is hardly surprising, since some
correspondents want to defend that movement while others
merely claim that its defects owe nothing to Freudianism. Yet
the letters are nevertheless of a piece in their failure to cope
with the central liability of RM T: that the therapists presup­
position that childhood sexual abuse is the likeliest cause of adult
misery may issue in specious “memories” on the suggestible
patient s part. That error partakes o f a much wider insensitiv­
ity to suggestion —a shortcoming whose roots can be found in
Freud’s stubborn faith, in defiance o f explicit challenges on the
point, that messages from the unconscious are by and large
incorruptible. If my portion of a book as miscellaneous as The
Memory Wars can be said to have a main focus, it is precisely
the carry-over, from Freudianism to its stepchild RM T, of
blindness to the role of therapy itself in producing behavior
that gets mistaken for the residue of long-buried trauma from
the patient’s early years.^
The linkage between these two styles o f psycho­
therapy—point 4 in my list above—is what now demands a

9. Analysts do, o f course, recognize that a patient s thoughts and feelings will be
warped by “transference” toward the therapist. Yet that very name transference
points to the problem: an unwarranted assumption that the patient’s needs,
demands, and “resistance” have been imported from a much earlier stage o f life
and that the therapist serves chiefly as a stand-in for more primordial objects o f
lust, love, and aggression. IT u s the “analysis o f the transference” tends to

14
revised accounting, for the essays and letters in The Memory Wars
tell only part of an appalling story that continues to unfold.
My ovv^n contributions belovv^ all rested on the assumption that
psychoanalysis stands largely in a genealogical, not a partici­
patory, relation to the hunt for missing scenes o f sexual abuse.
But one published letter (see the summary on pp. 233-235
below), signed by no fewer than twenty-nine “psychoanalyti-
cally trained clinicians who work with adults who were sexu­
ally molested and abused as children,” opened up another
vista that has subsequently proved to be all too enlightening.
Although those twenty-nine therapists deplored “the
worst elements within the recovery movement,” they also
appeared broadly hospitable to the movements ruling
premises. One of those premises, which has rapidly come to
the fore as “repressed memory” has been shown to be scientif­
ically uncorroborated, is that early sexual trauma typically gets
processed not through repression but through dissociation^ or
the withdrawal of the victims sense o f self from the very scene
of a trauma. These days, reference to dissociated experiences of
abuse tends to indicate a relatively canny but still zealous com­
mitment to RM T. Yet dissociation was precisely the watchword
o f these otherwise Freudian correspondents.
It was especially suggestive that my critics were prepared
to hint that dissociated trauma could eventuate in the forma­
tion o f multiple personalities. “Multiple personality disorder,”
now officially renamed “dissociative identity disorder,” is the

underrate the immediate source o f the patients irritability: the contemporary

behavior o f the therapist, an unequal partner in dialogue who deflects every
legitimate complaint about his own needling manner onto the patients endur­
ing flxations. For further discussion, see pp. 119-121 below.

15
strangest fruit of the recovered memory movement—the most
extreme outcome, depending on one’s perspective, either of
repeated and horrific childhood sexual abuse or of psycho­
therapeutic malpractice in the here and now.^® To be told,
then, as I was in their letter, that I had failed to appreciate the
trauma victim’s “multiple experiences of self and others” struck
me as a deeply ominous sign. Moreover, I was directed to
educate myself in what the authors called “a growing and rich
psychoanalytic literature” about the distant aftereffects of for­
gotten molestation, including such works as Jody Messier
Davies and Mary Gail Frawley’s Treating the Adult Survivor o f
Childhood SexualAbuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Basic Books,
1994) and Howard B. Levine’s 2,\vA\o\o^ Adult Analysis and
Childhood Sexual Abuse (Analytic Press, 1990).
Pressed for time, I had only begun to scan that body of
texts when I replied in The New York Review to the abuse-
oriented Freudians, suggesting to them that an entente with
RM T would hardly serve to shore up the crumbling respectabil­
ity o f psychoanalysis. But the advice was belated: my
twenty-nine adversaries, 1 am now left to conclude, simply are
recovered memory practitioners who have convinced them­
selves that “psychoanalytic knowledge” somehow authorizes
their reversion to Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic “seduction theo­
ry” of 1896, whereby the muffled but unextinguished memo­
ry o f having been sexually abused in childhood was deemed

10. A middle path, to be sure, is traced by the philosopher Ian Hacking in

Rewriting the Soul: M ultiple Personality and the Sciences o f Memory (Princeton
University Press, 1995). Unfortunately, Hackings account is vitiated by insuffi­
cient vigilance against cases o f fraud, malingering, and iatrogenesis, or therapist-
induced symptomatology.

16
the source o f every “hysteria.” I soon learned that the home
base o f all but eight o f the signers, the William Alanson White
Institute, has transformed itself from a center of relatively
pragmatic psychoanalysis to a magnet for RM T enthusiasts
who, in fact, were shortly to hold a one-sided symposium
validating “Memories of Sexual Betrayal.”^^ Further, I myself was
then magnanimously invited to comment in writing on two of
the papers presented there; they would form the nucleus o f a
special issue o f the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues devoted
precisely to the intended merger o f psychoanalysis and RMT.^^
In preparing that critique, I have by now acquainted
myself with many writings that prove how vastly I had under­
rated the ties between those two movements. There is no longer
room for doubt that a considerable number, if still a minority,
o f nominal Freudians are ready to toss out infantile sexuality
and the Oedipus complex in favor o f the “survivor psychology”
I had castigated in “The Revenge of the Repressed.” *^ As it

11. The symposium was held at the New York Hilton on March 18, 1995.
12. This will be volume 6, number 2 (1996), o f Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
13. See, e.g., Judith L. Alpert, “Analytic Reconstruction in the Treatment o f an
Incest Survivor,” Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 81 (1994), pp. 217-235; Philip M.
Bromberg, “‘SpeakThat I May See You; Some Reflections on Dissociation,
Reality, and Psychoanalytic Listening,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 4 (1994),
pp. 517-547; C. Brooks Brenneis, “Belief and Suggestion in the Recovery of
Memories o f Childhood Sexual Abuse,” / оигйй/ o f the American Psychoanalytic
Association, Vol. 42 (1994), pp. 1027-1053; Bertram ]. Cohler, “Memory
Recovery and the Use o f the Past: A Commentary on Lindsay and Read from
Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 8 (1994), pp.
365—378; Jody Messier Davies and Mary Gail Frawley, “Dissociative Processes
and Transference-Countertransference Paradigms in the Psychoanal)iically
Oriented Treatment o f Adult Survivors o f Childhood Sexual Abuse,” Psycho­
analytic Dialogues, Vol. 2 (1992), pp. 5-36; Paul A. Dewald, “Effects on an

17
happens, this development within psychoanalysis is occurring
at a time when RiMT itself, after a meteoric rise between 1988
and 1993, has been rapidly losing favor in the courts, the pro­
fessional journals, and even the mass media o f the United
States and other infected countries.Perhaps, then, most ana-

Adult of Incest in Childhood: A Case Report,” o f the American Psychoanalytic

Association, Vol. 37 (1989), pp. 997-1014; Judith L. Herman and Emily Schatzow,
“Recovery and Verification o f Memories o f Childhood Sexual Trauma,” Psycho­
analytic Psychology, Vol. 4 (1987), pp. 1-14; Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn,
“Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms o f Traumatic
Memory,” International Journal o f Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 74 (1993), pp. 287-302;
Ethel Spector Person and Howard Klar, “ Establishing Trauma: The Difficulty
Distinguishing between Memories and Vznizsxts," Journal o f the American Psycho­
analytic Association, Vol. 42 (1994), pp. 1055-1081; Mark Trewartha, “On Post-
analytic Amnesia,” Annual o f Psychoanalysis, Vol. 18 (1990), pp. 153-174; Scott
E. Wetzler and John A. Sweeney, “Childhood Amnesia; A Conceptualization in
Cognitive-Psychological T tim s," Journal o f the American Psychoanalytic Association,
Vol. 34 (1986), pp. 663-685; Miriam Williams, “ Reconstruction o f an Early
Seduction and Its Aftereffects,” /owrW o f the American Psychoanalytic Association,
Vol. 35 (1987), pp. 145-163; and Elizabeth K. Wolf and Judith L. Alpert, “Psycho­
analysis and Sexual Abuse: A Review o f the Post-Freudian Literature,” Psychoanalytic
Psychology, Vol. 8 (1991), pp. 305-327. Some o f these writers express a degree
o f caution about RMT, but all attest to the turn toward it within American
psychoanalysis. Note that such a trend is different from— indeed, fundamen­
tally antithetical to— attention to the here-and-now mistreatment o f children.
14. The changing American legal climate is reflected in the Supreme Courts cru­
cial ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 43 F.3d 1311 (9th Cir.
1995). Although not without its ambiguities, the Daubert precedent has already
tightened standards for the admissibility o f expert testimony. Under the previous
“Frye rule,” the “general acceptance” o f an idea within the relevant informed com­
munity was deemed adequate for admissibility. Now, however, the idea must have
been “derived by the scientific method” and “supported by the appropriate valida­
tion.” Scrupulously applied, Daubert W\Wexclude from American trials either a
plaintifFs or an expert witness’s testimony about the alleged retrieval of repressed
or dissociated memories. In this connection, see note 6 on page 248.

18
lysts will prove reluctant to book passage on a vessel whose
deck is already discernibly listing toward the waterline. But
meanwhile, the fact that some Freudians can so readily accom­
modate themselves to a diagnostic outlook that Freud himself
came to consider an absurdity is pregnant with implication for
the issues debated in this book.
One such issue is that o f alleged progress in the evolu­
tion of psychoanalytic theory. Freudians often scold me and
other critics for failing to note that “ [pjsychoanalysis as a field
has moved far beyond Freud. We have learned much in the
past 80 years.” Such a boast imputes to psychoanalysts a
collective rationality that can reliably discriminate between
nonsense and actual knowledge. As I have already noted, how­
ever, the existence o f assorted orthodox, deviant, neo-, and
post-Freudian schools that all regard themselves as psycho­
analytic points unmistakably to an absence, within the
movement at large, of any clear path connecting facts to
suppositions. Now we have been offered the most scandalous
and sobering instance o f that condition.
Again, anyone who believes that mutations o f psycho­
analysis typically thrive because o f their scientific cogency will
be discomfited by the new clinical literature that grafts The
Courage to Heal onto The Interpretation o f Dreams, To be sure,
that literature does marshal research to support its claims. It
does so, however, in a self-interested spirit, drawing largely on
the tendentious work of fellow RM T partisans, ignoring

15. Glen O. Gabbard, Sheldon M. Goodman, and Arnold D. Richards,

“Psychoanalysis after Freud: A Response to Frederick Crews and Other Critics,”
Psychoanalytic Books, Vol. 6 (1995), pp. 155-173; the quotation is from p. 156.

19
contrary reports, and deriving dubious conclusions from
cognitive and neurophysiological studies that were never
intended to provide justification for RMT.^^This last stratagem
fits all too neatly within the tradition— illustrated by more
than one o f the letters republished in this b ook — o f attempts
to make hand-m e-dow n articles o f Freudian faith look like
inferences from replicated research. T h e dogmas change
according to cultural w him , but the work o f packaging them
as “findings” marches on.
In some respects, however, I myself need to alter my
position in view of the surprising rapprochement between
RM T and psychoanalysis. I have maintained until now, for
example, that Freudianism has been losing its capacity to
wreak social harm as it has gradually forsaken its most ambi­
tious pretensions and retreated toward hermeneutic perspec-
tivism—that is, toward abandoning truth claims and recasting
the therapeutic goal as mere reconciliation o f the client to a
less self-punitive myth about his or her identity. But I should
have realized that there is nothing binding about this anemic
reduction of the Freudian program. Insofar as psychoanalysis
succumbs to the temptation o f rejuvenating itself through
RM T, all bets are off about social harm.
Thus, too, I now feel less inclined to credit commonly
reported research indicating that nearly all extant psychother­
apies yield approximately the same modest degree o f bene­
fit. Such a state of affairs points to the relatively uniform
operation of placebo factors—benefits conferred by the sheer

16. See Frederick Crews, “Forward to 1896? A Critique o f Harris and Davies,”
forthcoming in Psychoanalytic Dialogues^ Vol. 6, No. 2 (forthcoming in 1996).

20
receiving of professional attention—from one style of therapy to
another. But the attention o f someone who convinces you that
you were sexually brutalized by your father, now reconceived
as a monster who has escaped justice all these years, is a dif­
ferent story altogether. To judge from the ravages already
caused by the recovered memory movement, Freudians who
join that movement may bring about not just the “survivor
paranoia” of disoriented patients but also, in some instances,
the bankruptcy and even imprisonment o f their accused fam­
ily members.
Whatever its social effects may prove to be, the RM T
initiative within American psychoanalysis constitutes a
significant-looking challenge to the Freudian old guard. In
two related senses, that initiative is transparently ideological
in character. First, a marked “feminization” o f psycho­
dynamic theory and therapy is under way. Analysts like
Adrienne Harris, Mary Gail Frawley, and Jody Messier Davies
alter the Freudian model of the mind to enshrine at its core
the “introject” o f an abused little girl—the child-self that
was allegedly split off from the ego when the sexual abuse
began, and that must now be reunited with the conscious
adult self Accordingly, the analysts reconceptualize treat­
ment as an exercise o f womanly empathy with that furtive and
dissociated inner child. The resulting vision may be no more
gender biased than Freuds, but it is more unguardedly and
militantly so.

17. These writers do not claim, of course, that everyone is female or has been
molested. They simply invest all of their interest in the “abuse model” o f mental
development, putting the rest o f Freudian theory into limbo.

21
 And second, the feminist commitment to locating and
emotionally bonding with women survivors inevitably spills
over into hostility toward a largely male Freudian establish­
ment that is still inclined to honor such patriarchal dogmas as
‘ analytic neutrality,” penis envy, the Oedipus complex, and its
practical corollary, an automatic distrust of any patients
conscious “screen memory” of molestation. Whether or not
old-line Freudians realize the fact, a war o f psychoanalytic suc­
cession is under way, with the issue o f forgotten child abuse as
its casus belli. At this point it would be premature to venture
a guess as to the outcome.
The potentiality for reversion to a theory centered on
claims of real-life childhood victimization, we can now make
out, has always lain just beneath the surface o f mainstream
psychoanalysis. When, in 1897, Freud launched his movement
as we now recognize it, he abandoned one unviable theory
about the causation of hysteria (the experience of “seduction”
by an elder) for a less intuitively plausible one (repression of
forbidden sexual wishes). If early events are to be regarded as
causes of later neurosis, it is easier to picture them as physical
assaults on the child than as mere imaginings about
penisectomy at the hand o f a father who, the toddler suppos­
edly reasons, must adopt that means o f keeping him from
realizing his goal of fornicating with his mother.
It is little wonder, then, that Sandor Ferenczi in 1932,
breaking loose at last from Freud s suffocating control, founded
a one-man recovered memory movement, reinstating the
seduction theory in all its fanatical narrowness. The psycho­
analytic RM T o f our own era was very largely anticipated in
Ferenczis practice, including his boldest heresy, scrapping

22
analytic coldness in favor o f hands-on supportiveness toward
patient-survivors. Ferenczis rebellion was doomed by Freuds
implacable opposition and by the absence of a facilitating
feminist ambiance. But in the mid-1980s, with womens
causes on the march and with nothing to fear from Freuds
ghost, the same undertaking encountered no obstacles.
Significantly, one contribution to the launching of RMT as we
know it was Jeffrey Massons emotionally charged rehab­
ilitation o f the late Ferenczi in his best seller o f 1984, The
Assault on Truth
The interesting question, then, is not whether psycho­
analysis helped to bring on the recovered memory movement
—of course it did, both directly and dialectically—but
whether we are now witnessing a hostile takeover o f the older
therapeutic business by the younger. The mere specter o f such
a result is already causing adjustments of a predictable kind.
When challenged by earlier countertrends, the conservative
guardians of Freud s legacy have usually muddled through by
recourse to a halfway measure: adding new and sometimes
opposite concepts and explanations to the old ones, thus ren­
dering the theory a bewildering but handsomely ecumenical
palimpsest o f accommodative gestures. The same process
remains at work today.
Listen, for example, to three non-RMT analysts recently
disparaging “The U nknow n Freud”:

18. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression o f the
Seduction Theory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), pp. 145-187. See also Lewis
Aron and Adrienne Harris, editors. The Legacy o f Sdndor Ferenczi (Analytic
Press, 1993).

23
 Crews has thoroughly misunderstood the modern usage
of repression in psychoanalytic discourse. Ever since
Freud departed from his view that all neuroses were
caused by actual seduction of children, repression
evolved in a different direction. Today it is used to refer
to the banishment from consciousness of unacceptable
wishes arising from within. Severe childhood trauma,
such as sexual abuse, overwhelms the ego’s capacity for
repression and more commonly produces a different set
of defensive operations involving denial, disavowal, and
disassociation [sic].*^

This passage certainly does bring us up to date with

“today’s” amending of traditional Freudian theory. What are we
witnessing here, if not a smoking of the peace pipe with the
RMT faction among fellow analysts? Repression, the very heart
of psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it, is being asked to cede
half its realm to the current watchword of the recovered mem­
ory movement, dissociation. (“Disassociation” is archaic in this
sense.) The authors do not even bother to pretend that disso­
ciation has come into prominence by virtue of objective dis­
coveries about authenticated cases o f sexual abuse. Repression
and dissociation are here being assigned different terrain for the
same reason (and perhaps with the same success) that Goneril
and Regan were, to forestall civil war and the total loss of an
already tottering authority.

19. Gabbard et al., “Psychoanalysis after Freud,” p. 169. Incidentally, Freud

never maintained that “all neuroses were caused by actual seduction o f children.’

24
 These writers are at least correct, however, in implying that
I myself have hitherto paid little regard to dissociation. It is not
easy to keep pace with the shell game whereby critics o f Freud-
ianism are always told that new breakthroughs render their
strictures obsolete. What matters, however, is that the innovations
prove no better grounded than the ideas they have displaced.
In this case the novelty is not, o f course, the mere descriptive
concept of dissociation; indeed, its nineteenth-century origi­
nator, Pierre Janet, believed that Freud s repression was plagia­
rized from it. The contemporary wrinkle is that dissociation is
now assigned a powerful causal role in the newly elaborated
operation o f recovered memory. In that capacity it emits, if
anything, an even more insubstantial aura than repression does.
In the words o f one psychoanalyst who has become a
wholehearted convert to RM T, dissociation is the mind s way of
processing “memories of traumatic childhood abuse which can­
not be forgotten in the usual way, because they never succeeded
in being fully known in the first place.”^^ It is hard not to admire
the fittingness of such a notion to the legerdemain of the recov­
ered memory movement. By its very ineffability, dissociation is
ideally adapted to dignifying the “memory” of illusory events
that the therapist nevertheless feels duty bound to credit.^ ^ If no
awareness of the alleged trauma was originally registered, then its

20. Jody Messier Davies, “ Dissociation, Repression, and Reality Testing in the
Countertransference: The Controversy over Memory and False Memory in the
Psychoanalytic Treatment o f Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse,”
forthcoming in Psychoanalytic Dialogues^ Vol. 6, No. 2 (1996).
21. As Davies puts it, the therapist must “validate the patients belief that abuse
occurred, or risk reenacting the role o f denying parent, which may have enabled
the abuse in the first place.” It is important to grasp that Davies’s point, which

25
“reconstruction” in therapy needn t be tested against any con­
scious recollections. The therapists and the patients joint bio­
graphical artifact becomes, as it were, the perfect crime—but
with the patient also serving as victim of her own concoction.
It would appear, then, that by popular internal demand,
a bustling dissociation wing is being added to the conceptual
mystery house of psychoanalysis. Let us take careful note of
what this means for the already minuscule believability of
Freudian theory. Since molestation-minded analysts typically
strive for, and achieve, “the recovery and disclosure of as
many memories of early sexual abuse as possible”^^—dozens of
rapes, for example, from which the child was instantaneously
and serially able to detach her conscious mind—the newly
favored concept is, de facto, not mere dissociation but a
virulent strain o f it that operates habitually, even routinely,
whenever trauma is encountered. This is an exact counterpart
o f the “robust repression” whose implausibility I do discuss
in this book.^^ Both phenomena went unremarked in the
entire human record before the 1980s, but one or both are now
needed to lend respectability to the staggering claims o f recov-

faithfiilly echoes The Courage to HeaU covers “beliefs” that the RMT specialist
herself has coaxed into being. Compare this complete abdication o f judgment
by a psychoanalyst with the claim o f Gabbard, Goodman, and Richards that
“ [pjsychoanalysts scrupulously avoid persuading the patient to remember things
that did not happen. , . . Analysts are trained to be skeptical about the veridical-
ity o f memories” (“Psychoanalysis after Freud,” p. 169).
22. Davies and Frawley, “ Dissociative Processes . . . p. 23.
23. The name “robust repression” was coined by Richard Ofshe, who found the
concept implicit in the teachings o f RMT practitioners. It is explained and
exposed to withering criticism in Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters’s M aking
Monsters, discussed on pages 200-203 below.

26
ered memory practitioners. Such is the psychoanalytic progress
since Freud that I have been chided for leaving out of account.
Amid the befogging o f evidential common sense, one
point that seems all too clear is the futility of waiting for psycho­
analytic professional associations to acknowledge the folly of
RM T and to expunge it from current practice. Given the poli­
tics of Freudian territorialism, such a reform can probably
occur only after the now ascendant purveyors of memory
retrieval have become objects of general public disgrace. Other
psychological and medical guilds, at least formally committed
to disgorging fraud, have recently been crafting pronounce­
ments that, though diplomatic to a fault, make manifest their
discomfort with RMT.^"^ But with honorable individual excep­
tions, Freudians appear more outraged by cost-efficient “brief
therapy” than by recourse among some of their colleagues to
reckless tampering with their patients’ psychic equilibrium.
If Freudian reformers were to condemn R M T, however,
on what principled basis could they do so? A checklist for
quackery would have to ask the therapist such questions as
these: How do you know that a particular class of early ordeals
is always lastingly traumatic? Can you locate, and validate the
traumaticity of, a particular unrecalled event by means that an
independent investigator would find believable? By what
means can you reliably tell the difference between delayed
effects of early trauma and immediate effects of your own

24. Such statements have been issued by, among others, the American Psychia­
tric Association, the Council on Scientific Affairs o f the American Medical
Association, the American Psychological Association’s Working Group on the
Investigation o f Memories o f Childhood Abuse, and a working party o f the
British Psychological Association.
interference? Do your ministrations typically leave your
patients emotionally dependent on you? Do many of those
patients deteriorate even further during treatment, contract­
ing a despair that leads to “abrupt terminations, escalating
self-abuse, or suicidal behaviors”?^^ And has your therapy
passed independent tests of relative effectiveness and relative
freedom from the risk of disaster to your clients and other
affected parties? Such a questionnaire would embarrass every
“archaeological” and “transference-based” regimen—every
one, in other words, that “provisionally” infantilizes its clients
in the interest of recovering early material whose repression or
dissociation allegedly made them ill. But this is simply a char­
acterization of the classical Freudian program, which cannot
offer reassurance on a single one of the named criteria.
Let us suppose, finally, that the “retraumatizing” of
psychoanalysis by means of a revived seduction theory is only
an ephemeral threat after all. The fact remains that psycho­
analysis and RM T are profoundly alike and that their resem­
blance is anything but fortuitous. It was Freudianism that
taught the recovered memory movement to regard not just the
dream but also the human body itself as a readable note pad
o f the unconscious—a tablet whose symptom-hieroglyphics
(tics, sores, rashes, lameness, stammering, etc.) could be faith­
fully retranslated into the otherwise unutterable thoughts that
etched them. In their shared predilection for fixed symbolic
meanings, dogmatic explanations, split selves, and quasi-
demonic “introjects,” and in their common affinity for what
Freud once praised as “the obscure but indestructible surmises

25. Davies and Frawley, Treating the Adult Survivor . . . , p. 138.

28
of the common people against the obscurantism of educated
opinion” (SE, 18:178), both systems stand closer to animistic
shamanism than to science.^^’ Both must be discarded if, once
and for all, we are to bring psychotherapy into safe alignment
with what is actually known about the mind.

26. Indeed, for sheer gnostic zaniness there is nothing in the recovered memory
literature that quite approaches Freud s belief, which he and Ferenczi considered
expounding in a book, that “ [Lamarcks] concept o f need,’ which creates and
modifies organs, is nothing else than the power unconscious ideas have over the
body o f which we see the remains in hysteria— in short, the ‘omnipotence o f
thoughts.’ ” See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work o f Sigm und Freud, 3 volumes
(Basic Books, 1953-1957), Vol. 3, p. 312.

29
YHE u n k n o w n pREUD
 L
That psychoanalysis, as a mode of treatment, has been experi­
encing a long institutional decline is no longer in serious dispute.
Nor is the reason: though some patients claim to have acquired
profound self-insight and even alterations o f personality, in
the aggregate psychoanalysis has proved to be an indifferently
successful and vastly inefficient method o f removing neurotic
symptoms. It is also the method that is least likely to be “over
when its over.” The experience of undergoing an intensive
analysis may have genuine value as a form o f extended medi­
tation, but it seems to produce a good many more converts
than cures. Indeed, among the dwindling number of practic­
ing analysts, many have now backed away from any medical
claims for a treatment that was once touted as the only lasting
remedy for the entire spectrum of disorders this side of psychosis.
Freuds doctrine has been faring no better, in scientifi­
cally serious quarters, as a cluster of propositions about the

33
mind. Without significant experimental or epidemiological
support for any of its notions, psychoanalysis has simply been
left behind by mainstream psychological research. No one
has been able to mount a successful defense against the
charge, most fully developed in Adolf Griinbaum’s meticu­
lous Foundations o f Psychoanalysis, that “clinical validation” of
Freudian hypotheses is an epistemic sieve; as a means of gain­
ing knowledge, psychoanalysis is fatally contaminated by the
inclusion, among its working assumptions and in its dialogue
with patients, of the very ideas that supposedly get corrobo­
rated by clinical experience. And Griinbaum further showed
that even if Freud’s means of gathering evidence had been
sound, that evidence couldn’t have reliably yielded the causal
constructions that he placed on it. We cannot be surprised,
then, by Malcolm Macmillan’s recent exhaustive demonstra­
tion that Freud’s theories of personality and neurosis—derived
as they were from misleading precedents, vacuous pseudo­
physical metaphors, and a long concatenation o f mistaken
inferences that couldn’t be subjected to empirical review—
amount to castles in the air.^
Nevertheless, Freudian concepts retain some currency in
popular lore, the arts, and the academic humanities, three are­
nas in which flawed but once modish ideas, secure from the
menace of rigorous testing, can be kept indefinitely in play.
There psychoanalysis continues to be accepted largely on
faith—namely, a faith in Freud’s self-description as a fearless

1. See Adolf Griinbaum, The Foundations o f Psychoanalysis: A Phibsophical

Critique (University o f California Press, 1984), and Malcolm Macmillan, Freud
Evaluated: The Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991).

34
explorer, a solver of deep mysteries, a rigorously objective
thinker, and an ethically scrupulous reporter of both clinical
data and therapeutic outcomes. That is the image that his own
suave texts, aided by the work of loyalist biographers from
Ernest Jones through Peter Gay, have managed to keep before
our eyes for many decades now. Surely, the average reader of
such works infers, a man who has widened our horizons so
decisively must have bequeathed us some irreversible gains in
our understanding of the mind.
Not surprisingly, however, the tradition of hero worship
is now being challenged as vigorously as are the claims of
Freudian therapy and theory. Since the 1970s, a rapidly grow­
ing number o f independent scholars—including among oth­
ers Henri Ellenberger, Paul Roazen, Frank Cioffi, Frank J.
Sulloway, Peter J. Swales, E. M. Thornton, Morton Schatzman,
Han Israels, and Phyllis Grosskurth—have been showing us a
different Freud, darker but far more interesting than the
canonical one. According to their revisionist view, our would-
be Prometheus was highly cultivated, sophisticated, and
endowed with extraordinary literary power, sardonic wit, and
charm, but he was also quite lacking in the empirical and eth­
ical scruples that we would hope to find in any responsible sci­
entist, to say nothing of a major one.
Now we are beginning to discern a notably willful and
opportunistic Freud who appears to have thrown together his
magisterial-looking claims from various unacknowledged
sources—some of them more folkloric than scientific—while
passing them off as sober inferences from the data o f his clin­
ical practice. Once having arrived at those claims, we see, he
adhered to them with a blind, combative stubbornness—

35
though not without willingness to expand the system on an ad
hoc basis to encompass newly perceived difficulties. And he
promoted that conceptually overstuffed system by means of
devious rhetorical maneuvers that disarmed criticism without
obliging Freud himself to take the criticism into material
account. Through all his conduct, at least from the 1890s
onward, runs a note of existential daring and high disdain that
could hardly be more remote from ordinary scientific pru­
dence. Fiercely believing in his general vision yet stooping to
low tricks in defense of it, this Freud is a saturnine self-
dramatizer who defies us to see through his bravado and pro­
vides us with tantalizing autobiographical clues for doing so.
Such a figure differs so radically from the Freud we thought
we knew that readers may understandably wonder which ver­
sion comes closer to the truth. But it is really no contest. Until
recently, most people who wrote about Freud in any detail
were open partisans of psychoanalysis who needed to safeguard
the legend of the scientist-genius-humanitarian, and many of
the sources they used had already passed through the censor­
ship of a jealously secretive psychoanalytic establishment,
whose leaders have been so fearful of open historical judgment
that they have locked away large numbers o f Freud s papers
and letters in the Library of Congress for periods extending as
far ahead as the twenty-second century. But as some sensitive
documents, having already served their Sleeping Beauty sen­
tences, make their way into the light, and as serendipity turns
up others from outside sources, the more improvisational and
fallible Freud will necessarily come into ever sharper focus.
Two examples may help to show this link between emer­
gent primary materials and the revisionist portrait of Freud.

36
When the orthodox analysts Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud,
and Ernst Kris first edited Freuds correspondence with his
one-time friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1950, they omitted every­
thing that, in their announced judgment, lacked “scientific”
interest. Republication, under different editorship, of the
unbowdlerized letters in 1985 showed that the dismissible
“unscientific” category had included everything from Freud’s
cavalier approach to clinical sessions—his writing to Fliess
while an early patient was under hypnosis, for example, and
his habit o f napping while his later psychoanalytic ones were
free-associating on the couch — to his naive acceptance of
Fliesss dubious theories o f periodicity and nasal-genital corre­
spondence.^ The full letters also put on view the now notori­
ous case of Emma Eckstein, whom Freud had grotesquely
diagnosed as “bleeding for love” o f himself, whereas she was
actually suffering from a half-meter o f gauze that Fliess had
accidentally left within the remains o f her nose after a mad-
scientist operation to thwart a supposed “nasal reflex neuro­
sis.” We will see that the Eckstein story, which Freuds heirs
were so anxious to hide from posterity, is no aberration in the
wider record; it constitutes an entirely typical instance of
Freud s rashness in always preferring the arcane explanation to
the obvious one.
As for the second example, the following scarcely believ­
able events may illustrate how previously unexamined (not

2. The 1950 German edition o f the Freud-Fliess letters became The Origin o f
Psycho-Analysis, Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887-1902, edited by
Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, translated by Eric Mosbacher
and James Strachey (Basic Books, 1954). The revelations about letter writing
and napping appear on pp. 21 and 303 o f the 1985 Freud-Fliess Letters.

37
suppressed) documents can transform our image of Freud.
Thanks to a long-neglected and rediscovered cache of letters
that avoided becoming time capsules in the Library of
Congress, we can now reconstruct the history of Freud s rela­
tions with one Horace Frink, a married American patient and
protégé who, like many another psychoanalyst of the 1920s,
was having an affair with a patient of his own, the bank heiress
Angelika Bijur.^ Despite this redundant testimony to his sex­
ual orientation, Frink was told by Freud that he was a latent
homosexual who stood in great peril of becoming an overt
one. To avoid that fate, Freud prescribed, Frink would have to
divorce his wife and marry Bijur, whom he also urged to
divorce her husband, even though Freud had never met either
of the allegedly unsuitable spouses.
Freuds transparent aim was to get his own hands on
some of the heiress Bijurs money. As he brazenly if perhaps
semifacetiously wrote to Frink in steering him toward divorce
and remarriage to Bijur, “Your complaint that you cannot
grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of
your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all
right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution
to the Psychoanalytic F u n d s.T h e divorce and remarriage did
occur—soon followed by the deaths of both of the abandoned,
devastated spouses, an early suit for divorce by Frinks new
wife, and the decline of the guilt-ridden Frink himself into a
psychotic depression and repeated attempts at suicide.

3. See Lavinia Edmunds, “ His Master’s Q \\o\ct," Johns Hopkins Magazine^ Vol.
40 (April 1988), pp. 40-49.
4, Edmunds, “ His Master’s Choice,” p. 45.

38
 It is not recorded whether Freud ever expressed regret
for having destroyed these four lives, but we know that it
would have been out of character for him to do so. Advancing
the fortunes of his movement was for him an imperative that
overrode all others. As many casual remarks in his correspon­
dence reveal, he was indifferent to his patients’ suffering and
quite dismissive of their real-world dilemmas, which struck
him as a set of pretexts for not getting down to the repressed
fantasies that really mattered. Nor did he care very much,
except from a public relations angle, whether those patients
improved as a result o f his treatment. As he sarcastically wrote
to Carl Jung in 1912 about a woman who had been in and out
of his care since 1908, “she is beyond any possibility o f therapy,
but it is still her duty to sacrifice herself to science.”^ Frink, it
seems, also had to be sacrificed—in this instance to Freud’s
working capital rather than to his intellectual passions.
What the Eckstein and Frink episodes have most in
common is a perfect match between Freud s diagnoses and his
immediate self-interest. That fit is obvious in Frink’s case. As
for Eckstein, by designating her bleeding as psychosomatic
Freud was exculpating both his surgeon friend Fliess and him­
self for having recommended the gruesome and pointless
operation. Such stories can only lead us to wonder whether
Freud’s powers of observation and analysis ever functioned
with sufficient independence from his wishes. That, in brief, is
the paramount issue confronting Freud studies today.

5. William McGuire, editor, The Freud—

Jung Letters: The Correspondence between
Sigm und Freud and C. G. Jung, translated by Ralph Manheim and R. E C . Hull
(Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 4 7 3 ^ 7 4 ,

39
 This is not to say that every Freud scholar is obliged to
tackle that issue head on. Among the recent round of revision­
ist books I will discuss here, only one (Allen Estersons) takes
Freuds scientific incompetence as its central theme. In varying
degrees, the others all convey mixed feelings about Freud’s
stature and the legitimacy of psychoanalytic claims. But for
that very reason, it is instructive to see how convergent their
accounts of Freud’s imperious style of reasoning prove to be.
Take, to begin with, James L. Rice’s informative and
subtle study, Freud*$ Russia: National Identity in the Evolution
o f PsychoanalysisF For Rice, Freud is anything but the objec­
tive scientific investigator who insulates himself from cultural
impulses and discovers only later, as he maintained, that imag­
inative writers had anticipated his findings. Instead, he is fully
a man of his own time, one whose sensibility, intellect, and
specific ideas about the mind were crucially shaped by his
reading. And he is also, as Rice puts it, “one of the great egos
of our age” (p. 26).
Behind Freud’s physicianly manner and his solemnity
about the libidinal sacrifices exacted by civilized mores. Rice
discerns, lay the nihilism o f a disillusioned revolutionary who
had deemed the species not worth saving after all. Insofar as it
has been noticed, this quality has understandably called to
mind the figure o f Nietzsche, whose writings Freud disingen­
uously claimed to have encountered after the psychoanalytic
system had been fully shaped.^ Rice understands, however.

6. Transaction Publishers, 1993.

7. Later: The Nietzsche connection has now been thoroughly explored by
Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche's Presence in Freud's Life and Thought (State University
of New York Press, 1995).

40
that nihilism and spiritual extremism in general had another
strong correlate in Freuds imagination: Russia. Freuds family
roots lay in Lithuania, where he retained many kin, and where
his imagination turned when he thought, as he continually
did, about the persecution of Jews and about their efforts to
strike back. Up to the early years of Stalins rule. Rice shows,
Freud thrilled to revolutionism and looked to Russia for a
political equivalent to his own assault on the tyranny of the
despotic superego. Indeed, the Stalinist debacle had much to
do with bringing on the futilitarian mood that dominates that
most bathetic of “classics,” Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930).
Long before the accession of Stalin, however, Freud
feared Russian extremism as strongly as he was drawn to it. As
Rice convincingly argues, Freud’s notion of ambivalence owed
much to his idea of the Russian national character, featuring a
supposed savage repressiveness which always gets reimposed
after sadistic and erotic uprisings. This creaky formula became
his master key to understanding Dostoevsky, about whom he
published a celebrated monograph in 1928, “Dostoevsky and
Parricide.” That essay in turn, as Rice coolly anatomizes it,
deserves our attention here as an especially clear instance of
the apriorism that vitiates all o f Freud’s psychoanalytic work,
both clinical and belletristic. The fact that we know so much
about Dostoevsky from other sources affords us a rare oppor­
tunity to compare the record to what Freud self-indulgently
made of it.
As Rice explains, in most respects “Dostoevsky and
Parricide” is a derivative effort, indebted to views o f the nov­
elist that had been popular ever since his enormous Germanic

41
vogue began in 1906. In one key respect, however, Freud’s
essay was original: its rejection of the idea that Dostoevsky suf­
fered from epilepsy and its substitution o f hysteria originating
from a primal scene, or a child’s discovery of ‘‘female castra­
tion” through witnessing an act of parental intercourse.
Although other analysts within Freud’s circle had already
made the diagnosis of hysteria on Dostoevsky’s part, it is obvi­
ous that they were doing so with the blessing of Freud, who
had decreed in 1908 that “all those illnesses called hystero-
epilepsies are simply hysterias” (Rice, p. 186).
Today, thanks to Rice’s own work in Dostoevsky and the
Healing Art (1985), there is no room for doubt that
Dostoevsky, who endured seizures approximately once a
month, waking and sleeping, for the last thirty-four years of
his life, was a genuine epileptic. As Rice concedes, however,
the state of medical knowledge in the 1920s allowed for some
uncertainty on that point. In “Dostoevsky and Parricide”
Freud advances his erroneous view with a typically guileful
show of tentativeness; but then, just as typically, he goes on to
treat it as firmly settled. Only with the hindsight granted by
the general decline of psychoanalytic authority can we per­
ceive, as Rice does, the perfect circularity of Freud’s argumen­
tative procedure. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy is brushed aside in
order to leave an opening for acts of non-neurological oedipal
decoding, acts whose consilience with one another then
“proves” that Dostoevsky was never epileptic.
This was by no means the only point o f obtuseness in
Freud’s assessment of Dostoevsky, against whom he bore a gra­
tuitous ill-will. As he wrote to Theodor Reik in 1929, he dis­
liked Dostoevsky because he had already seen too many

42
“pathological natures” in his clinical practice. “In art and life,”
he reported, “I am intolerant of them” (Rice, p. 159). In
“Dostoevsky and Parricide” this intolerance takes the form of
saddling the novelist with the political cynicism of the Grand
Inquisitor and, more remarkably still, with the criminal
temperament of Stavrogin. As Rice makes clear, Freud’s whole
indictment of Dostoevsky as humanity’s jailer is built on pros­
ecutorial animus and is buttressed by elementary misunder­
standing of the difference between an author and his created
characters. We need only add that such misunderstanding is
facilitated by psychoanalytic theory, which teaches us to peel
away defensive sublimations and to regard as primary what­
ever psychic materials appear most base.
Dostoevsky was an unlucky man in several ways, but he
did have the good fortune to have died without presenting his
troubles in person to Sigmund Freud and his epigones. Not so
the other notable Russian featured in Rice’s study, Sergei
Pankeev, or the “Wolf Man,” who, beginning in 1910, received
some five years’ worth of Freud’s professional attention. Thanks
to the suspenseful case history of 1918 in which Freud claimed
to have removed all of his symptoms and inhibitions, the Wolf
Man became the most celebrated of all Freud’s alleged cures.^
Freud knew perfectly well, however, that psychoanalysis had
not helped the depressed and obsessive Pankeev at all. By
reminding us o f this discrepancy and by going into the specifics
of Freud’s bungling of the case, Rice brings us to the verge of a
more general critique of Freudian logic.

8. See “ From the History o f an Infantile Neurosis” (SE, 17:3-122; the claim of
cure is made on p. 11).

43
 Just as he was later to do for Dostoevsky, Freud per­
ceived Pankeev through the distorting lens of “Russian national
character.” The concept of Russische Innerlichkeit^ or Russian
spiritual inwardness, was especially comforting in Pankeevs
case because it served Freud as a private excuse for the Wolf
Man’s recalcitrance to treatment. But Dostoevsky was already
very much on Freud’s mind when he first began treating
Pankeev in 1910. Indeed, one of the main contributions of
Freud's Russia is its demonstration that Pankeev and
Dostoevsky were curiously interchangeable in Freud’s mind.
If, for example, a reader o f “Dostoevsky and Parricide” won­
ders why Freud perversely insists on the murderousness of
the haunted and harmless novelist, who had been perma­
nently traumatized by a czarist firing squad. Rice suggests
that the answer can probably be found in the severely
relapsed Pankeev’s announced intention o f shooting Freud at
the time when the Dostoevsky paper was being composed
(p. 191). For the phylogenetically minded Freud, what one
Russian was acting out in 1926-1927 must be what another
Russian had secretly harbored in his unconscious fifty
years earlier.
The full career o f Sergei Pankeev, who was in and out
of psychoanalytic treatment for almost seventy years, makes
up one of the strangest chapters in the history o f Freud’s
movement. Having lost a millionaire’s fortune when (on
Freud’s advice) he neglected to return to Russia and rescue his
estate from the ascendant Bolsheviks, Pankeev adopted the
vocation of celebrity charity patient. As the protagonist of
Freud’s triumphant case history, he allowed himself to be
passed from one awestruck analyst to another and even

44
took to signing his letters ''Wolfsmann'' Later, however, his
conspicuous debilitation caused him to be regarded as a bomb
that could blow up in the face of psychoanalysis, and he was
strongly encouraged, by “pension” payments as well as exhor­
tations, not to tell his story to outsiders/^ But he eventually
did so anyway, spilling his grievances to the Austrian journal­
ist Karin Obholzer in the 1970s and lamenting that, in the
final stage of his long Freudian odyssey, “the whole thing looks
like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I first came
to Freud, and Freud is no more.” ^®
Yet Pankeevs thralldom to Freud was no greater than
that of the analytic community at large, which left the contra­
dictions and implausibilities in Freud’s published account of
the Wolf Man case entirely unchallenged from 1918 until the
1970s. Even with the aging Pankeev on hand as living evi­
dence that his announced cure was bogus, no Freudian dared
to ask whether Freud had tampered with the record to make
himself appear a master detective and healer. Rice under­
stands, however, that that is exactly what Freud did.
Involved as he was in a fierce battle against the
schismatics Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, each o f whom had
denied the importance of infantile sexuality in the etiology

9. See Frank J. Sulloway, “ Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories: The Social

Construction o f Psychoanalysis,” Isisy Vol. 82 (June 1991), pp. 245-275; the
quotation is from p. 260. The article has been reprinted in Freud and the History
o f Psychoanalysisy edited by Toby Gelfand and John Kerr (Analytic Press, 1992).
10. Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later: Conversations with Freud's
Controversial Patienu translated by Michael Shaw (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982), p. 172.

45
of neurosis, Freud was determined to find a primal scene to
serve as the fountainhead of Pankeev’s symptoms. He made it
materialize through a transparently arbitrary interpretation of
a remembered dream of Pankeev’s, from the suspiciously early
age of four, about six or seven white wolves (actually dogs, as
Freud was later compelled to admit) sitting in a tree outside
his window. The wolves, Freud explained, were the parents;
their whiteness meant bedclothes; their stillness meant the
opposite, coital motion; their big tails signified, by the same
indulgent logic, castration; daylight meant night; and all this
could be traced most assuredly to a memory from age one of
Pankeev’s mother and father copulating, doggy style, no fewer
than three times in succession while he watched from the crib
and soiled himself in horrified protest.
Because he has absorbed the revisionist spirit in Freud
scholarship. Rice stands in no danger of being taken in by
Freud’s posited primal scene. With acknowledgment, he
builds upon a trenchant study by the singularly critical psycho­
analyst Patrick Mahony, who, though he remains a loyal
Freudian, has exposed much of Freud’s inventiveness in this
instance. For Mahony and Rice alike, the Wolf Man’s primal
scene lacks all verisimilitude. Freud elsewhere reports that
Pankeev’s mother disliked sex, for example, yet here he has the
wedded pair going at it repeatedly like teen-agers on speed,
with a one-year-old kibitzer precociously keeping score while
observing, from across the room, both his mother’s “castrated”
genitals and her rapt but suitably passive facial expression—a
feat of observation, as Mahony has remarked, that “would

11. Patrick Mahony, Cries o f the WolfMan (International Universities Press, 1984).

46
exceed the ingenious staging of any pornographic film
producer.” *^
More tellingly, and more portentously for a final judg­
ment of psychoanalytic claims in general, Freud was never able
to convince Pankeev himself that this “terribly farfetched”
episode, as Pankeev later called it, had ever occurred (Obholzer,
p. 35). “These scenes from infancy,” Freud admits, “are not
reproduced during the treatment as recollections, they are the
products of construction” (SE, 17:50-51). That is to say, all
such “memories,” including the Wolf Mans, were proposed by
Freud himself without necessarily involving the patients coop­
eration or assent.
Yet having admitted that Pankeev had no recollection of
a primal scene, Freud twice reports specific memories on the
Wolf Man’s part that “confirm” that scene with volunteered
details. How strange this is, in view o f Pankeev’s assurance to
Karin Obholzer that, given the customs of his social class, he
could hardly have found himself in the parental bedroom
where Freud insistently placed him! (Obholzer, p. 36) And to
make matters more bizarre, in the course o f revising his paper
Freud himself came to deny the reality of the primal scene and
then to reassert its genuineness, leaving all three propositions
to jostle one another in the text. The illogic o f Freud’s presen­
tation is matched, for absurdity, only by the inherent ridicu­
lousness o f the fabricated tale itself.
If the Wolf Man never presented Freud with the
required primal scene, from which depths was it hauled up?
Rice argues that it was the child Freud, not Pankeev, who slept

12. Mahony, Cries o f the WolfM an, p. 52.

47
in his parents’ bedroom and who later fancied that he recalled
a traumatically enlightening act of intercourse. And it was
Freud who was demonstrably obsessed with copulation from
the rear and with yet another pivotal feature of the Wolf Man
analysis, sexual initiation at the hands of servant girls. One
might add the suggestive fact that little Sigismund, according
to The Interpretation o f Dreams, was permanently scarred by
a paternal rebuke after he had relieved himself in his parents’
bedroom (SE, 4:16), thus anticipating, and perhaps deter­
mining, what would later be ascribed to the Wolf
Man’s infancy.

2,
What necessarily falls beyond Rice’s purview is the relation of
the Wolf Man case, with its fanatical misconstructions and its
pathetic outcome, to Freud’s normal practice. For a concise
sense of that relation, readers can consult an important 1991
article by Frank Sulloway that reviews all of the major case
histories and infers that they compose a uniform picture
of forced interpretation, indifferent or negative therapeutic
results, and an opportunistic approach to t r u t h . W e can go
further and ask whether, strictly speaking, Freud can be said to
have ever practiced psychoanalysis in the sense that he com­
mended to others. Freud generally lacked the equanimity to
act on his key methodological principle, that the patient’s free
associations would lead o f their own accord to the crucially
repressed material. Some of his accounts and those o f his ex­
patients reveal that, when he was not filling the hour with

13. Sulloway, “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories.”

48
opinionated chitchat, he sought to “nail” the client with hastily
conceived interpretations which he then drove home unabat-
ingly. As a distinguished American psychiatrist, Joseph Wortis,
recalled from his own training analysis, Freud “would wait
until he found an association which would fit into his scheme
of interpretation and pick it up like a detective at a line-up
who waits until he sees his man.” ^"^
Revisionist students of psychoanalysis agree that one
case history in particular illustrates that tendentiousness with
especial clarity. This is the 1905 “Fragment of an Analysis o f a
Case o f Hysteria” (SE, 7:3-122), a work that forms the topic
of Robin Tolmach Lakoff and James C. Coynes new study,
Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse o f Power in Freud's Case
o f Dora}^ Even though “Dora” (Ida Bauer) severed relations
with Freud after just three months of tempestuous sessions,
Freud s portrait of her has been used as a model in psycho­
analytic training—as, in Erik H. Eriksons words, “the classi­
cal analysis of the structure and genesis o f hysteria.” *^ But by
today the Dora case is more often regarded as one long indis­
cretion on Freud’s part. As the first of his fully psychoanalytic
cases to be written up, it is relatively candid and vivid in its
portrayal of his behavior—so much so that it filled his
nonpsychoanalytic contemporaries with alarm. The immedi­
ate scandal aroused by the Dora report taught Freud to be

14. Joseph Wortis, “Fragments o f a Freudian Analysis,” American Journ al o f

Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 10 (1940), p. 844.
15. Teachers College Press, 1993.
16. Erik H. Erikson, “ Reality and Actuality,” o f the American Psycho­
analytic Association, Vol. 10 (1962), p. 455.

49
more circumspect in subsequent writings, but there is no sign
that it altered his peremptory clinical style.
Father Knows Best resembles many another recent study
of Dora in approaching the case from a manifestly feminist
perspective. It distinguishes itself from most other accounts,
however, by showing concern for Dora the actual person,
whose escape from Freud’s orbit may not have been as free of
consequence as other observers have assumed. Though the
eighteen-year-old Bauer went to Freud unwillingly, he did rep­
resent her final hope of establishing a relationship of trust and
mutual respect with an authoritative adult. By betraying that
hope in a singularly bullying way, Lakoff and Coyne maintain,
Freud helped to ensure Bauer’s later unhappiness.
Whether or not this is so, there can be no doubt that,
even by the standards of 1901, Freud’s treatment of Bauer
constituted psychiatric malpractice. Granted, Freud could not
have realized what now seems obvious, the sexual aggressive­
ness of his own behavior in attempting to force prurient sug­
gestions upon his virginal teen-age patient. But as Lakoff and
Coyne understand, what matters most is the larger picture,
namely, that Freud withheld all sympathy from Bauer and
assailed her self-esteem at every turn. Abetted by the bias of
psychoanalytic theory away from real-life factors and toward
sexual fantasy, he tried to convince Bauer that she herself, by
virtue of having repressed her latent homosexuality, her fan­
tasies of pregnancy and oral sex, and her memories of child­
hood masturbation and of the obligatory primal scene, was to
blame for a distress that clearly had much to do with the
current ugly situation into which she had been plunged by
others. But that was not the worst of it, for he also tacitly

50
sought her acquiescence in a scheme that can only be charac­
terized as monstrous.
Lakoff and Coyne offer an exceptionally clear account of
Bauer’s situation when she consulted Freud. The key facts are
these:
1. Her syphilitic father was having an affair with the
wife of a close family friend, “Herr K.”
2. Herr K himself had taken a sexual interest in Bauer
since she was fourteen years old and was now pressing his
attentions on her once again.
3. Bauer’s father evidently found those attentions con­
venient, since Herr K’s proposed misconduct seemed no worse
than his own and might distract Herr K from his role as
cuckolded husband, thus leaving the father a free hand with
Frau K.
4. When Bauer complained to her father about this, he
rebuffed her and sent her off to Freud to be cured not just of
her numerous tics and suicidal thoughts but also o f her
insubordination.
Freud was only too happy to oblige. In Lakoff and
Coyne’s summary, he demanded that Bauer “become aware of
her responsibility for her predicament and on the basis of that
awareness, modify her reactions, bringing them into confor­
mity with the wishes of her milieu” (p. 74). Prominent among
those wishes was a desire that Bauer give up her antagonism to
the pédophilie Herr K, whose intentions toward her had been
made plain by a forced kiss when she was fourteen and a direct
verbal invitation to sexual activity when she was sixteen, as
well as by daily gifts and flowers. Accordingly, Freud labored
to show Bauer not only that it had been hysterical on her part

51
to spurn Herr K s original kiss but also that she had been in
love with him all along.
It is a pity, Freud tells us, that Dora spitefully cut off the
treatment before he could bring her to this useful realization.
If Herr K had learned “that the slap Dora gave him by no
means signified a final ‘No’ on her part,” and if he had
resolved “to press his suit with a passion which left room for
no doubts, the result might very well have been a triumph of
the girl’s affection for him over all her internal difficulties”
(SE, 7:109-110). In short, a sexually and morally uninhibited
Bauer, rounded into psychic trim by Freud, would have been
of service to both her father and Herr K, the two predatory
males who, unlike any o f the women in the story, basked in
the glow of Freud’s unwavering respect.
It is this last aspect of gender bias that especially catches
the interest of Lakoff and Coyne. Using the tools of their aca­
demic specialties—Lakoff’s is “linguistic pragmatics,” and
Coyne’s is “interpersonal systems theory” —the coauthors take
turns exploring the nonreciprocity between Freud and Dora.
Freud, they show, overmastered and dehumanized the patient
with his badgering. In doing so, Lakoff and Coyne maintain.

17. “I should without question consider a person hysterical,” writes Freud about
the fourteen-year-old girl who had been grabbed and kissed in a darkened room
by her family’s married friend, “in whom an occasion for sexual excitement
elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable . . (SE,
7:28). Apart from its sheer dementedness, this statement is o f interest for the
light it throws not just on Freud’s conception o f female psychology but also on
the itchiness o f his diagnostic trigger finger. No wonder that he decided, in the
critical year 1897, that several o f his sisters, his brother, and he himself were all
hysterics, or that people who disagreed with him, including Fliess, Adler, and
even Jung, were suddenly found to be paranoiacs.

52
he was redoubling the age-old subjection o f women to mascu­
line will by exploiting a power imbalance already inherent in
the clinical setting.
Lakoff and Coyne suggest that all psychotherapy relies
to some extent on such an imbalance, and they consider it
indispensable to therapeutic progress. But psychoanalysis,
they feel, tips the scales egregiously, and doubly so when the
analyst is male and the analysand female. Freuds personal
quirks aside, Lakoff and Coyne argue, psychoanalysis as an
institution—with its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of
emotional regression, its depreciation of the patients self­
perceptions as inauthentic, its reckless dispensation o f guilt, its
historic view of womens moral inferiority and destined pas­
sivity, and its elastic interpretative license, allowing the analyst
to be “right every time” —seems ideally geared to assaulting
the very selfhood o f insecure female patients.
The point is worth pondering, but the Dora case,
precisely because it is one of the worst instances on record of
sexist hectoring by a reputed healer, is not representative
enough to convey it. If Lakoff and Coyne’s primary target is
really psychoanalysis rather than Freud personally, they would
have done better to show how the standard analytic “power
imbalance” warps the conduct of cases in which the therapist
behaves more rationally and humanely than Freud did with
Bauer. Contemporary analysts, faced with Lakoff and Coyne’s
critique, will have no trouble disowning this archaic example
and maintaining that Father Knows overlooks the improved
modern state of their craft.
Odd as it may seem, this book must also be judged
insufficiently skeptical toward Freud himself Because their

53
interest stops at Freuds tyrannizing over Bauer and his dis­
missal of her real-life predicament in favor o f ‘ an inspection of
[her] internal, pre-existing conflicts” (p. 74), Lakoff and
Coyne rashly concede the accuracy of vv^hat he asserted about
those conflicts. There is, they declare, “no clear reason to dis­
pute any of Freuds interpretations o f the material” (p. 41); he
is “precisely on target with every interpretation that reflects
poorly on Doras motives” (p. 128); and in general, he “often
displays a remarkably subtle analytic ear for language as his
patients use it” (p. 44), presumably in this case as well as
in others. But these compliments defy the by now well-
established fact that Freud’s hypersensitive ear was chiefly
attuned to his own fanciful associations, not to Bauers. And
his reconstructions of Bauer’s infantile habits, traumas, and
repressions are, transparently, a tissue of flimsy preconceived
ideas. As he aptly said in a letter to Fliess when he had known
Bauer for scarcely a week, the case “has smoothly opened to the
existing collection of picklocks” (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 427).
There is, finally, the neglected but overarching issue of
whether Bauer was ever a hysteric in the first place. Lakoff
and Coyne casually assume that she was, but her imme­
diate family featured a rich array o f disorders, from
asthma to tuberculosis to syphilis, that would have set off
alarms in the mind of a responsible physician. We will
probably never know whether Bauer suffered from an organic
disease, because Freud made no attempt to find out. Instead,
he followed his customary diagnostic procedure, which we
have already seen at work with the Wolf Man and in the
armchair case of Dostoevsky. That is, he leapt immediately to
a conclusion that would permit him to put his trademark

54
suppositions into play and then held to them like a pit
bull—later, however, portraying himself as having gradu­
ally solved the case with all the prudent objectivity and
uncanny astuteness o f his favorite literary character,
Sherlock Holmes.

Lakoff and Coynes hesitation about taking too adversary a

position toward Freud and psychoanalysis illustrates the con­
tinuing resilience of the Freud legend, which tends to snap
back into shape at every point that is not under immediate
pressure. To a lesser extent, even James Rice’s steadily lucid
book on Freud and Russia exhibits the same phenomenon.
And so, as we shall see, does another revisionist effort, John
Kerr’s otherwise superb A Most Dangerous Method, All four
authors could have profited from scanning still another recent
book, Allen Esterson’s Seductive Mirage: An Exploration o f the
Work o f Sigmund Freud.^^ By concisely surveying the whole
Freudian enterprise with a skeptical eye, Esterson dispels any
impression that some parts of that enterprise have passed
beyond controversy.
Except for an incisive discussion o f the Wolf Man case
establishing that Freud must have invented one of its key figures,
the servant girl Grusha, Seductive Mirage does not add to our
factual knowledge about Freud. Rather, it closely scrutinizes
his ethics and rhetoric, his original “seduction theory” and its
putative correction, his major case histories, his theories of
neurosis and dream formation, his several reformulations of

18. Open Court, 1993.

55
metapsychology, and his clinical technique and its results.
Estersons book, I should emphasize, is not a polemic written
by a long-time foe of psychoanalysis. It is a piece of careful and
sustained reasoning by a mathematician who happens to be
offended by specious means of argumentation. And its eventual
verdict—that every notion and practice peculiar to psycho­
analysis is open to fundamental objection—rests on evidence that
any reader can check by following up Estersons cited sourcesJ^
Because people do have such a hard time perceiving the
nakedness of Emperor Freud, Seductive Mirage viiW prove espe­
cially illuminating for the attention it gives to Freuds seduc­
tion theory and its sequel, the founding o f psychoanalysis per
se. After all, to take note of Freud s unsuccess with individual
patients like Dora and the Wolf Man leaves the working
assumptions o f psychoanalysis largely uncompromised. There
is always the possibility that Freud simply had little aptitude
for therapeutically applying his perfectly sound principles. But
if, with Esterson, we uncover grave flaws of reasoning or even
outright fraudulence behind the cases that supposedly com­
pelled Freud to adopt those principles, the stakes of the game
are considerably raised.
As Esterson relates, up until a certain day in 1897
there was no such thing as psychoanalysis. The method of in­
vestigation was in place, but it was producing “findings” of
an opposite purport—namely, that hysteria and obsessional
neurosis were caused by the repression of actual sexual

19. Regrettably, however, Estersons bibliography contains some errors, and it

fails to cite all o f the works referenced in the main text. I hope that a second
printing will remove this defect.

56
abuse in childhood. Psychoanalysis came into existence
when Freud reinterpreted the very same clinical data to indi­
cate that it must have been his patients themselves,
when scarcely out o f the cradle, who had predisposed them­
selves to neurosis by harboring and then repressing incestuous
designs of their own. Every later development o f psycho­
analytic theory would crucially rely upon this root hypothesis,
which spared Freud the embarrassment o f having to discard his
most cherished concept, that of repression. But had he actual­
ly discovered anything, and if so, where was his evidence for it?
As Esterson reminds us, the controversy over Freuds
seduction theory has concentrated on whether the accusatory
tales recounted by his patients were believable. Some feminists
and defenders o f children follow Jeffrey Masson in holding
that those stories were true and that Freud showed a failure o f
nerve in renouncing them.^® Freudians, by contrast, take it for
granted that the stories were false. In Peter Gays words, 'Tor a
time [Freud] continued to accept as true his patients lurid
recitals,” until he reluctantly concluded that he had been told
“a collection o f fairy t a l e s . B u t Esterson, drawing on pio­
neering studies by Frank Cioffi and Jean G. Schimek among
others, demonstrates that both parties have been drastically
misled.^^ The question they should have posed to themselves
is not. Were those stories true? but rather. What stories?

20. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression o f the
Seduction Theory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
21. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life fo r Our Time (Norton, 1988), pp. 94, 96.
22. See Frank Cioffi, “Wollheim on Freud,” Imjuiry, Vol. 15 (1972),
pp. 171-186; “Was Freud a Liar?,” The Listener, Vol. 91 (February 7, 1974),
pp. 172-174; ‘“ Exegetical Myth-Making in Griinbaum’s Indictment o f Popper

57
 It was Freud himself who taught both his followers and
his adversaries to take the seduction narratives seriously as pro­
ductions of his patients minds. Beginning in 1914, some
twenty years after his work on the pivotal cases, he repeatedly
asserted that “almost all my women patients told me that they
had been seduced by their father” and that he had innocently
believed those narratives until their cumulative unlikelihood
became too apparent (SE, 22:120; see also 14:17 and
20:33-34). But as Esterson makes unavoidably clear, Freuds
papers from the Nineties expose this claim as a cover-up for a
very different state of affairs.
“Before they come for analysis,” Freud declared in 1896,
“the patients know nothing about these scenes__ Only the
strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to
embark on a reproduction of them” (SE, 3:204). “The princi­
pal point,” he revealed, “is that I should guess the secret and
tell it to the patient straight out” (SE, 2:281). And he con­
fessed that even after his patients had been “induced” to join
in the storymaking, '"they have no feeling o f remembering the
scenes" thus concocted (SE, 3:204; italics added). Here is the
heart of the matter. As in the case of the Wolf Mans and

and Exoneration o f Freud,” in M ind, Psychoa)ialysis and Science, edited by Peter

Clark and Crispin Wright (Blackwell, 1988), pp. 61-87; and Jean G. Schimek,
“Fact and Fantasy in the Seduction Theory: A Historical KQw\eyN," Journal o f the
American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 35 (1987), pp. 937-965. Esterson’s
conclusions were largely anticipated by an article published when his book was
in press, Morton Schatzman’s “Freud: Who Seduced Whom?” New Scientist,
March 21, 1992, pp. 34-37. For a still more far-reaching study, upon which 1
rely below, see Han Israels and Morton Schatzman, “The Seduction Theory,”
History o f Psychiatry, Vol. 4 (1993), pp. 23-59.

58
Doras primal scenes, Freud himself laid down the outlines o f
the seduction plots, which were then fleshed out from “clues”
supplied by his bewildered and frightened patients, whose
signs of distress he took to be proof that his constructions
were correct.^-^
Freud s motive, in later years, for trying to hide his prin­
cipal authorship o f his patients’ “scenes” is easy to discern. The
myth of the birth of psychoanalysis required that some sexual
material have been presented to Freud for explanation.
Otherwise, even a simpleton would be able to detect the fal­
lacious means by which Freud segued from the seduction
theory to psychoanalysis proper. In Estersons words, “having
decided that his ou'n constructions [about childhood sexual
abuse] are untrue he concludes that they are not genuine
occurrences, but are phantasies o f his patientsr (p. 133). That
was exactly the indefensible leap Freud had taken, but it dis­
appeared from view as soon as he convinced his critics, and
perhaps himself as well, that his patients had come to him
with “lurid recitals.”
Given Freud’s severe problem with reality testing, it may
seem wonderful that he was able to let go of his seduction
theory at all. But here again, dishonesty and cowardice played

23. Freud’s early papers make it clear why he felt entitled to dictate what must
have happened to his patients decades earlier. For him, each presented symptom
bore a message about a homologous sexual trauma. Thus, vomiting pointed
infallibly to oral violation, painful defecating to anal violation, and so on (e.g.,
SE, 3:214). This allegorizing tendency, whereby a symptom is regarded as the
charade o f an unconscious memory, survived the seduction theory and found a
happy home within psychoanalysis; it is, for example, a prominent feature o f
the Dora case.

59
a larger role than rationality. In the spring of 1896 he had
already delivered a talk announcing the seduction theory to
Viennese neurologists and psychiatrists, claiming that his
viev^s had been borne out by ‘ some eighteen cases o f hysteria,”
treated on the whole with “therapeutic success” (SE, 3:199).
We now know from the uncensored Freud-Fliess letters that,
at the time, Freud had not resolved a single one o f his thirteen
cases; nor, despite increasingly frantic efforts, did he ever do
so. As the months dragged on and his patients wandered away,
disillusioned, each of them became a potential refuter of his
seduction claims. Somehow he had to minimize his exposure
to the revelation that those people had been neither sexually
abused nor cured of their symptoms. His means o f doing so
was to slap together a new theory whereby it no longer mattered
what had happened to patients in their infancy, since in their
fantasy life they and every other child who ever breathed had
been the would-be seducers—namely, of their opposite-
sex parents.
Freud had a plain medical and scientific obligation to
retract his seduction theory as soon as he realized its implau-
sibility in 1897. Instead, he publicly reaffirmed it in the fol­
lowing year (SE, 3:263). By 1905, in the Dora case history, he
was taking the desperate tack of pretending that his published
conclusions of 1895 and 1896 had already been fully psycho­
analytic; the Dora case, he maintained, would “substantiate”
those findings (SE, 7:7). And even when he felt secure enough
to admit his seduction mistake and turn it to rhetorical advan­
tage, he continued to adulterate the facts. In 1896 the alleged
seducers of infants were said to have been governesses, teach­
ers, servants, strangers, and siblings, but in later descriptions

60
Freud retroactively changed most of them to fathers so that a
properly oedipal spin could be placed on the recycled material.
At every stage, earlier acts of fakery and equivocation were
compounded by fresh ones. And this pattern, as Esterson
shows in devastating detail, holds for the entirety of Freud’s
psychoanalytic career.
Dissembling aside, it was no coincidence that the key
amendment enabling psychoanalysis to begin its colorful his­
tory was one that placed Freud altogether beyond the reach of
empirically based objections. Thenceforth, he and his suc­
cessors could claim to be dealing with evidence that was
undetectable by any means other than his own clinical tech­
nique—the same technique, as Esterson emphasizes, that had
generated the false tales of seduction. Instead o f spelling out
that technique for the sake of the medically solicitous or the
scientifically curious, Freud chose to keep it a mystery that he
would unveil only to disciples whom he trusted to accept his
word without cavil.
In a word, then, Freud had launched a pseudoscience—
that is, a nominally scientific enterprise which is so faulty at
the core that it cannot afford to submit its hypotheses for
unsparing peer review by the wider community, but must
instead resort to provisos that forestall any possibility of refu­
tation. And, despite some well-intentioned efforts at reform, a
pseudoscience is what psychoanalysis has rem ain ed .Su ch a
doctrine can accrue any number of theoretical niceties as it

24, The movement’s anti-empirical features are legion. They include its cult o f
the founder’s personality; its casually anecdotal approach to corroboration; its
cavalier dismissal o f its most besetting epistemic problem, that o f suggestion; its

61
continually trims its sails to the Zeitgeist, but it can never con­
front the nullity of its knowledge claims, since to do so would
be institutional suicide.

4^.
It is precisely the institutional emergence of psychoanalysis—
its metamorphosis from Freuds personal crusade to a con­
tentious and internally riven movement—that occupies John
Kerr s A Most Dangerous Method: The Story o f Jung, Freud, and
Sabina Spielrein}'^ As its subtitle indicates, this impressive
work is essentially a narrative, one that spans the crucial years
(1904-1914) of Freuds volatile collaboration and eventual
falling out with Jung. But the narrative is informed at all
points by Kerrs discriminating awareness of methodological
issues. The story he tells is not just a dramatic tale o f profes­
sional empire building, ethnic mistrust, erotic complications,
and vendettas; it is also an account of the haphazard way in
which psychoanalytic doctrine acquired some of its major lin-

habitual confusion o f speculation with fact; its penchant for generalizing from a
small number o f imperfectly examined instances; its proliferation o f theoretical
entities bearing no testable referents; its lack o f vigilance against self-contradic­
tion; its selective reporting o f raw data to fit the latest theoretical enthusiasm; its
ambiguities and exit clauses, allowing negative results to be counted as positive
ones; its indifference to rival explanations and to mainstream science; its absence
o f any specified means for preferring one interpretation to another; its insistence
that only the initiated are entitled to criticize; its stigmatizing o f disagreement as
“resistance,” along with the corollary that, as Freud put it, all such resistance
constitutes “actual evidence in favour of the correctness” o f the theory (SE,
13:180); and its narcissistic faith that, again in Freuds words, “applications o f
analysis are always confirmations o f it as well” (SE, 22:146).
25. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

62
eanients. For Kerr, the deeply antiscientific character o f
Freudianism—with its unformalized procedures, its gratuitous
causal assertions, and its appeal to evidence consisting of
unobservable buried wishes—left a rational void that could
only be filled by exercises of personal power.
Thus readers of A Most Dangerous Method who grasp the
complex interactions between Jung, Freud, and Sabina
Spielrein, the hitherto underappreciated woman who inadver­
tently sharpened the co-leaders’ differences and precipitated
their split, will find that they have also acquired insight into
the surprisingly negotiable content of psychoanalysis itself
Because Freud was reluctant to say just what he meant by
psychoanalysis, and because he was principally concerned to
launch an international movement that would leave behind
his hapless circle of misfits and drudges in Vienna, it appeared
for a while that Jung, his chosen heir, could bend the emerg­
ing “science” to spiritualizing purposes o f his own. Eventually,
of course, Freud proved adamant on large and small points of
dogma—but not before he and Jung had freely traded specu­
lations and turned psychoanalytic theory building into a tense
dialogue of coded thrusts and parries.
In several respects, A Most Dangerous Method serves as
an invaluable corrective to received views about the Jung-
Freud relationship. Kerr establishes, for example, that in prestige
Jung was by no means the supplicant “son” to the authoritative
“father,” Freud. Because the Zurich contingent commanded a
psychiatric clinic and had already published well-regarded
research, “it was Jung and [Eugen] Bleuler who put Freud on
the scientific map, not the other way around” (p. 9). Similarly,
the common assumption that Jung was the less empirically

63
minded of the two thinkers cannot survive Kerrs penetrating
discussion. Freud was more suspicious of idealizations than
Jung, but the latter, for all his woolly emphasis on a guiding
subliminal self, adhered to hypotheses about conflict and
regression that required fewer leaps of faith than Freud’s.
Whereas Jung believed, plausibly, that the failure of
patients to cope with present dilemmas caused them to act
regressively, Freud saddled himself with a counterintuitive
structure o f inextinguishable, polymorphously perverse
wishes and repressions that were supposed to become sud­
denly virulent many years after their formation, dwarfing the
patient’s contemporary sources of trouble and requiring a
mode of analysis that demeaned those sources as trivial.
Thus, while Freud treated the patients unconscious as an
obscure and devious text to be deciphered through the
cracking of resistances, Jung saw the unconscious as a poten­
tial ally that deserved to be courted and activated. Jung may
have been naive in his optimism and reckless (as Freud was)
about the transmission o f ancestral impulses, but his support­
ive and enabling attitude forestalled the kind of injury that
Freud wrought on Dora, the Wolf Man, and others as he
prodded them for “memories” that would shore up his dubious
premises.
We are often admonished that Freud’s work should not
be held accountable to stricter standards than those prevailing
in his own day. As Kerr shows, however, Freuds peers under­
stood both the man and his errors more clearly than have the
generations that came o f age after psychoanalysis had acquired
its transatlantic vogue. Freud, observed William James in
1909, is “obsessed with fixed ideas” (Kerr, p. vi); in the words

64
of Poul Bjerre, he possessed ‘ an infelicitous tendency to drive
one-sidedness to absurdity” (p. 347). His refusal to provide
extensive case data to support his notions aroused generally
unfavorable comment (pp. 91, 117). As for his therapeutic
regimen, James Jackson Putnam remarked in 1906 that it
established a “dependence of the patient upon the physician
which it may, in the end, be difficult to get rid o f” (p. 233).
And Putnam added that such unhealthy closeness allows the
therapist to impose his sexual preoccupations through sugges­
tion (p. 233). As Albert Moll astutely observed.

Much in the alleged histories has been introduced by the

suggestive questioning of the examiner__ The impres­
sion produced in my mind is that the theory of Freud
and his followers suffices to account for the clinical his­
tories, not that the clinical histories suffice to prove the
truth o f the theory. (Kerr, p. 245)

Above all, A Most Dangerous Method is useful for the

light it throws on the ossification o f psychoanalysis, during the
period o f the Freud-Jung struggle, into what Kerr calls “a
totalizing worldview” (p. 9). Kerr is at his best when showing
how inevitable it was that psychoanalysis would be plagued by
sectarianism and, in its reconstituted core, patched together
by enforced ideological conformity. Running through this
book, subtly but insistently, is a parallel between psycho­
analysis and a modern totalitarian regime in which propaganda
campaigns and heresy trials come to preempt free debate.
That analogy becomes inescapable when Kerr recounts the
activity of Freuds top-secret “Committee,” convened in 1912

65
by none other than Freuds official biographer-to-be Ernest
Jones, and taking as its mission the shielding of Freud from
criticism by promulgating whatever his latest line might be
and by heaping ridicule on his opponents. This Orwellian
project, which continued until 1926 and remained undis­
closed until 1944, guaranteed that the sounding board for
Freuds newest fancies, like those of any insecure dictator,
would be an echo chamber.
Unsettling though it is, Kerrs discussion of the inquisi­
torial “Committee” will not be considered either his most
original or his most shocking contribution to revisionist Freud
scholarship,^^ That distinction belongs to two “love stories,”
one solidly documented and the other quite speculative, that
Kerr regards as having crucially affected Freuds and Jungs
perception and treatment of each other. The less certain of
those stories shouldn’t affect our picture of Freud unless it is
borne out by further research. But in the better-established
case of Sabina Spielrein’s affair with Jung, at least, we gain
some valuable insight into the sexual ethics of the earliest
psychoanalysts and the sexual politics that affected the shap­
ing of both Freudian and Jungian theory.
Briefly, Sabina Spielrein began as Jung’s patient in
Zurich, became his soul friend and mistress, drifted into
Freud’s orbit when the already married Jung deemed her a lia­
bility, and gained equivocal acceptance as a Freudian analyst in
Vienna, thereafter returning to her native Russia to introduce
and champion psychoanalysis until Stalin closed it down as

26. For a full narrative o f the Committees activities, see Phyllis Grosskurth, The Se­
cret Ring: Freuds Inner Circle and the Politics o f Psychoanalysis (Addison-Wesley, 1991).

66
counterrevolutionary.^^ In the course o f that career—brought
to a barbaric end when Spielrein and the other Jews of
Rostov-on-Don were herded into a synagogue and shot by
Nazi troops in 1942—Spielrein worked not just with Freud
and Jung but also with such other luminaries as Jean Piaget,
A. R. Luria, and Lev Vygotsky. The latter two were for a while
her protégés in Moscow.
As Kerr is at some pains to argue, the one point on
which Spielrein has hitherto received general credit, that of
having anticipated Freud’s concept of a death instinct, is
largely a misapprehension. On the other hand, Kerr shows,
Spielrein has not been properly acknowledged as the proto­
type of Jung’s 'anima,” the female presence that supposedly
occupies a command post within a man’s unconscious. But
that attenuated form of immortality looks like small recom­
pense for Spielrein’s suffering as a result of Jung’s sexual
hypocrisy and the icy misogyny with which she was greeted by
Freud’s small-minded cadre in Vienna.
Freud had heard directly from Spielrein about her
involvement with her psychiatrist Jung, and he knew that the
aspirations of the paterfamilias and hospital officer Jung in
Protestant Zurich could have been considerably thwarted by
word of that affair.^^ As he incurred more and more of

27. Spielrein began to come into modern historical focus with the publication
o f the Freud-Jung letters in 1974, and much o f her importance was grasped by
Aldo Carotenuto in A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Freud and Ju n g
(1982; revised edition. Pantheon, 1983). Since then, however, two further
discoveries o f unedited documents have permitted the fuller understanding that
is registered in A M ost Dangerous Method,
28, Given the norms o f conduct in Freud s circle, however, he could hardly have

67
Freuds intellectual displeasure, Jung trembled before the
prospect of exposure by Freud, who had a well-known record
of dealing unscrupulously with former friends.^^ But if Kerr is
right, Jung held a higher card that could be played if necessary:
Freud himself was the potential subject of an even more
damaging story, one about a sexual involvement with his own
sister-in-law.
It was Peter Swales—by all odds the canniest and most
dogged, as well as the most irrepressible, of Freud historians—
who first systematically argued that Freud, during the decades
spanning the turn of the century, may have consoled himself
for his then sexless, intellectually sterile marriage by sleeping
with his usual traveling companion and confidante, Minna
Bernays.^® The idea has been summarily dismissed by
Freudians, who find it incompatible with the high­
mindedness they associate with the discoverer of ubiquitous

been morally outraged by the news. As Kerr relates, “Gross’s exploits were leg­
endary, Stekel had long enjoyed a reputation as a ‘seducer,’ Jones was paying
blackmail money to a former patient, and even good Pastor Pfister was lately
being entranced by one o f his charges. Indeed, the most extraordinary entangle­
ment was Ferenczi’s, the amiable Hungarian having taken into analysis the
daughter o f the woman he was having an affair with and then falling in love
with the girl” (pp. 378-379).
29. See, e.g., Kerr’s recounting o f how Freud vindictively leaked Fliess’s unpub­
lished theory o f bisexuality to Otto Weininger, who mysteriously committed
suicide after pirating that theory in his international best seller. Sex and
Character > Freud lied to Fliess in denying his own instigation o f the pla­
giarism, but by 1903, thanks to a widely publicized lawsuit, his true role in the
affair was common knowledge.
30. See Swales, “Freud, Minna Bernays, and the Conquest o f Rome: New Light
on the Origins o f Psychoanalysis,” New American Review, Vol. 1 (1982), pp. 1-23.

68
incest w i s h e s . B u t Swales s essay on the topic abounds in
arresting circumstantial evidence. And we do know for certain
that Jung confidentially told a number of people that the
morally distressed Bernays herself had revealed the secret to
him in person. It is equally clear that something induced
Freud and Jung alike to step back from mud-slinging and to
end their collaboration on relatively civil terms. To put it
mildly, the jury is still out on the Freud-Bernays question.
Meanwhile, of course, there remains the less sensational
but more important issue o f whether anything is salvageable
from a once respected body of theory whose evidential
grounds have proved so flimsy. On this point, I must say, John
Kerr is not always helpful or consistent. At moments he for­
gets his own powerful account of the psychoanalytic move­
ment’s early and decisive break with the scientific ethos— as,
for example, when he refers to Freud as “a systematic thinker
of the highest rank” (p. 101), or when he characterizes the typ­
ically self-flattering Rat Man case as “a stunning demonstra­
tion of the method and a matchless psychological study in its
own right” (p. 184). Kerr also seems occasionally inclined to
lay all the subsequent troubles o f the psychoanalytic move­
ment at the door of the Jung-Freud clash. Freudians who are
willing to come to grips with the shameful side of their history.

31. See, e.g., the limp rebuttal by Peter Gay, “Sigmund and Minna? The
Biographer as Voyeur,” The New York Times Book Review, January 29, 1989,
pp. 1, 43-45. Having examined the newly available cache o f Freud-Bernays
letters in the Library o f Congress, Gay reports with relief that there is no
suspicious evidence suggesting an affair; letters 95 through 160, those covering
the exact years at issue, are unaccountably missing!

69
he tells us, may yet be able to “renovate [psychoanalysis] or
build extensions” upon it (p. 14).
It may be pertinent to note here that A Most Dangerous
Method began as a dissertation directed by a psychoanalyst,
though a relatively critical one, Robert Holt. In a concluding
bibliographical essay, Kerr tells us that Holts (distinctly waf­
fling) book of 1989, Freud Reappraised, has served as one of
his essential guides to the scientific standing of psychoanalysis.
Has Kerr, like the Frank Sulloway of the unrevised 1979
Freudy Biologist o f the Mind, written a major study of psycho­
analysis that is still residually under the spell of the Freud leg­
end? If so, I would like to think that his further development
will also follow Sulloways. For now, 1 am left wondering
which wing of the ramshackle Freudian edifice could be
deemed solid enough to “build extensions” on.

A Most Dangerous Method does make a case for psychoanalysis

as having been a progressive force at the turn of the century,
when psychiatry was burdened with sinister theories o f hered­
itary degeneration and racial inferiority. We should be grateful
to the early Freudians, Kerr tells us, for their candor about sex,
their cultivation of a developmental perspective, their address­
ing of the problems and opportunities posed by transference,
and their belief in deep and intricate continuities among a
patient’s disparate productions of symptom and language.
Though one could retort that the Freudian craze postponed
investigative approaches that have proved more fruitful than
psychoanalysis, this perspective has some merit. To be deemed
progressive, after all, a psychological movement needn’t put

70
forward accurate hypotheses; it need only raise useful new
questions and attract followers who are eager to put aside the
older dispensation.
Let us not remain in doubt, however, about whether
psychoanalysis remains a vanguard influence today. Incorrect
but widely dispersed ideas about the mind inevitably end by
causing social damage. Thanks to the once imposing prestige
of psychoanalysis, people harboring diseases or genetic condi­
tions have deferred effective treatment while scouring their
infantile past for the sources of their trouble. Parents have ago­
nized about having caused their childrens homosexuality, and
gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental dis­
order. And women have accepted a view of themselves as
inherently envious, passive, and amoral.
Most recently, moreover, even our criminal justice sys­
tem has suffered episodes of delusion that would have been
impossible without the prior diffusion of Freuds ideas. As I
write, a number of parents and child-care providers are serving
long prison terms, and others are awaiting trial, on the basis of
therapeutically induced “memories” of child sexual abuse that
never in fact occurred.^^ Although the therapists in question

32. See, e.g., Lawrence Wright, “Remembering Satan,” The New Yorker^ May
17, 1993, pp. 60-81; May 24, 1993, pp. 54-76; Richard Ofshe and Ethan
Watters, “Making Monsters,” Society, Vol. 30, No. 3 (March/April 1993),
pp. 4 -1 6 ; Martin Gardner, “The False Memory Syndrome,” Skeptical Inquirer,
Vol. 17 (Summer 1993), pp. 370-375; and Ofra Bikel’s documentary,
“ Innocence Lost: The Verdict” (PBS Frontline, July 20-21, 1993). It is necessary
to add that I do not mean to impugn the integrity or minimize the suffering o f
actual incest survivors. They, too, have a stake in our ability to discriminate
between real and delusional reports o f childhood experience.

71
are hardly Park Avenue psychoanalysts, the tradition of
Freudian theory and practice unmistakably lies behind their
tragic deception of both patients and jurors.
This claim will, I know, strike most readers as a slur on
Freud and his movement. Didn’t psychoanalysis arise precisely
from a denial that certain alleged molestations were veridical?
But we have seen earlier that it was Freud’s technique of break­
ing down resistance that brought those charges into being in
the first place, and we have further seen that the same tech­
nique, unaltered in any way, saddled Dora and the Wolf Man
with initially unremembered primal scenes. By virtue of his
prodding, both before and after he devised psychoanalytic the­
ory, to get his patients to “recall” nonexistent sexual events,
Freud is the true historical sponsor of “false memory syn­
drome.” Indeed, the modern cases hinge absolutely on Freud’s
still unsubstantiated notion that children routinely repress
anxiety-producing memories—for how else could their initial
denial of having been molested be so blithely set aside?
Moreover, our incest Pied Pipers are following the most basic,
if also the least noted, of all Freudian precedents, a discount­
ing of the suggestibility of patients under emotional stress.^^

33. It may seem calumnious to associate the skeptical, thoroughly secular

founder o f psychoanalysis with the practice o f Bible-thumping incest counselors
who typically get their patient-victims to produce images o f revolting satanic rit­
uals. Yet in the annus mirabilis 1897, Freud wrote a stunning letter to Wilhelm
Fliess reporting that he had obtained from his patient Emma Eckstein “a scene
about the circumcision o f a girl. The cutting off o f a piece o f the labium
m inor... sucking up the blood, after which the child was given a piece o f the
skin to eat___I dream, therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that are
carried on secretly, and understand the harsh therapy o f the witches’ judges”

72
 Freuds net legacy, then, may not be quite so positive as
the conventional wisdom assumes. While we are assessing it,
we can only applaud the efforts of revisionist scholars to
restore to us the historical Freud who, before his own promo­
tional efforts and those of his clandestine “Committee” ren­
dered him sacrosanct, used to be regarded with healthy skep­
ticism. The new Freud studies are having the salutary effect o f
putting the deviser o f psychoanalysis back where he stood at
the turn o f the century, possessed of a hobbyhorse about the
infantile-sexual roots of neurosis and having to win over a
sophisticated audience of doubters. The first time around,
Freud prevailed by snubbing his most acute critics and pos­
turing before lay readers who knew only that he stood in the
forefront o f the anti-Victorian camp. This time, it seems, he
will not be so lucky.

November 18, 1993

(Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 227). As Peter Swales has shown, what Freud meant
here was not that he believed in literal witchcraft but that he shared the clerics’
belief that a thematically pointed application o f duress could evince from the
subject genuine psychic material, uncompromised by suggestion. See Swales, “A
Fascination with Witches,” The Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 8 (November 1982),
pp. 21-25. The principle o f internal psychic determinism was so fixedly rooted
in Freud’s mind that he discounted not only the influence o f his own insistent
coaching but even that o f theologically crazed interrogators, centuries earlier,
who were extracting information by means o f the rack and thumbscrew.

73
£XCHANGE
 February 3y 1994

]. SCHIMEK is Professor o f Clinical Psychology at New York

University and a training analyst at the Institute for Psycho­
analytic Training and Research in New York City. He writes:

In The New York Review issue o f November 18, F. Crews

(“The Unknown Freud”) makes a reference to an article of
mine. In this article I showed that Freud s later accounts of
his “seduction theory” (“all my female patients told me they
had been seduced by their father”) does not fit with the way
he presented his theory and data originally in 1896.
An examination of Freuds texts o f 1896 suggests that
the early sexual trauma was not based directly on the
patients’ recovered memories but was reconstructed by
Freud, by interpreting a variety of data in the light o f his
theoretical assumptions. This is not a startling or damning
conclusion, since a few years later Freud readily admitted
that many of the crucial experiences o f childhood were never
directly remembered but only inferred and reconstructed by
the analyst, through the interpretation o f dreams, fantasies,
transference, etc.
I believe my findings have been taken out o f context
and misused by Crews and Esterson. To conclude from my
arguments that Freud made up all the sexual material he got
from his patients, and that his theories were dominated by
“dishonesty and cowardice,” is arbitrary, farfetched, and
remote from my intent. I want hereby to dissociate myself
completely from such indiscriminate and ill informed Freud
bashing. 4^

77
 J A M E S H O P K I N S is the author of a number of arti­
cles on the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and the editor (with
Richard Wollheim) of Philosophical Essays on Freud and (with
Anthony Savile) of Psychoanalysis, M ind and Art: Perspectives
on Richard Wollheim, He is also Assistant Editor of the philo­
sophical journal M ind and Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s
College in London. He writes:

In “The Unknown Freud” Frederick Crews puts forward a

new interpretation of Freud’s “seduction theory” of neurosis,
and the events surrounding it, based on a number of recent
studies by Cioffi, Schimek, Schatzman, Israels, and others
(see his footnote 22). Thus Crews writes:

even when [Freud] felt secure enough to admit his

seduction mistake, he continued to adulterate the facts.
In 1896 the alleged seducers of infants were said to
have been governesses, teachers, servants, strangers, and
siblings, but in later descriptions Freud retroactively
changed most of them to fathers so that a properly
oedipal spin could be placed on the recycled material.
At every stage, earlier acts of equivocation and fakery
were compounded by fresh ones.

To assess this claim it is necessary to compare it with the

historical data, which include both Freud’s published work
and his private correspondence from the time with his friend
Wilhelm Fliess, to which Crews refers in his footnote 2. As
Crews says, in 1896 Freud put forward the view that neuro­
sis was caused by childhood seduction (or abuse), and that

78
the seducers included governesses, teachers, and so forth.
Also, as Crews stresses, these papers show Freud employing a
technique which might well be supposed to have contami­
nated his observations by suggestion.
During 1897, however, as his letters to Fliess make
clear, Freud framed a different theory, according to which
the principal abuser in the case of women was the father;
and he also tried to take account of the role of suggestion, in
relation to the data upon which this theory was based. Thus
on January 3, 1897, Freud exclaims ''Habemus papam r in
reference to what he takes to be a clear case of paternal
abuse; and on February 11, he records his belief that his own
father’s perversion is responsible for hysterical symptoms in
his brother and several younger sisters remarking that “the
frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.” On
April 28, he speaks explicitly o f “a fresh confirmation o f
paternal etiology,” describing a dialogue with a young
woman whose “supposedly otherwise noble and respectable
father regularly took her to bed when she was from eight to
twelve years old and misused her without penetrating (made
her wet,’ nocturnal visits),” to which he appends “ q e d . ”
As this indicates, the data upon which Freud’s theories
were based included his patients’ recollections o f “sexual
scenes” or “seduction stories”; and it seems clear that the
1897 paternal seduction theory had the same basis, for Freud
wrote on December 17, 1897, that his “confidence in pater­
nal etiology” had risen greatly, because

[Emma] Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in

such a way as not to give her the slightest hint o f what

79
 would emerge from the unconscious and in the process
obtained from her, among other things, the identical
scenes with the father.

Here Freud was apparently using one of Mills methods

of causal enquiry, in order to see whether his data—evidently
recollected scenes, involving the father—might be due to
some influence of his own. Since the same scenes arose also
in the case of a different therapist, of a different sex, who
gave not “the slightest hint” as to what would be forth­
coming, Freud evidently concluded that they were a rela­
tively robust phenomenon, and not to be accounted for by
suggestion on his part.
Although Freud clearly held this theory in 1897, he
abandoned it without publishing it. He cited some related
therapeutic and scientific reasons for this in his letter to
Fliess of September 21, 1897. These included:

The continual disappointment in my efforts to bring a

single analysis to a real conclusion; the running away
of people who for a period had been most gripped [by
analysis]; the absence of the complete success on which
I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself
the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fash­
ion __ Then the surprise that in all cases, the father,
not excluding my own, had to be accused of being per­
verse— the realisation of the unexpected frequency of
hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing
in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions
against children are not very probable--- Then, third,

80
 the certain insight that there are no indications o f reality
in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish
between truth and fiction that has been cathccted with
affect. (Accordingly, there would remain the solution
that the sexual phantasy invariably seizes upon the
theme o f the parents.)

As is well known, Freud was to adopt the alternative

hypothesis indicated in the last quoted sentence. The next
letters contain the first specific formulations o f the theory of
the Oedipus complex, applied in his own case, as well as that
of his patients.
This material makes quite clear that Crews’s claim in
the paragraph quoted above is false. Freud s writing in 1897
o f ‘ paternal etiology,” “perversion against children,” the fact
that “in every case” the father had to be accused, etc., make
clear that during 1897 he held a theory o f paternal abuse.
His continual references to scenes or stories of seduction,
and in particular that to Eckstein above, show that the theo­
ry was in part based on scenes or stories produced by his
patients, which scenes were liable to arise without sugges­
tion. Since Freuds descriptions in 1897 were written in pri­
vate correspondence which Freud himself did not see again,
there can be no question of their having been “retroactively
changed” in any manner for any purpose. In particular there
can be no question of retroactive “oedipal spin,” since Freud s
letter formulating some of the main ideas of the Oedipus
complex simply follows that about abandoning the paternal
abuse theory quoted above. And since Freud s later accounts
of the seduction episode are in close correspondence

81
with the material in his letters from the time, there is no
reason to suppose that they involve fakery, etc., either.
It seems from what he writes that Crews has made two
related mistakes: (1) he has conflated Freuds unpublished
paternal seduction theory of 1897 with the earlier and less
specific theory published in 1896, and (2) he has supposed
that Freud s later accounts of the seduction episode are
meant to be accounts of the material in his 1896 publica­
tions, rather than accounts of the work which he did in
1897, and did not publish, but wrote about to Fliess. It is
easy to see why the two theories might be confused, since the
later developed out of the earlier in 1896-1897. Still the dif­
ferences are fairly clearly indicated, for example in Freud’s
remarks about confirmation. Thus in the ''Habemuspapam"
letter of January 3, Freud also records how a past male
patient “travelled to his hometown in order to ascertain the
reality of the things he remembered, and that he received full
confirmation from his seducer, who is alive (his nurse, now
an old woman). He is said to be doing very well.” This is
confirmation and follow-up relating to the earlier theory. By
contrast, when Freud speaks in April o f “a fresh confirmation
of paternal etiology” —that is, a further (fresh) confirmation
of a theory which he has already previously taken as con­
firmed—he is concerned with the later theory. Although
Freud had been given accounts of paternal seduction from as
early as the case of “Catherine” in Studies in Hysteria (1895),
he seems to have concentrated on “scenes involving the
father,” and to have tried to control for effects of suggestion
on these, only in 1897; and these are points relevant to
Crews’s charges.

82
 Now of course if you mistake which theory a man is
talking about, then even if what he says is true you are liable
to think that he is speaking falsely or even incoherently.
Since Crews is apparently taking Freud’s later descriptions of
his unpublished theory of paternal seduction as descriptions
of something quite different, published work containing a
distinct theory, he naturally thinks that what Freud says is
false or worse. In this Crews is not alone. The same mistake,
apparently stemming from the work of Frank Cioffi, is
clearly also to be found in the article by Israels and Schatzman
which Crews cites (and, if Crews’s account is correct, also in
the work of Esterson under review). In each case, it seems,
the authors take Freud’s descriptions of his unpublished work
and theory of 1897 as intended accounts of the material in
his papers o f 1896, and so assume that Freud was somehow
deeply engaged in the incoherent project o f misrepresenting
published work about hypothesized seduction by governesses
(or nursemaids) and others as a theory about the role of
fathers. Hence, o f course, they find Freud’s work on this
topic highly suspicious, and full o f the most astonishing
confusions and contradictions. But as Crews’s paragraph
illustrates, it remains to be seen how many o f these alleged
confusions, contradictions, etc., are Freud’s, and how many
are due to misinterpretation on the part o f these scholars
themselves.
In this connection it is worth noting in particular that
the letters to Fliess tend to show that, so far from involving
fakery, Freud’s practice over this period was in accord with
the very methodological canons which Crews cites via the
reference to Griinbaum in his first footnote. Thus we saw

83
above that the letters show Freud using Mills methods to
test the hypothesis of suggestion, they also show Freud find­
ing improvement in his patients with the confirmation of his
theories in a way reminiscent of what Griinbaum calls
Freud s “tally argument.”
This can be seen clearly in the case of the patient E,
whose symptoms Freud used to illustrate his developing the­
ory on February 19, 1899. On December 21, 1899, Freud
reports that this analysis has got to a deep unconscious scene
in which “all the puzzles converge” and which is “everything
at the same time— sexual, innocent, natural and the rest.” As
a result “the fellow is doing outrageously well,” so that Freud
can look forward to the conclusion of this analysis as a
“happy prospect.” In describing this analysis too Freud
apparently speaks of what is unconscious scenes, but by now
he is using the term to cover what may be fantasies, as in the
paragraph about Eckstein quoted above. Then on April 6,
1900, Freud writes that

E at last concluded his career as a patient by coming to my

house to dinner. His riddle is almost completely solved;
he is in excellent shape, his personality entirely changed__
I shall keep an eye on the man. Since he had to suffer
through all my technical and theoretical errors, I actu­
ally think that a future case could be solved in half the
time. May the Lord now send this next one. L. G. is
doing very well. There is no longer any chance of failure.

Plainly this last statement was unduly optimistic, but

the sequence o f which it is a part provides a clear and

84
detailed illustration of the way in which Freuds reasoning at
this time linked truth with health. When Freud was able to
frame a good analytic explanation relating the patient’s
symptoms to an unconscious scene recovered in analysis, this
was correlated with improvement in the patient’s condition.
Since the best explanation of the improvement was that it
was due to the recovery and understanding of the scene, the
improvement was also a datum which tended to confirm the
accuracy o f the explanation. This mode of inference also
seems to have played a significant role in the transition from
the theory of paternal seduction to that of the Oedipus com­
plex, for Freud evidently began to obtain what he regarded as
satisfactory therapeutic results only while working with the
latter. (See also the apparent success reported on May 16,
1900.) There are various ways in which this kind o f infer­
ence might be characterized, but on any account it should be
regarded as reasonable. ^

HERBERT S. PEYSER, M.D., practices psychiatry in New

York City. He writes:

Frederick Crews’s article on “The Unknown Freud” deserves

some discussion by a clinician working in the field. In this
regard it is particularly fortunate that in addition to being a
practicing clinical psychiatrist I am a member of a psycho­
analytic study group, the Rapaport-Klein Group, that num­
bers among its members such people as those referred to and
whose criticisms of psychoanalysis and Freud are quoted by
Professor Crews: the philosopher Adolf Griinbaum, the

85
historian Frank Sulloway, and the psychoanalyst/psychologist
Robert Holt.
Over the years our group, including such critical people
as Professor Crews has quoted, has repeatedly discussed these
same issues, questioning the matter of proof, the validity and
usefulness of Freud’s hypotheses, the question of the scien­
tific nature of the enterprise, and so forth. Indeed, many of
us would agree with many of the points made in the article,
perhaps most of them, certainly those made early in the
article, the first page or so.
But as the article goes on an intemperate note enters
into the argument, an angry and ad hominem note. A cer­
tain cast to the criticism develops that significantly alters the
arguments of others. For example: Adolf Griinbaum, while
demonstrating that Freud’s methods of proof are not ade­
quate for a truly scientific discipline, does not give up the
idea of such proof being possible. He even points out ways
to do it. He believes it can be done and should be done, as
he has stated in his books. You would not know that from
Professor Crews’s article.
The angry note is interesting and, lacking any further
information, I cannot account for it. But I know o f a simi­
larly angry note in an analogous situation. In my younger
days it was the note found in the bitter criticisms of
Marxism by former adherents, once devoted, now disillu­
sioned and feeling betrayed. I cannot say that this is the ori­
gin o f Professor Crews’s point o f view but the situation as it
appears in a number o f cases is similar. Two brilliant men,
Marx and Freud, extremely ambitious, even messianic, are
not content with merely valuable first order contributions of

86
great importance but must organize a grand, unified synthe­
sis, a universal, all embracing Weltanschauung, explaining
everything. They then wrap it in the mantle of science but
without the experimental probative factors and the rigorous
self-denying quality that true science requires.
Their syntheses are applied and are found often not
useful and at times even harmful. In the case of Marx this is
self-evident. In the case o f Freud psychoanalysis has not been
found to be particularly useful in the treatment of the major
disorders such as schizophrenia, major affective disorders,
addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.; indeed, this
was noted by Freud himself as regards the former conditions.
Furthermore, there were the tendencies of many psychoanalysts
to blame others, usually the parents (as in the case o f the
erroneous concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother”) and
to minimize the factors of child abuse and molestation; all this
was unfair and incorrect and led to much improperly imposed
suffering, although certainly on a lesser scale than Marxs.
The grand theory in both instances collapsed. One
could see multiple competing theories and schools arise in
the case o f psychoanalysis: classical, ego psychology, object
relations, self psychology, Kleinian, systems theory, informa­
tion theory, etc. These approaches saw things differently;
their interventions, in timing and content, were different;
and there was no way to prove one and eliminate the others.
This has led some toward a radical hermeneutic position that
in essence takes all theories as equally true and does not
conceive o f psychoanalysis as a science with utility and
accountability. The picture tends toward, if not chaos, then
at least disorder.

87
 Marxism is in no better position, but what must be
remembered is that the first order contributions have been
taken up, worked over, and metabolized into the contiguous
major disciplines in both instances: economics, sociology,
and history in the case of Marx; psychiatry, psychology, and
sociology in the case of Freud. In psychiatry such clinical
concepts as unconscious mental activity, the role o f early
development and the part the past plays in the present, the
phenomenon of transference, all are a part of everyday clinical
practice even if they are difficult to pin down in a rigorous
scientific way; they are nevertheless empirically invaluable to
patients and therapists alike.
For example, a young woman who had done well in
treatment returns, about to be married. She is very upset
because, so she states, her mother does not like her fiance,
and so she is holding off the wedding. I do not understand
for I was never aware that her mothers opinion had such an
influence on this somewhat strong-willed woman. We go
on for a while without any increase in understanding of
the matter or change in the situation until she tells me a
dream involving her being in a shower, then emerging from
the shower, followed by a snake coming through the bath­
room wall, and finally her awaking with great anxiety.
Based upon my understanding o f Freud s hypotheses I sug­
gest an ambivalence toward the phallus in particular and
toward men in general: that aspect/representation of the
matter which is clean and good (the shower) is seen posi­
tively but is bland, and that aspect/representation which is
“wicked,” even “evil” perhaps (the snake), is seen negatively
but is highly emotional. I have developed an idea in my

88
mind about this but I do not intrude. I say no more,
asking her what she can contribute to our understanding
of this.
She says nothing about this subject, speaks about
something else, and the session ends. Subsequently she calls
to cancel the treatment but returns a month or so later to tell
me that there was something she was fully conscious o f but
guilty about and had not wanted to tell me. In fact she had
planned not to until she heard my discussion of the dream
and knew that I had guessed her secret. She appreciated my
tact and now she had the courage to tell me. The ambiva­
lence that I noted had been carried out in the real world for
there was another man, a married man, a secret and
“wicked” affair that was most exciting as compared to the
bland relationship with the good, clean fiance. Guilty, unable
to tell me, she was relieved that I had discovered it in the
dream and that it had finally come out in the open. Now we
were able to work on it and help resolve it so that she could
become “unstuck” and proceed with her life.
In this both my patient and I are indebted to Freud. It
is just a small example, an everyday story in practice. It was
most useful despite the very serious problem that Freud s
psychoanalysis, now almost a century old, has had in estab­
lishing itself as a true science and as an accountable tech­
nique in terms o f cost and benefit in a sorely pressed health
care system. But “gray are all theories and green the golden
tree o f life,” and we are left, when all is said and done, with
the usefulness o f such formulations in everyday clinical
experience, for which we are grateful to Freud, with all his
warts. ^

89
 M . D is Associate Clinical Professor of
D A V I D D. O L D S ,
Psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and
Research at Columbia University, and he is in private practice
in New York City. He writes:

The article by Frederick Crews reviewing “revisionist” books

about Freud is an interesting one. It seems to have aroused
the fear and rage of many psychoanalysts as well as current
and former psychoanalytic patients. The review does indeed
unleash a broadside against psychoanalysis as the author
apparently imagines it is currently practiced. And because it
describes some definitely “unscientific” aspects in the history
of psychoanalysis, it implies that current practice is still wild,
capricious, and self-serving on the part of analysts. It is com­
mon for commentators to attack what they think is psycho­
analysis, but which is in fact the extremely shaky practices of
early pioneers; it is like criticizing modern astrophysics by
attacking Newtonian cosmology or by making ad hominem
attacks on Isaac Newton.
What is most striking about the article is that it pro­
vides all the data for a really interesting conclusion; but,
since it is devoted more to polemical detraction, it seems to
miss the crucial point entirely.
When reading the article I thought of an acquaintance
of mine, a skilled and well-trained surgeon practicing in a
medically underserved area in northeastern Canada. At a
time when he was the sole physician in a small hospital, he
developed appendicitis and, since he was the only surgeon
available, did the operation on himself He had the help of
competent nurses; but he injected the local anaesthesia, cut

90
through his layers o f skin and fascia, looked around inside
with the aid of mirrors, probably nicked a few blood vessels
that he shouldn’t have, removed the inflamed appendix, and
sutured himself up. The association is of course to Freud’s
self-analysis and his self-supervision in performing the first
psychoanalyses ever performed. One can see right away that
Freud’s position was much more difficult even than that of
the solo surgeon. If the surgeon had not done hundreds of
appendectomies (a procedure then perfected over many
years), if he was doing the first appendectomy, the first time
anyone had ever cut into the abdomen o f a live patient, and
that patient were himself, then he would be approximating
Freud’s position.
Critics of psychoanalysis seldom see that it is a process
of dealing with a wildly moving target from a slightly less
wildly moving platform. The first person to do it was bound
to make mistakes, as was the first person to do an appendec­
tomy. The phenomenon of the erotic transference, in fact of
any transference, took the early analysts by surprise. Freud’s
early collaborator, Josef Breuer, quit the field in the face of
its awesome power. Freud, whose personality did include
grandiosity, narcissism, self-delusion, and megalomania, had
the imagination, creativity, and recklessness to push on, with
no textbooks, maps, or guides. He and his first-generation
disciples made some horrendous mistakes. There is no reason
to idealize them as anything more than brilliant, dedicated,
flawed human doctors. It may well be that Freud was some­
what corrupted by the power that was thrust upon him, and
which he no doubt enjoyed. But he did not sleep with his
patients, nor found a lucrative ashram. His heart went mostly

91
in a scientific direction, despite the peculiar nature of his
instrument.
The nature o f that instrument and the nature o f psy­
choanalysis are both missed in the article. Freud had no
supervision, no training analysis, other than his ‘‘self-
analysis” —in his case an oxymoron. One has only to super­
vise beginning analysts, or in fact to be a beginning analyst
oneself, to see the pitfalls beckoning the unwary. One quickly
realizes the power of the analytic relationship to evoke the
regressed neurotic aspects of both partners. The rigorous
training analysis, and the intensive supervision—in most
good institutes lasting five and more years—are for the pur­
pose of organizing and using this power for the good of the
patient, preventing it from causing some of the disasters the
revisionists are fond of describing.
I do not wish to criticize the valuable work of the
more fair-minded Freud scholars; in fact they do us a great
service. Lets take a look at the old chestnut, “Is psycho­
analysis scientific?” Usually we mean: Does it have hypotheses
which can be proven or disproven empirically? Also we
mean: Can we do outcome studies that show the benefit of
psychoanalytic techniques? Without belaboring this argu­
ment, let us look at the time scale in which there is some
empiricism at play. That is the historical time frame of one
hundred years in which techniques have been tried and found
wanting and improved upon. If such a trial and error method,
which is common in the development o f surgical techniques,
is scientific, then the term applies here also. We have learned
that giving financial advice to a patient, or sleeping with a
patient, or lying to a patient, are bad techniques which

92
interfere with the analytic process. We have learned, and this
only in recent years, that the countertransference--g(^ntvzx.Qá
urge to commit those errors can be used as valuable informa­
tion. When used properly, countertransference has become a
valuable lens rather than a destructive nuisance. Another
thing vve are in the process of learning is the difficulty of
evaluating memories; the “false-memory” problem is a seri­
ous one. We are at least nov^ sensitive to the danger of sug­
gestibility, and we will have to develop the skills necessary to
minimize the potential damage.
The point Professor Crews could have made is that, if
we take a historical perspective, we can see that psychoanaly­
sis has moved forward over the graves of bad ideas. In medi­
cine, one remembers radiation therapy for acne, or DES, or
Thalidomide. These lessons are not learned by all individu­
als; there are still unscrupulous and crazy therapists and
physicians. But the majority of psychoanalysts attempt
to make use of the wisdom learned over the years, and to
improve on it. Ironically, we are indebted to Freud, and
to the other founders, almost as much for their errors as for
their successes. This is an aphorism appropriate in most
progressive endeavors. ^

MA R I A N T O L P I N , M . D . , is aTraining/Supervising Analyst
at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, and Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry at Chicago Medical School. She writes:

Professor Crewss “The Unknown Freud” misleads readers who

are not familiar with critical Freud studies in the psychoanalytic

93
literature. For example, Crews cites Erik Erikson’s 1962
“Reality and Actuality” only to imply that Erikson
recommended Freud s treatment of Dora as a model for the
treatment of adolescents and young adults. Nothing could be
farther from the truth. In fact, in the paper cited Erikson
began one of the most penetrating critiques of Freud and the
Dora case yet written; and, making use of the case and
Freud’s failure to understand Dora and her needs, he began
revolutionary advances that had a salutary effect on psycho­
analysis and psychotherapy and paved the way for recent
further advances.
Were Crews to divulge the thrust o f Erikson’s critique
and his substantive clinical contribution he would have
undermined his overriding imperative—to discredit all of
Freud’s work and to pronounce all of contemporary psycho­
analysis worthless and/or destructive. Therefore, it is worth
mentioning some specifics of Erikson’s thinking about Dora
and Freud. Erikson protested Freud’s failure to recognize the
import of the “traumatic sexual approaches” made to her by
a man she expected to be trustworthy (p. 455); and he dis­
puted Freud’s assertions that the past and repressed child­
hood sexual wishes played a central role in Dora’s disorder.
Moreover, Erikson placed the traumatic sexual approaches to
her in the wider causal nexus in which they belonged: the
“pervading perfidy” with which Dora was treated by her par­
ents and their friends (p. 459); and the family and culture
that discouraged an intelligent young woman’s use of her
intellect and “did not [give her] a chance” for a future.
Thus Crews fails to even mention that Erikson refuted
that Freud and father “know best” about women’s place

94
(Dora, he said, was placed in the “role as an object o f erotic
barter,” p. 456). In short, in what was to become his encom­
passing and influential theory o f identity, Erikson staked out
important “feminist” issues: “A vital identity fragment in
[Doras] young life. .. that of the woman intellectual”
(p. 459) was nipped in the bud by a convergence of familial
and cultural betrayal and lack o f encouragement. The deep­
est significance o f Doras dream of a house on fire and her
hope that her father would save her jewel box was neither
sexual nor oedipal, as Freud insisted. Understood in the light
of emerging identity theory, the dream contained the imper­
ative unconscious need for help from Freud to save herself,
her own female self, if you will, and her chances for a
future (p. 461).
Crews omits additional insights o f Eriksons that would
also undermine his claim that he is revealing the Freud
“unknown” to psychoanalysts. Erikson saw clearly that Freud
was determined to prove “his kind of truth” (the theory o f
repressed sexuality); that the need to be right blinded him to
Doras psychological truth and led to the failure of her treat­
ment; and this repetition of the failure by her adult world
had lasting deleterious repercussions. Because o f his under­
standing of transference (one o f Freud’s enduring discoveries)
Erikson was able to take a step Freud could not take: he real­
ized that Freud’s failure was so important to Dora precisely
because she turned to him with her (“transferred”) needs
and hopes for fidelity. From Freud, now, she wanted and
expected “mutual verification” of her “actuality.” The help
she needed was a far cry from making unconscious sexual
wishes conscious. Erikson’s Dora needed help to get on with

95
the interrupted tasks of her adolescence and young adult­
hood: to find value in herself and salvage values to live by
when her trust in herself and those most important to her
was destroyed.
Intent on “proving his kind of truth,” Crews fails to
mention that psychoanalysis grows from scholarly Freud
studies that do not have an axe to grind. For example, ana­
lysts know from Erikson, not from Freud, that many adoles­
cents and young adults of our day are like Dora. They too
suffer from what Erikson described as “malignant forms” of
frustration of their basic needs for adults’ fidelity; and when
they cannot rely on parents, teachers, and others in their
wider milieu, they too transfer their needs to therapists and
expect understanding and responsiveness from them. Well
trained therapists’ understanding of their patients’ quandary
is an essential ingredient of their having another chance at a
future. (Erikson was neither the first nor the last analyst to
dispute Freud’s contentions and to go on ahead of him.
Crews fails to acknowledge past and present psychoanalytic
work that does not support his thesis.)
In the final analysis, though, Crews is right in at least
one respect. Freud’s tendentious arguments to prove his
point were extremely harmful to some of his patients and to
the field he tried so hard to establish. Nevertheless psycho­
analytic scholars continue to study Freud’s theories and case
histories as part of the ongoing effort to learn from Freud’s
frank histories and his mistakes, to widen knowledge about a
still largely “unknown” psychological universe, to further
clinical understanding and improve therapeutic efficacy.
Perhaps Professor Crews can come to see that his selective

96
omissions of analysts’ critical studies, and what can be
learned from them, are in the service of the tendentiousness
of his argument, his insistence on his “truth” about psycho-
analysis; and that, because these omissions mislead, they
actually undermine his argument. If he cannot face this
“truth” squarely, his “Unknown Freud” will remain as a
classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. ^

M O R T I M E R OS T O W , M . D . , P. C . , is a psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, President o f the
Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund, Attending
Psychiatrist at Montefiore Medical Center, and Visiting
Professor Emeritus in Pastoral Psychiatry at the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. Fie writes:

It should not be surprising if psychoanalysts felt impelled to

respond to Crews’s missile attack on their profession and its
founder.
Perhaps one should start by stating the role of psycho­
analysis in the current treatment of mental illness. In their
extreme forms, two approaches may be described as follows.
The first approach attempts to assess the patient’s illness by
an initial interview which is likely to include the use of a
questionnaire, a so-called test “instrument,” administered
personally or even by computer. The results o f this assess­
ment lead the psychiatrist to a code number and diagnosis
specified in the current Diagnostic and Statistical M anual,
Armed with this information, the psychiatrist then turns to
the three-volume handbook on Treatments o f Psychiatric

97
Disorders} There he will be told how to proceed. Such treat­
ment is usually based primarily upon medication where that
is relevant, although other modalities are recommended too.
Fortunately this procedure often works out fairly well, espe­
cially when the disorder is a circumscribed episode of one of
the affective disorders, that is, disorders that lie on the
manic-depressive spectrum. It is the treatment preferred by
third-party payers and health maintenance organizations.
Other disorders do not lend themselves to such a
mechanical procedure. These include symptom neuroses and
personality disorders that impair the individuals ability to
enjoy a loving relation with another person, or to apply him­
self successfully to any vocation or to escape from a prevailing
self-defeating tendency. For these, various psychotherapies
are prescribed. Some psychotherapies address themselves to
specific symptoms rather than to the patient. They isolate
the prominent symptoms of the illness and attempt to sup­
press them by a kind of conditioning technique. The extraor­
dinary rates o f success advertised by the practitioners of such
methods are probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that
the treatment does succeed in many instances.
However, for the treatment o f other neuroses and the
personality disorders, a patient-oriented psychotherapy is
required. The patient learns about himself, his true desires,
and the conflicts that surround them, the salient themes in
his life, his major and continuing disabilities. He learns to

1. American Psychiatric Association, Treatments o f Psychiatric Disorders: A Task

Force Report o f the American Psychiatric Association (American Psychiatric
Association, 1989).

98
distinguish between difficulties created by external reality
and internal fantasy. For such psychodynamic treatment, an
understanding of the basic dynamic mechanisms recognized
by Freud are essential: conflict, repression, transference,
defense, sublimation, unconscious guilt, Oedipus complex,
separation anxiety, the destructive effect o f success, to name
only a few. In fact, given the current situation in the treat­
ment of mental illness in the United States, the transmission
of the understanding of these dynamic mechanisms may be
the primary legacy of psychoanalysis to American psychiatry
and psychotherapy.
Professor Crews is right. Psychoanalysis has been expe­
riencing a decline in the United States. However, one may
question his understanding of its cause. As I have watched
my practice change over recent years, I see a progressive loss
of interest in psychoanalysis for two reasons. First, the drug
treatments have created a climate of expectation of brief
treatment. Second, patients have come to depend more and
more on third-party—usually insurance company—pay­
ments. Insurance companies will not pay for any extended or
intensive psychiatric care beyond the bare minimum, except
in the case of the most generous policies. Among those seg­
ments of the population that can pay for treatment without
external supplement, psychoanalysis remains desired.
Elsewhere in the world, where economics are different, in
Germany for example, and in many countries of South
America, for example, psychoanalysis is flourishing.
Having acknowledged in his second sentence that
some patients have found psychoanalysis helpful. Crews
then feels free to devote the rest of the extended essay to its

99
shortcomings and those o f Freud. What are the facts? Estab­
lishing the efficacy of any kind of psychotherapy is difficult
because personality and individual mental illness, constitu­
tional disposition and temperament, resilience and motiva­
tion all differ greatly from one patient to another and its
difficult to assess these before treatment has started. More­
over it should be obvious that psychoanalysts differ in ability
and experience among each other.
In 1979, I reviewed the outcome o f thirty-seven for­
mer patients, all of my patients who had had at least a mini­
mal amount of psychoanalytic treatment.^ Five of these (14
percent) exhibited dramatic improvement, that is, improve­
ment so striking that friends or relations who hadn’t known
that the patients were being treated commented on the dis­
tinct change. Nine others (almost 25 percent) were consid­
ered by themselves and their families to have improved
impressively, as demonstrated by important changes in their
ability to function in the several areas of life in which they
had previously functioned badly. So these two categories
together constituted about 40 percent of the group. Sixteen
patients could be said to have achieved limited improvement.
They functioned better in one or more areas o f life but still
far from optimally. In general, these patients and their fami­
lies were pleased with the outcome but I was less pleased.
Seven patients (19 percent) showed no improvement at all. I
should add that in almost half of the sample I had used med­
ication along with analysis. However, the changes that 1

2. “The Outlook for Psychoanalysis,” Bulletin o f the New York Academy o f

Mediciney Vol. 59, No. 5, pp. 451-463.

100
looked for in evaluating the treatment were not the simple
changes o f mood that drugs produce, but rather alterations
in personality function. The distribution of degrees of
improvement among patients who had no medication did
not differ from those who had medication. Considering the
nature of the illness, the duration, and in many cases the
constitutional basis, these findings are not at all discourag­
ing. I should imagine that a more recent cohort would do
even better.
The reader will note that Crews criticizes only those
reports of Freuds work that were published before 1905,
that is, reports o f his very earliest psychoanalytic experience,
when the discipline was being developed. Crewss comments
did not apply to Freud s later work nor to psychoanalysis as
it is practiced now.
Much has been made in recent years of Freud s seduc­
tion theory versus his subsequent theory that reports o f early
seduction are fantasy. The perceptive reader who is not look­
ing for polemic would infer that in some instances actual
seduction did take place, while in other instances the seduc­
tion took place in fantasy only, and in still others, innocent
encounters were interpreted as seduction. In most instances,
unless there is outside corroboration, it is difficult or impos­
sible to distinguish among these possibilities. There is no
conspiracy here either against children or their parents.
With respect to Freud s status as a scientist. Crews
neglects to inform his readers that before his psychoanalytic
work began, Freud had written and published well over 100
papers and monographs on neuroanatomy, neuroembryology,
and clinical neurology. At least two of his major monographs.

101
On Aphasia and On Cerebral Palsy^ are still considered both
authoritative and valid statements.
I shall have nothing to say to Professor Crewss reports
of Freud s personal behavior. We don t ordinarily evaluate a
discipline by the ethics of its founders but if one thought it
necessary to judge Freuds conduct, it would have been help­
ful if Professor Crews had made a serious effort to distin­
guish between established fact on the one hand and gossip,
rumor, and speculation on the other. Sigmund Freud never
claimed publicly that his personal behavior was exemplary,
but those who knew him well thought that it was. The
Pentateuch demonstrates that the founders of religious
monotheism were not above reproach in their personal
behavior, but we do not reject monotheistic religion on that
account. ^

L E S T E R L U B O R S K Y , P H . D ., is Professor of Psychology in
Psychiatry in the School of Medicine of the University of
Pennsylvania. He has written six books and numerous papers
on research in psychotherapy. He writes:

Frederick Crews, who wrote the review for you “The

Unknown Freud,” is clearly a man who reads and writes a lot
about psychoanalysis, but there is no evidence that he has
knowledge of studies on the comparison of the efficacy of
psychoanalysis with other forms of psychotherapy. I have
done the studies. I thought the readers would be interested
in knowing the facts about the relative efficacy of different
forms of psychotherapy including psychoanalysis, because he

102
raised the issue. He says, for example, in his first paragraph
in which he reviewed four books about different facts of
psychoanalytic history, ‘‘in the aggregate psychoanalysis has
proved to be an indifferently successful and vastly inefficient
method o f removing neurotic symptoms.”
It is fashionable to make such statements, but in fact
Crews should know the facts. His conclusions should have
been: (1) There are no adequate studies comparing psycho­
analysis with other forms of psychotherapy so there is no
proof that it is better or it is worse. (2) It is probably at least
as good as other forms o f psychotherapy. The evidence for
this is that for all treatment comparisons involving different
forms of psychotherapy the overwhelming trend is for non­
significant differences in benefits received from the different
forms of psychotherapy, including psychodynamically ori­
ented psychotherapy (which is a shorter form of psycho­
analytic psychotherapy). (3) The evidence is overwhelming,
in fact, that these different forms of psychotherapy produce
very meaningful benefits for the majority of patients.
For Professor Crews and for the interested audience,
which I know is very large, I will cite just a few reviews of
comparative psychotherapy studies:

L. Luborsky, L. Diguer, E. Luborsky, B. Singer,

and D. Dickter, “The efficacy of dynamic psychothera­
pies. Is it true that everyone has won so all shall have
prizes?” in N. Miller et al.. Handbook o f Dynamic
Psychotherapy Research and Practice (Basic Books, 1993).
L. Luborsky, N. Miller, J. Barber, and J.
Docherty, “Where we are and what is next in dynamic

103
 therapy research and practice,” in N. Miller et al.,
Handbook o f Dynamic Psychotherapy Research and
Practice (Basic Books, 1993).
L Luborsky, B. Singer, and Lise Luborsky,
“Comparative studies of psychotherapies: Is it true that
‘Everyone has won and all must have prizes?’ ” Archives
o f General Psychiatry, 32 (1975), pp. 995-1008.
M. Smith, G. Glass, and T. Miller, The Benefits
o f Psychotherapy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

I will be glad to send some of these reprints to

Professor Crews or any of the readers who write me for
them. ^

H A R O L D P. B L U M , M . D ., is the Executive Director of the

Sigmund Freud Archives. B E R N A R D L. PAG E L L A , M . D . ,
is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Sigmund Freud Archives and
Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
They write:

It was very surprising and disappointing that such a distin­

guished periodical as The New York Review o f Books would
publish an article containing gross misunderstandings and
scurrilous comments against Freud and psychoanalysis by
Professor Frederick Crews. Readers of the Review should
expect sober and scholarly appraisal rather than what appears
to be a series of emotionally charged statements which deal
more with misperceptions and misconceptions than scientific,
objective evaluation. It appears that Freud cannot be allowed

104
human frailty, any errors, or lack o f present-day knowledge.
Even his critics are criticized for not being critical enough.
The enduring discoveries o f his revolutionary genius are
cavalierly dismissed with superficial consideration and super­
cilious contempt.
At this time, Freud s initial propositions, first findings,
and landmark case reports are no longer vital for the valida­
tion of psychoanalytic formulation. Further, as psychoanalysis
became popularized, many concepts were distorted and
bowdlerized, a tendency which can be discerned in the
Crews article.
Freud is part of our culture, our way o f comprehend­
ing personality development and disorder. All rational
psychotherapy is based upon psychoanalytic principles.
Psychoanalysis provides a fundamental mode of exploring
and understanding art and literature, biography and history,
etc. Concepts o f repression, regression, denial, projection,
and “Freudian slip” have become part o f our language. The
vulgar idiom “jerk off” conveys thinly disguised castration
anxiety. Lady Macbeth washes her hands because of under-
lying guilt, not because her hands are literally dirty. Shake­
speare intuited ego defenses and can be invoked in “methinks
Dr. Crews doth protest too much.”
Dr. Crews implied that The Sigmund Freud Archives
has concealed documents to protect Freuds reputation. This
is contrary to the fact that The Sigmund Freud Archives’
policy has been to derestrict and release Freud correspon­
dence as quickly as legally and ethically possible. Professor
Crews cites a document restricted to 2102 when he could
have ascertained that this document was already derestricted

105
by The Sigmund Freud Archives. The Archives are now
largely derestricted and much of the new Freud documents
have become available through The Sigmund Freud
Archives.
Finally, the encompassing explanatory reach of psycho­
analytic theory and the immense value of psychoanalytic
therapy stand on their own merits having endured the test of
time and continuing challenge. Psychoanalysis has developed
independent of the person, personality, and personal life of
its creator. But Freud could have, in the final analysis, ironi­
cally observed, “they may attack my theories by day, but they
dream of them at night.” ^

F R E D E R I C K C R E W S replies:
1. It does appear that, as the psychoanalyst David Olds reports
above, “The Unknown Freud” has caused widespread “fear
and rage” within the Freudian community. The result is a del­
uge of mail such as The New York Review has rarely seen. The
letters above constitute only the most civil and temperate of
countless protests mailed in by offended Freudians, most of
them practicing psychoanalysts.
Those unpublished complaints deserve at least a passing
mention here. In the rhetorical tradition perfected by Freud
himself, they tend to concentrate not on the substance of my
argument but on my allegedly defective personality, the main
sign of which is precisely my incapacity to render a “bal­
anced” — i.e., predominantly appreciative—assessment of
Freud and his brainchild. The letters thus beg the question of
whether, as I argue, Freuds scientific reputation has been

106
grossly inflated, first through his own promotional efforts and
later by self-interested disciples.
The unpublished letters also converge in calling my
essay ad hominem, as several of the published letters do as
well. I deny the charge. An ad hominem argument is one that
ducks substantive issues by vilifying the person or kind o f per­
son who takes the position opposite to ones own. But though
the main emphasis of “The Unknown Freud” is biographical,
it begins by summarizing the objective grounds for deciding
that the “clinical validation” o f psychoanalytic ideas is hope­
lessly circular and that Freud’s theories o f personality and neu­
rosis are woolly, strained, and unsupported. And it directs
curious readers to sources that establish those judgments in a
strictly evidence-based manner.^ My essay makes it clear that
I object to Freud’s doctrine not because Freud himself dis­
played certain weaknesses o f judgment and character but
because his theoretical and therapeutic pretensions have been
weighed and found to be hollow.
Although I can hardly expect psychoanalysts to be grate­
ful for my restraint, moreover, I actually steered clear of their
founder’s least stable side—his lethal cocaine evangelism, his

1. To repeat, those sources are Adolf Griinbaum’s The Foundations o f

Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (University o f California Press, 1984)
and Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (North-Holland,
1991). Less technically inclined readers, I pointed out, can survey the case
against Freudian psychoanalysis in Allen Esterson’s briefer Seductive M irage: An
Exploration o f the Work o f Sigm und Freud (Open Court, 1993). For an elabora­
tion and extension o f Griinbaum’s argument, see also his new Validation in the
Clinical Theory o f Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy o f Psychoanalysis
(International Universities Press, 1993).

107
phobias and psychosomatic fainting spells, his bizarre super­
stitions, his belief in the magic power of telephone and hotel
room numbers, his affinity for ESP, his gnostic ideas about the
primal horde and its Lamarckian effect on modern psyches,
his paranoid streak, and what even his hagiographer Ernest
Jones called his “twilight condition of mind” at the time of his
famous self-analysis.^ My essay, however, eschews speculation
about the ways in which specific delusions on Freud s part may
have found their way into psychoanalytic theory.
Before answering the pro-Freudian letters that appear
above, let me refresh readers’ memories by recapitulating the
claims o f my essay:
—that Freud’s uniquely psychoanalytic ideas have re­
ceived no appreciable corroboration, and much discourage­
ment, from independent sources;
—that his method of reaching causal conclusions, even
in the idealized form described in his public writings, could
not have reliably yielded those conclusions by any imaginable
path of inference;
— that his actual method was far worse, namely, turning
hunches, borrowed notions, and corollaries of his other beliefs
into certainties and then depicting those “findings” as the
inescapable results of clinical experience;
— that his idea of corroboration was the fallacious one of
heaping up consilient-looking exercises of his interpretative
style, without regard for rival lines o f possible explanation;

2. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work o f Sigm und Freud, 3 volumes (Basic Books,
1953-1957), Vol. 1, p. 306. Jones discusses all o f the traits I am mentioning
here.

108
 — that his perceptions and diagnoses invariably served
his self-interest, always shifting according to the propagandistic
or polemical needs of the moment;
—that his therapeutic successes, supposedly the chief
warrant that his psychological theory was correct, appear to
have been nonexistent, and that he lied about them brazenly
and often;
—that his rules o f interpretation were so open-ended as
to permit him to twist any presented feature to a predeter­
mined emphasis;
—that he brushed aside as trivial the main threat to the
integrity of psychoanalytic knowledge, namely, the contami­
nating effect of the therapist s suggestion;
—that, as a result, he failed to maintain even a minimal
demarcation between his own obsessions and those o f his
patients;
— that the “stories” figuring crucially in the official ver­
sion of his transit from the seduction theory to psychoanalysis
proper were his own inventions, misascribed at first to his
patients’ early histories and soon after, more extravagantly, to
their early fantasies— thus foisting off his “seduction” error on
the contents of their minds when they were toddlers;
—that, consequently, there never was a need to import
notions such as repression and the infantile-sexual basis of
neurosis to account for what Freud “found” in the patients
whom he now chose to regard in a psychoanalytic light;
—that the coercive tactics by which he attempted to win
his patients’ agreement to his own theory-driven surmises
about their infantile histories rendered him the chief begetter
of our contemporary “false memory syndrome”;

109
 —that, with his approval, his movement conducted
itself less like a scientific-medical enterprise than like a polit-
buro bent upon snuffing out deviationism; and
—that the “science” he invented was, and remains, a
pseudoscience, in that it relies on unexamined dogma, lacks
any safeguards against the drawing of arbitrary inferences, and
insulates itself in several ways from the normal give-and-take
of scientific debate.
Remarkably few of the letters above, written by eight
American psychoanalysts and one British academic of a
known Freudian persuasion, address any of these points in
specific detail. Indeed, a number of the letters don’t just leave
my theses unchallenged but grant that they may be substan­
tially correct. Curiously, however, such concessions leave the
writers’ general loyalty to Freudianism undiminished.
Whereas the orthodox psychoanalysts in the group appear to
be “massively into denial,” the more liberal ones would like to
embrace just enough criticism o f Freud to distance themselves
from his errors—thus skirting the awkward fact that their
method o f making “advances in insight” remains exactly as
subjective as his own.
2. It is, for the most part, the liberal, modernizing ana
lysts who are represented in the letters above. As a result, one
sees there only traces o f the misty-eyed Freudolatry that used
to characterize psychoanalytic discourse—traces, for example,
such as Dr. Olds’s likening of Freud’s muddled self-analysis to
a heroic self-appendectomy,^ or Dr. Ostow’s tribute to the

3. I have discussed the incoherence and absurdity of Freud s self-analysis i

Skeptical Engagements (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 60-62.

110
humble Freud’s “exemplary” personal behavior."^ Nevertheless,
some of these writers do claim that I have misrepresented
Freud in important respects. Let us see if their charges hold up.
Dr. Jean Schimek was the first psychoanalyst to have
squarely faced Freud’s conflicting accounts of his seduction
theory.Now , understandably, Schimek prefers to renounce
any credit for having inspired “The Unknown Freud.” Since
he neglects to show where my “Freud bashing” was factually
incorrect, however, his letter serves no purpose other than self­
exculpation within the notoriously unforgiving Freudian
community.
Nevertheless, I am glad for the opportunity to com­
mend Schimek’s pioneering article and to point out the very
modest extent to which my essay went beyond it. Briefly,

4. According to Ostow, Freud never told us what a good person he was. On the
contrary, his pervasive account o f himself as a self-sacrificing man o f science has
proved to be his most enduring creation. As David Olds says above, Freuds per­
sonality included “grandiosity, narcissism, self-delusion, and megalomania.” It is
now widely acknowledged that he was also manipulative and vindictive, even to
the extent o f plotting the successful plagiarism o f his former best friends
unpublished ideas and o f driving a severely depressed ex-protégé (Viktor Tausk)
to suicide by coldly ordering his analyst to abandon him. Yet this veteran o f the
world’s only self-analysis possessed no insight whatever into the darker side o f
his nature. As he wrote to James Putnam in 1915, “I believe that when it comes
to a sense o f justice and consideration for others, to the dislike o f making others
suffer or taking advantage o f them, I can measure myself with the best people I
have known. I have never done anything mean or malicious___If only more of
[an urge towards the ideal] could be found in other human beings!” Letters o f
Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Jones (Dover, 1992), p. 308.
5. Jean G. Schimek, “Fact and Fantasy in the Seduction Theory: A Historical
KtwxevtF Journal o f the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 35 (1987),
pp. 937-965.

Ill
Schimek establishes the untruthfulness of Freud’s later state­
ments about what his seduction patients “told” him about
their molestations in early childhood, and he then asks “why,
in 1896, Freud presented his data in an ambiguous and incon­
sistent fashion, and why he saw them as much clearer and
stronger (almost all of my women patients told m e . .. ’) once
they had become evidence for universal oedipal fantasies
rather than proof of the past misdeeds of some individual
fathers” (Schimek, p. 961). My essay supplies the answer that
is already implicit in this delicately posed question: Freud mis­
represented what his hysterics had “told” him because it suited
his later theoretical interests to do so.
3. It is too bad that James Hopkins couldn’t have stud
ied Schimek’s article before writing his own letter, which does
at least get down to specifics. Those details just don’t lead to
the conclusions he thinks they do. It is Schimek, not Hopkins,
who clearly recognizes Freud’s contradictions over “seduction”
and who understands the nonclinical basis on which “the
father” came to dominate the last phase of Freud’s prepsycho-
analytic thought. I will draw on Schimek’s findings in the fol­
lowing response to Hopkins.
The core of Hopkins’s letter is his allegation that, by
overlooking the evolution of Freud’s seduction theory in the
last year o f its existence, 1897, I have created a false discrep­
ancy between Freud’s early and late accounts o f that theory,
thus unjustly impugning his integrity. Specifically, says
Hopkins, Freud did, in his private letters to Fliess, blame
fathers for the molestations he believed his hysterical patients
to have undergone—and so he was being strictly truthful when
he later characterized his abandoned theory in the same terms.

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 Hopkins’s letter goes awry on several points that will
require explanation, but it is also wrong in a global way that
can be stated at once. My brief against Freud in the seduction
matter was a double one. First, Freud later pretended that
nearly all o f his female hysterics had directly told him about
early childhood molestations which in fact were sheer inven­
tions o f his own; and second, he eventually maintained that
those patients had named their fathers as the culprits. If, as his
three relevant papers o f 1896 abundantly show, Freud conjec­
tured the infantile scenes that his patients never did succeed in
remembering, then his later versions of the story, including
the one that incriminates fathers, are manifestly false. No con­
clusions drawn from the Freud-Fliess Letters could challenge
this assertion, which pertains to inconsistencies in Freud’s
published writings. Hopkins’s laboriously reasoned indict­
ment is thus much ado about nothing.
Hopkins would have us believe that Freud in all o f his
later statements was merely recalling the final, never pub­
lished, phase of his seduction theory, in which “the father”
indeed served as the evil protagonist. How odd, then, that
fathers aren’t even mentioned in Freud’s first retrospective
comments about the theory in 1914, when he began making
self-serving misstatements about the authorship of the infan­
tile scenes. Indeed, it took Freud until 1925, in his Auto­
biographical Studyy to assert that most o f his women patients
in the 1890s had explicitly blamed their fathers. When he
repeated that claim more strongly in 1933, in his New
Introductory LectureSy his reason for doing so was made trans­
parently clear by a following sentence: “It was only later that I
was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the

113
father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in
women” (SE, 22:120).^
A further aim on Hopkins’s part is to show, through sev­
eral examples, that Freud’s hysterics did offer him uncoerced
reports o f sexual abuse, in direct contradiction of my claim
that the scenes were invented. In making this argument, how­
ever, Hopkins reveals that he has misunderstood the seduction
theory in all of its variations. As Schimek explains, Freud’s the­
ory anticipated the retrieval of sexual material from two stages
o f a hysteric’s life: a molestation between the ages of two and
five and a disturbing incident after the onset of puberty. The
latter could be anything from “the stroking of the hand or the
hearing of a mildly obscene joke” (Schimek, p. 941) to a fully
incestuous relationship. The inevitability that some recollec­
tion on a patient’s part would fall into such a vast category
rendered this aspect of his interrogations relatively uninterest­
ing to Freud, even when adolescent incest was involved. If the
seduction theory was not to topple, he would have to go fur­
ther and show that the Ur-traumas from ages two to five had
actually occurred.^ And those same “scenes” were to become

6. As Peter Swales has pointed out to me, the very fact that we refer to a “seduc­
tion theory” about the rape of small children attests to Freuds success in the air-
brushing o f history. Once Freud had adopted his notion (actually borrowed
from Fliess) o f infantile sexuality and had endowed all children with a wish to
“seduce” a parent, it became useful for him to claim that his patients had sym­
metrically (mis)remembered their own “seductions.” I will keep to Freud’s retro­
spective nomenclature here, but students of his thought would do well to
change the name of the seduction theory to the “molestation theory.”
7. “If the first-discovered scene is unsatisfactory, we tell our patient that this
experience explains nothing, but that behind it there must be hidden a more
significant, earlier, experience” (SE, 3:195-196).

114
no less indispensable to psychoanalysis itself, which came into
being as an attempt to account for them as repressed oedipal
fantasy. But since the scenes existed only in Freuds head, the
only thing that required explaining was his own fanaticism.
Hopkins’s error will become clearer if we look at one of
the cases he cites, that of a patient who consciously recollected
that her father had lasciviously fondled her between the ages of
eight and twelve. Hopkins believes that such narratives gave Freud
just the key information he was seeking. Freud, however, saw
the matter very differently, and his account to Fliess, on April
28, 1897, of his two initial sessions with this patient displays the
prodding and coaching that Hopkins is at such pains to deny.
The patient was a young woman who had become insom­
niac after seeing her brother hauled off to an insane asylum.
Characteristically brushing aside that palpable trauma, Freud
told her that “ [i]n my analyses the guilty people are close rela­
tives, father or brother.” Apparently without coercion, the
woman then revealed her molestation by her father in her pre­
adolescent years. Here again lay a likely source o f mental dis­
turbance in the present. For Freud’s purposes, however, such
direct reporting o f actual abuse beyond age five was little more
than a challenge to his powers as a psychic detective. “O f course,”
he relates to Fliess, ''when I told her that similar and worse things
must have happened in her earliest childhood, she could not find
it incredible” (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 238; italics added).
Did Freud in the “seduction” period, as Hopkins pro­
poses, make serious attempts to guard against the effects of his
own suggestion? Readers can judge for themselves by studying
both the letter just quoted and the "Habemus p apam r letter
of January 3, 1897, that Hopkins also attempts to enlist in his

115
behalf. There Freud tells Fliess that he has solved the case of a
patient (a cousin of Fliesss) who must have been molested by
her father:

When I thrust the explanation at her, she was at first

won over; then she committed the folly of questioning
the old man himself who at the very first intimation
exclaimed indignantly, “Are you implying that I was the
one?” and swore a holy oath to his innocence.
She is now in the throes of the most vehement resis­
tance, claims to believe him, but attests to her identifi­
cation with him by having become dishonest and swear­
ing false oaths. (Freud-Fliess Letters, pp. 220-221)

As I indicated in my essay, Freud believed that even the

tortures inflicted by witch interrogators yielded uncontami­
nated psychic data—a position to which he still adhered after
founding psychoanalysis.^ Not surprisingly, then, he expended
as much ingenuity on the uncontrolled and egregiously lead­
ing pursuit of infantile “primal scenes” and repressed fantasies
as he had previously devoted to infantile incest. This is not the

8. “Why,” Freud asked Fliess, “are [the accused witches’] confessions under tor­
ture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment?”
(p. 224). Freud’s answer was that the “witches” were fantasizing in a manner
that was true in every detail to the experience o f their repressed infantile
molestations. Much later, he broached the subject o f witch trials again with his
psychoanalytic colleagues, telling them: “We find unmistakably infantile ele­
ments in those fantasies that were not created by torture but merely squeezed
out by it.” See Minutes o f the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol. 2, 1908-1910,
edited by Herman Nunberg and Finest Federn (International Universities Press,
1967), p. 123.

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Freud described in Hopkins’s letter, but so much the worse for
Hopkins’s ability to read the record discerningly.^
4. The psychoanalysts represented above share a belief
widely held among the uninformed public, that Freud, though
fallible, bequeathed us a precious store o f permanently valid
discoveries and concepts. Their inventory includes the uncon­
scious, infantile sexuality, dream symbolism, repression, regres­
sion, projection, sublimation, denial, transference, counter­
transference, “Freudian slips,” and o f course the centerpiece of
it all, the universal Oedipus complex. These notions are thrown

9. Hopkins stumbles in other respects as well. It is pointless to argue, as he tries to

do, that Freud’s “father etiology,” which was soon transmuted into the Oedipus
complex, rested solidly on his clinical cases. Everyone knows that it came directly
from his self-analysis. Schimek, referring to the very cases cited by Hopkins,
observes that “ It is hard to tell what was presented by the patients as memories
or as dreams and hallucinations; it is also difficult to separate Freud's suggestions
and interpretations from the patients’ direct and spontaneous statements.
Furthermore, two out o f the three cases refer to later periods o f childhood, and
in one instance the father is only indirectly incriminated” (p. 952).
Similarly, when Hopkins justifies Freud’s shift to an oedipal etiology by citing
its superior therapeutic results, he is whistling in the dark. According to the
Freud-Fliess Letters, many o f Freud’s hysterics had forsaken his services by
1897. Does Hopkins think that Freud got back in touch with them, broke the
news that they were all suffering from Oedipus complexes, and thereby relieved
them o f their symptoms? And where do we learn about the critical mass o f new
patients who did so much better from the outset? Freud was eager, as Hopkins
inadvertently documents, to draw hasty correlations between symptom abate­
ment and interpretation. He knew, however, that his finished cases were nothing
to boast about.
Hopkins’s whole letter manifests a desire to take what Freud thought he was
doing (being inductive a la John Stuart Mill, correlating hypotheses with thera­
peutic outcomes, etc.) as sufficient evidence o f his actual procedures, which
were aprioristic and peremptory in the extreme. From Freud’s point o f view as a
rhetorician, Hopkins would seem to constitute his ideally gullible reader.

117
back at me as if only ingratitude had kept me from paying due
obeisance to them. Astonishingly, most o f the writers seem
unaware that their conceptual stock-in-trade is even contro­
versial, much less that it lacks corroboration that can be taken
seriously outside the precincts of the Freudian village.
How can this be? The answer is that these analysts, like
their colleagues around the world, fail to grasp what is
required of an adequate scientific explanation. With Freud,
they believe that the instancing of a causal hypothesis—show­
ing that it “works” in “covering” the phenomenon in ques­
tion—suffices to prove its worth. The mere fact that genera­
tions of Freudians have been able to organize their data
according to Freudian categories strikes them as settling the
matter.^® They thus inhabit a kind of scientific preschool in
which no one divulges the grown-up secret that successful
causal explanation must be differential, establishing the superi­
ority of a given hypothesis to all of its extant rivals.
Whenever that standard has been applied, Freudian
notions have failed to pass muster. Nor should we be sur­
prised, since the entire psychoanalytic system was assembled
deductively as an elaboration o f Freud’s infantile-sexual etiol­
ogy of neurosis, about which even the analysts themselves now
feel distinctly queasy. Every Freudian idea, it turns out, suffers

10. I make no exception here for “responsible” Freudians like Dr. Peyser, who
appears to agree that “ Freuds methods o f proof are not adequate for a truly sci­
entific discipline.” Amid its ecumenical gestures, Peyser’s letter glibly refers to
Freud’s “empirically invaluable” findings and “first order contributions of great
importance.” Phis is to say that Peyser’s homage to scientific prudence, like his
attempt to portray my friends Adolf Griinbaum and Frank Sulloway as admirers
o f psychoanalysis, is nothing more than a gambit.

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from several of the following deadly flaws: vagueness (no deter­
minate consequences can be predicted by its use), excessiveness
(the explained phenomena can be accounted for more satis­
factorily by more plausible suppositions), logical dependency on
other dubious notions, and superfluousness (the explained phe­
nomena are themselves illusory products of the theory).
Take, for example, the concept of transference, regarded
by virtually all modern analysts as the most axiomatic of
Freudian theoretical entities. Transference as Freud under­
stood it is the patient’s reliving of infantile cravings and disap­
pointments through an unconscious casting of the therapist as
a substitute parent. It is thus an artifact o f the Oedipus com­
plex, itself a colossal overgeneralization o f Freud’s hunches
about the origin of his own hysterical tendency.^* And since
transference can be either “positive” or “negative” without our
possessing any guidelines for knowing which kind to expect
next, no behavioral consequences flow from it, and it is there­
fore at once irrefutable and operationally devoid of meaning.
The usefulness of transference to Freud, however, was
considerable. Like its constituent defense mechanism o f “resis­
tance,” transference explained why Freud’s patients failed to
recall the “memories” he proffered them and why they acquired
“no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction

11. For the misgivings oF analysts themselves about the Oedipus complex, see
Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, pp. 489-491. Anthropological objections are
summarized by Bruce Bower, “Oedipus Wrecked,” Science News, Vol. 140
(October 19, 1991), pp. 248-250. And for a powerful challenge to the concept
from an informed evolutionary perspective, see Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,
“ Is Parent-Offspring Conflict Sex-Linked? Freudian and Darwinian Models,”
Journal o f Personality, Vol. 58 (March 1990), pp. 163-189.

119
that [had] been communicated” to them (SE, 18:18). In short,
transference could be invoked to spare Freud from recognizing
that he might be wrong.
The concept first acquired prominence, in fact, when
“Dora” refused to accept Freuds thesis that she was in love
with the adulterous pedophile and chambermaid seducer “Herr
K,” whose advances to his friends daughter Freud deemed
“neither tactless nor offensive” (SE, 7:38n). Instead of asking
himself whether Dora might not be a better judge of her own
amorous feelings than he was, Freud decided that her love for
Herr K —ultimately derived, as he explained to her, from her
desire to commit sex acts with her father—had now blos­
somed into love o f Freud himself Thus when Dora dreamed
of smoke, Freud concluded that she was really pining uncon­
sciously for a kiss from his own cigar-scented lips (SE, 7:74).
And when Dora reasonably decided that nothing could be
gained from continuing to consult such a physician, Freud
once again laid all the blame on the tumultuous effects of
transference (SE, 7:118-19).^^
Needless to say, liberal contemporary analysts feel that
they have purged transference of its wild-card hermeneutic
function and its narrowly oedipal basis. In Dr. Marian Tolpins

12. As David Olds mentions above, transference also supposedly accounted for
the famous passion o f “Anna O ’ for the alarmed Josef Breuer, who, Freud told
us, fled in consternation from Anna and her hysterical pregnancy. Olds could
profit from reading Henri Ellenbergers investigation o f that pre-psychoanalytic
event, which never actually occurred; it was a malicious fiction invented by
Freud to discredit his former mentor and benefactor and to advertise his own
superior courage. See Ellenberger, “The Story o f Anna O ’: A Critical Review
with New Data,” Journal o f the History o f the Behavioral Sciences^ Vol. 8 (1972),
pp. 2G 7-279.

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letter above, for example, little remains of the concept but a
Cheshire cat smile—a bland hope on the part of patients that
their “basic needs for adults fidelity” will be better met by ther­
apists than they were by parents. I do not begrudge the liberals
this retreat from Freuds sexual house of horrors into Mr. Rogers’s
neighborhood. But I must point out that their revised under­
standing o f transference becomes less objectionable precisely
to the degree that it sheds its uniquely psychoanalytic character.
Meanwhile, the concept inevitably remains entangled in
the therapeutically questionable practice o f fostering a “trans­
ference neurosis,” or childish overinvolvement with the ana­
lyst, which will then take years to “work through.” As Dr.
Olds frankly points out above, another likely outcome is that
“the regressed neurotic aspects o f both partners” will bring
about “disasters.” By fetishizing emotional distortions on both
sides, moreover, the whole transference-countertransference
rigmarole deflects attention from the cognitive dubiety of
psychoanalytic formulations in general and of the analyst’s
surmises in particular. All in all, then, this pivotal notion has
proved itself to be not only scientifically vacuous but also con­
siderably worse than useless as a guide to the rational addressing
of patients’ initial complaints.
A similar critique could be made o f every other Freudian
heirloom prized by my correspondents. We have already seen,
for instance, that Freud’s own favorite idea, repression, arose
to meet a wholly imaginary need. When Freud conceded the
absence of the early sexual events posited by his seduction
theory, the concept o f repression was elevated into an article
of sheer faith in undetectable subterranean transactions, with­
out even a hypothetical link to the recoverable misfortunes of

121
children. In full-blown psychoanalytic theory, repression
serves as a pseudo-explanation of a pseudo-phenomenon, the
personality-forming renunciation by children of their primary
desire to do away with one parent and copulate with the other.
Well-designed experimental studies have not produced a shred
of evidence for the existence of such a mechanism.
The concept of repression has nonetheless survived and
prospered, thanks to a conjunction of several factors: the ana­
lytic fraternity’s century-long cover-up of Freud’s bungling in
the birth hour of psychoanalysis; Freud’s public relations suc­
cess in enlisting repression to “explain” dreams, jokes, and
errors; the enticingness of the concept as a means of facilely
negating manifest appearances; and a failure, by both analysts
and the lay public, to appreciate the difference between iso­
lated traumatic amnesia (a real but unusual occurrence) and
Freudian repression, which entails all the epistemic liabilities
of the Oedipus complex, the castration complex, and a demon­
strably erroneous idea of the way human memories are typi­
cally made unavailable to consciousness.
This last point deserves emphasis because of its bearing
on the urgent question of the moment, false memory syn-

13. For gaining an appreciation of the difference between Freudian and scientific
standards o f research design, there is still no better source than Hans J. Eysenck
and Glenn D. Wilson, The Experimental Study o f Freudian Theories (Methuen, 1973).
14. It was The Psychopathology o f Everyday Life (1901) that chiefly caught the
fancy o f Freud s lay admirers, who continue to believe that “Freudian slips”
neatly demonstrate the truth o f psychoanalysis. It has been shown, however, not
only that Freud’s theory o f parapraxes is conceptually dubious but that the book
announcing it contains not a single satisfactory illustration of that theory. See
Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism
(New Left Books, 1976).

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drome. As Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters have shown,
unscrupulous or incompetent therapists who induce patients
to “recall” fictitious molestations with hallucinatory vividness
are employing a souped-up but still recognizably Freudian
idea of repression. They share with Freud the discredited
belief that all experience, even from earliest infancy, is
photographically stored and retained without normal degra­
dation over time. Like Freud, they deem that only repression
can account for the inaccessibility of a given memory at a
given moment. Again, they subscribe to his groundless tenet
that repression can block the memory not just of a sudden
shocking assault but also of whole years' worth of psychically
unacceptable events. And most significantly, they also share
his conviction that a patients disorientation and distress
when confronted with alarming suggestions about his child­
hood must constitute a partial lifting of repression—that is, a
delayed activation of the affect that could not be felt at the time.
Similarly, prosecutors who browbeat innocent persons
into confessing to satanistic sexual crimes are reaping the legacy
of Freud’s utter refusal to make allowance for the contaminat­
ing effect o f suggestion. In his own words.

We must not be led astray by initial denials. If we keep

firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in the end con­
quer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakeable
nature of our convictions__ Moreover, the idea that
one might, by one’s insistence, cause a patient who is

15. Ofshe and Watters,“Making Monsters,” Society, Vol. 30 (March/April

1993), pp. 4-16.

123
 psychically normal to accuse himself falsely of sexual
misdemeanours—such an idea may safely be disre­
garded as an imaginary danger (SE, 3:269).^^

5. The psychoanalysts represented above are most exer

cised of all by my apparent imputation that their guild has
made no intellectual or behavioral improvement since Freud s
day. But this is to misconstrue my argument. The outlandish­
ness of Freud’s beliefs and practices virtually guaranteed that
any sane, honest, and compassionate successor would make
fewer incredible assertions and achieve better clinical results
than he and the members of his doctrinaire and unethical cir­
cle did. If, as Dr. Olds tells us, analysts have learned through
“trial and error” the imprudence of seducing their patients, I
will not deny that this is a step in the right direction. And I,
too, like Dr. Tolpin, find Erik Erikson’s avuncular wisdom
more congenial than Freud’s relentless biologism. That
Erikson has proved to be a better therapist and moral coun­
selor than Freud strikes me as the safest bet in the world.

16. This is Freud in quaint pursuit of his own pet “misdemeanor,” masturba­
tion. Modern analysts, o f course, do not share his Victorian prejudice in this
regard. Nor have they taken much interest in incest as a literal tragic event.
[Later. But see pp. 15-29 above.] Yet by continuing to turn their backs on the
critical problem o f experimenter effects, and by “normalizing” the relatively rare
and physiologically based phenomenon of traumatic amnesia, they are not with­
out their own share o f responsibility for our national epidemic o f false memory
accusations. In this connection, see Paul R. McHugh, “Psychotherapy Awry,”
The American Scholacy Vol. 63 (Winter 1994), pp. 17-30.
17. Dr. Tolpin wishes that I had written a friendly essay about Erikson instead
o f a harsh one about Freud. In my Skeptical Engagements she can find a whole
chapter that correlates Eriksons sweetening o f Freudian dogma with his protean

124
 Still, there is a problem here. Neither Eriksons postu­
lates nor those of any other neo-Freudian can be regarded
as bearing the slightest scientific (as opposed to moral-
ideological) weight. All of the defining traits of pseudoscience
that I listed in note 24 o f my essay apply equally to Freud’s
work and to that of his improvers. For, although each of
Freud’s ideas has been challenged from within his own tradi­
tion, that tradition itself remains one of deplorable conceptual
sloppiness and circularity.
To my knowledge, for example, no modern analyst has
renounced the cardinal Freudian investigative tool of “free asso­
ciation,” which is inherently incapable of yielding knowledge
about the determinants o f dreams and symptoms.^^ None has
even started to make due allowance for the leading and indoc­
trinating effects of the therapy itself None, again, has revised
the theory so as to endow it with clear predictive implications
—a step whose absence means that any number o f schismatic
Freudian sects can proliferate without appeal to a factual basis
for adjudicating between them. And none has removed the ulti­
mate joker from the Freudian deck—the principle that an analyst
is entitled, in Freud’s words, to “handle unconscious ideas.

adaptability to shifting currents o f American ideology.

Tolpin also makes much of my dereliction in implying that Erikson “recom­
mended Freud s treatment o f Dora as a model for the treatment o f adolescents
and young adults.” I implied no such thing. Erikson, I said, reported that the
Dora case was still (in 1962) being touted in psychoanalytic training as “the
classical analysis o f the structure and genesis o f hysteria.” My statement revealed
nothing o f Eriksons own views about hysteria, much less about the unmen­
tioned treatment o f adolescents.
18. On this point, see Macmillans Freud Evaluated, Chapter 15— a devastating
critique of the entire psychoanalytic means o f gathering and interpreting data.

125
unconscious trains of thought, and unconscious impulses as
though they were no less valid and unimpeachable psycholog­
ical data than conscious ones” (SE, 7:113). As Malcolm
Macmillan puts it,

We are never told that the so-called discoveries are

dependent upon methods of inquiry and interpretation
so defective that even practitioners trained in their use
are unable to reach vaguely congruent conclusions about
such things as the interpretation of a dream or a symp­
tom [,] let alone the basic clinical characteristics of infan­
tile or perverse sexuality or the reconstruction o f the
early stages of an individuals development o r...th e
functions that make up a given structure.

On this basis, moreover, I must qualify my praise of

modern analysts for doing better than Freud in their thera­
peutic work. They want us to believe that the improvements
they have achieved were made possible in part by a scientific
honing of their concepts over time. It is true, certainly, that
merely by refraining from reliance on such backward ideas as
inevitable female masochism and the fateful consequences of

19. Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, p. 505. This last point applies forcefully to
Erikson, whose humanistic pronouncements have been grafted onto a schema­
tized, fanciful extension o f Freud s empirically unanchored theory o f psycho-
sexual stages. Note, too, that Eriksons reading o f Doras dreams, like dozens of
other mutually incompatible efforts, offers no basic challenge to the open-
season license o f Freudian dream interpretation but merely exercises that license,
as Dr. Tolpin puts it, “in the light o f emerging identity theory.” This is a game
that any number may play, but to no purpose other than the exemplification o f
predetermined lessons.

126
masturbation, any contemporary therapist would have a head
start over Freud. But because the liberalized versions o f psycho­
analysis continue to use amorphous uncharacterized terms and
to make untested claims, the relationship between psycho­
analytic dogma and therapeutic effects remains as imprecise
and prayerful as ever.
In this connection, much can be learned from Dr. Peysers
story of his female patient who returned to treatment because
of anxiety about her impending marriage—an anxiety caused,
Peyser later learned, by her involvement with a second and
more alluring man. She was of course “fully conscious” of this
problem when she consulted Peyser, but because of indirections
that are built into psychoanalytic technique, the topic didn’t
come up, and the doctor’s fees, we can safely assume, kept
mounting. (“We go on for a while without any increase in
understanding o f the matter or change in the situation--- ”)
After again suspending the treatment for a month, however,
the patient returned to announce that an astute prior dream
interpretation on Peyser’s part had enabled her to tell him
about her dilemma at last. (He had already guessed, but, good
Freudian clinician that he is, he hadn’t wanted to intrude.)
And then comes the less than cathartic denouement: “Now
we were able to work on [her secret] and help resolve it so
that she could become unstuck’ and proceed with her life” —
but in which direction and with what success we are not
told.
This narrative really seems to illustrate the way psycho­
analysis itself can become an extra burden for a client. One
gets the impression that merely keeping the therapeutic rela­
tionship going had become a goal for both parties and that

127
a fear of displeasing her analyst was needlessly costing this
woman a good deal of time and money. Would she not have
done better to discuss her problem with a few sympathetic
friends.^ And can Peyser be sure that it was really his dream
interpretation, and not some other development in the womans
life, that allowed his sessions with her to resume?
And then there is the question o f whether Peyser had
“correctly” decoded his patients snake-in-the-shower dream.
That someone who, at the time, was keeping two lovers busy
suffered from “ambivalence towards the phallus” appears far
from self-evident. It may be, of course, that Peyser and his
patient were using dreams and their glossing as an Aesopian
language for the discreet trading of hints; as the psychoanalyst
Judd Marmor observed long ago, patients in various styles of
psychotherapy learn to edit their dream reports in ways that
suit the theoretical expectations o f their doctors. What must
be firmly rejected, however, is Peyser’s implication that the
unique correctness of Freudian ideas allowed him to reach an
outcome (whatever it was!) that couldn’t have been attained in
any number of less roundabout ways.
For all the advanced company he keeps in “the Rapaport—
Klein Group,” Dr. Peyser is still enmired in the primitive post
hoCy ergo propter hoc style of thought that pervades psycho­
analytic discourse. As independent students of therapeutic
outcomes understand, it is not enough to observe that, after a
lapse of months or years, some favorable change occurred in
a patient’s attitude or mood. The question must always be
whether factors specific to the therapist’s mode of treatment—
and not factors shared by all treatments or factors originating
outside the treatment—brought about the good result. The

128
same problem bedevils Dr. Ostows letter, which reports on a
follow-up of thirty-seven of his former patients. It is sad
enough that, even though Ostow had employed “medication
along with analysis,” a full 62 percent of those patients had
improved very little or not at all. But more pathetic still is
Ostow’s total unawareness that, thanks to his failure to control
for nonpsychoanalytic effects, his survey lacks any validity.
6. There is, however, one letter above from a corre
spondent who has spent a lifetime doing just what I am
recommending here, the comparative study of Freudian and
non-Freudian therapeutic outcomes. Lester Luborsky believes
that I need to undertake a crash course of reading on the topic.
But Luborsky goes badly wrong in several assertions, the least
important of which is his claim that I am unfamiliar with his
writings. As early as 1980, I was not only citing his work but
also disputing the unwarranted partisan conclusions that he
even now persists in drawing from it.
In his letter, Luborsky asserts that all psycho therapies
(that is, “talking cures”) may be about equally effective and
that I am therefore out of line in calling psychoanalysis “indif­
ferently successful” and “vastly inefficient.” This only shows
that Luborsky has yet to learn what the words “indifferently”
and “inefficient” mean. As 1 wrote in 1980, “if one therapy
worked about as well as another, only people with severely
impaired reasoning, or with motives other than a wish to be
speedily cured, would choose the one that is most disruptive
of their budgets and work schedules.”^®
Luborsky is on record as believing that Freudian analysts

20. Skeptical Engagements, p. 21.

129
are in possession, not of a counterintuitive and embattled
system of decoding, but of “a unique store of clinical wis­
dom. He recognizes, however, that psychoanalysis has had
to retreat from the claim of superior curative power that Freud
cited as the cardinal proof of his theory’s correctness. Long
ago, therefore, Luborsky adopted a more furtive strategy, that
of making psychoanalysis look as inconspicuous as possible
within a modestly cheerful assessment o f all psychotherapies.
This, once again, is the purpose of his present letter.
But Luborsky has fared poorly even in this low-profile
endeavor. Consider, for example, the book by Glass et al.
mentioned in the remedial reading list he has prepared for
my edification. Glass himself later acknowledged that his 1980
study failed to cover a single “outcome evaluation of orthodox
Freudian psychoanalysis.”^^ Moreover, the criterion of thera­
peutic effectiveness employed by both Glass et al. and Luborsky
—namely, better results than no treatment at all—has been
rejected as too lax by a number of independent researchers,
who cogently maintain that placebo treatment, not an absence
of treatment, ought to serve as the baseline of comparison.
And according to authors who have specifically reanalyzed and
disputed the work of Glass et al., “there is no evidence that the
benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo

21. Lester Luborsky and Donald P. Spence, “Quantitative Research on

Psychoanalytic Therapy,” in Handbook o f Psychotherapy and Behavior Change: An
Em pirical Analysis, second edition, edited by Sol L. Garfield and Allen E. Bergin
(Wiley, 1978), p. 360.
22. Gene V. Glass and Reinhold M. Kliegl, “An Apology for Research
Integration in the Study o f Psychotherapy,” o f Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, Vol. 51 (1983), p. 40.

130
t r e a t m e n t . T h u s Luborskys attempt, in his letter, to tuck
psychoanalytic treatment beneath the skirts o f short-term
‘‘dynamically oriented [i.e., Freudian] psychotherapy” is as futile
as it is shabby, given the failure even o f such brieftherapy to show
significantly better results than hand-holding control treatments.
The real import o f Luborskys work, as he himself else­
where admits, is that psychotherapies succeed (when they do)
thanks to factors that they all share—that is, placebo factors.
Thus, contra Freud, occasional happy outcomes of Freudian ther­
apy are incapable of vouching either for the truth o f psycho­
analytic notions about the mind or for the posited mechanism
of psychoanalytic cure. No doubt it is motivationally useful for
each o f the myriad extant psycho therapies to offer its clients
some structure of belief—whether it be about undoing infantile
repression, contacting the inner child, surrendering to the colleaive
unconscious, or reliving previous incarnations. But as Luborsky
understands, such notions are window dressing for the more
mundane and mildly effective process of renting a solicitous helper.
Once this point sinks in, psychoanalytic patients may well
question why they should be spending years reconstructing
early memories, fantasies, and feelings which, even if they
should happen to be genuine, will prove therapeutically inert.

23. Leslie Prioleau, Martha Murdock, and Nathan Brody, “An Analysis of
Psychotherapy versus Placebo Studies,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 6
(1983), p. 275.
24. “The most potent explanatory hictor [for the apparent equivalence o f out­
comes] is that different forms o f psychotherapy have major common ele­
ments— a helping relationship with a therapist is present in all o f them, along
with other related, nonspecific effects such as suggestion and abreaction”
(Luborsky et ah, 1975, p. 1006).

131
And if some patients still won’t care, the devisers of their med­
ical benefits surely will.
7. I reserve for last the haughty letter composed jointly
by Drs. Harold P. Blum and Bernard L. Pacella, the executive
director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and president of the
American Psychoanalytic Association, respectively. These emi­
nences charge me with many “gross misunderstandings” but
are able to name only one, my failure to realize that a certain
letter in the Archives originally restricted until the year 2102
is now available for viewing. No such date, however, appears
in my essay. I suppose that Blum and Pacella must be referring
to an actual letter that they know to have been originally des­
tined for release in 2102. Perhaps they can tell us which letter
it is, how recently it was declassified, and how it first came to
be salted away for an intended age.
I raise these questions because, insofar as the
Blum-Pacella letter attempts to deny that “the Sigmund Freud
Archives has concealed documents to protect Freud’s reputa­
tion,” it whitewashes a sordid history that Blum knows only
too intimately. Blum was appointed to replace Kurt Eissler
when the latter’s reign o f Stalinesque censorship, which began
with the founding of the archives in the early 1950s, was
exposed to worldwide ridicule by Janet Malcolm in the 1980s.
It was that mortifying episode, not any long-standing policy,
that eventually induced the Archives’ trustees to begin
counteracting Eissler’s mischief by giving Blum a different
mandate. And even so, the current “Restricted Section” cata­
log, as of December 1993, still includes whole sets of docu­
ments that are supposed to remain inaccessible until such
dates as 2020, 2050, 2053, 2056, 2057, and 2113.

132
 What Blum more particularly fails to disclose is that the
Eissler regime has cast a sinister afterglow over his own con­
trary efforts. Eissler remains the executor of all documents
donated by Anna Freud in the wake of the Jeffrey Masson
brouhaha that Malcolm so entertainingly related, and he has
continued to guard those documents against possible defilers
of Freud s shrine. When Eissler ruled the Archives, moreover,
he solicited gifts of documents for the Library of Congress but
“redonated” them in the name of the Archives, thus affording
himself the right to impose absurdly long periods o f seques­
tration.^^ It is a pity that Blum feels he must put such shame­
ful conduct under the rug in the interest of closing Freudian
ranks against the “scurrilous” Crews.
But Blum also has some explaining of his own to do. On
October 8, 1989, he told an interviewer:

We recently released letters that were considered highly

sensitive and that everyone was waiting to see, namely,
the Freud-Anna Freud and the Freud-Minna Bernays
correspondence. There have been wild speculations
about Freuds having had an affair with Minna. That
correspondence is available now to all, and they can
draw their own conclusions. But no one has yet inferred
from anything in the letters that there is any evidence of
any impropriety. 26

25. Eissler did, however, grant echt Freudians occasional selective access to some
restricted papers. Such a policy can have had no other purpose than to perpetu­
ate the Freud legend.
26. William Jeffrey, “A Conversation with Harold Blum,” The American
Psychoanalyst^ Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 1990), p. 16.

133
The documents characterized here include the same
Freud-Minna letters of 1893-1910 that Peter Gay declared
missing when, having been told that they were ready for exam­
ination, he applied to see them in 1989. In fact, however, the
letters were neither missing nor accessible. Rather, they were
under restriction, and they still are. If Dr. Blum himself has
lost track of them, he can find them (I am told) in Container
Z3, whose contents are banned from view until the year 2000.
Is it believable that Blum was unaware of that fact when he
said the opposite in 1989?^^
The Blum-Pacella letter is also noteworthy for the speed
with which it performs an agile two-step that is attempted in
some of the other letters as well: praising “the enduring dis­
coveries of [Freud s] revolutionary genius” and assuring us that
present-day psychoanalysis has left those same treasures safely
behind where they will cause no further harm. Freud s propo­
sitions, say Blum and Pacella, “are no longer vital for the vali­
dation of psychoanalytic formulation.” Well, what is the new
basis of such validation? Quite simply, there is none at all that
could impress an independent observer.
I have claimed above that psychoanalysts cannot seem
to grasp the rudiments of scientific explanation. As if to illus­
trate the point, Drs. Blum and Pacella remind us that “Lady
Macbeth washes her hands because of underlying guilt, not
because her hands are literally dirty.” The logic here is that
since both Shakespeare and Freud touched on the same

27. Even the available Freud-Minna letters are not altogether unrestricted.
Scholars who apply to examine them are given photocopies in which the names
of Freuds patients have been deleted, thus causing needless uncertainty about iden­
tities which can hardly be considered sensitive after the lapse o f a century or so.

134
phenomenon, guilt, Freud s structure of postulates about guilt
is thereby validated. Yes, in just the way that the undeniable
existence of stars demonstrates the propositions of astrology.
And then there is the sublimely fatuous clincher: “The
vulgar idiom ‘jerk off’ conveys thinly disguised castration anx­
iety.” Nowhere could one find a more perfect instance of
Freudian question begging and dogmatic intellectual slumber.
I would like to instruct the president of the American
Psychoanalytic Association that something other than a penis
comes off as a result of masturbation and that still another cas­
tration threat, Ockham’s razor, could be usefully employed
here. But will he even understand my criticism? Writing in
these pages nearly twenty years ago, Peter Medawar called doc­
trinaire psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual
confidence trick o f the twentieth century.”^^ He could have
added that like many another such instrument o f deception,
its first and most enduring dupes are its own practitioners.

JAMES L. RICE, Professor of Russian and Comparative

Literatures at the University of Oregon, is the author of
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art and Freud's Russia: National
Identity in the Evolution o f Psychoanalysis, He writes:

Frederick Crews includes an amiable critique of my book,

Freud's Russia^ in his essay on “The Unknown Freud.” I
would like to clarify some of the points raised. Freud’s many

28. P. B. Medawar, “Victims o f Psychiatry,” The New York Review, January 23,
1975, p. 17.

135
kin now known to have resided in the Russian Empire were
not in Lithuania, but chiefly in Odessa, where his mother
spent part of her childhood. It was the paternal line that
Freud traced to Lithuania, whence they began to emigrate in
the eighteenth century. Some unknown relatives, I conjec­
ture, must have remained behind, eventually to endure the
worst official Russian anti-Semitism. In any case, family
roots on both sides made Russian history and politics per­
sonally significant to Freud.
I would not characterize Freud, after 1917, as a “dis­
illusioned revolutionary.” He scoffed at the grandiose
Bolshevik schemes as early as 1919, before the “Russian
experiment” had even begun. Skepticism and irony toward
political and religious authority were always hallmarks of his
character. On the other hand, he never became a misan­
thrope, with malice toward the species. He had hope, even in
the mid-Thirties, that the Jews would some day thrive under
more enlightened conditions. And he believed that nutrition,
pharmacology, and radical organic therapies could in time
displace the imperfect art of psychoanalysis, to some degree.
Freud s ill-will toward Dostoevsky, such as it was, I do
not describe as “gratuitous.” The underlying factor, I believe,
was Dostoevsky’s late anti-Semitism, which had become
known in the West in Freud’s circle, though it was not well
documented. On the other hand, Freud profoundly admired
Dostoevsky’s “great intellect” deployed against religious faith
(“The Grand Inquisitor”). This indicates the essential rapport
between them, and in turn raises the question of Freud’s own
Jewish identity, which had great strength on social and per­
sonal levels, but none in terms of conventional faith. These

136
are some of the essential elements in Freuds labored “psycho­
analysis” of Dostoevsky, but of course not the whole story.
I have no bone to pick with Freud for the lapses in his
art. A number of drugs now used for depressive patients like
Freud s may cause sudden suicide with no prior tendency.
There is no evidence, I think, that Freuds psychoanalytic
sessions caused fatalities. He made mistakes, but his therapy
was a pioneering theory in an age with no medical options.
Real suffering drove patients to seek his help. My own inter­
est in Freud has less to do with his clinical methods than
with the design and humor of his world view, and with his
idiosyncratic constitution, recently summed up by a Harvard
psychiatrist as “crafty and inventive” (George E. Vaillant, The
Wisdom o f the Ego). ^

FREDERICK CREWS replies:

In denying that Freud was a “disillusioned revolutionary,”
James L. Rice makes it appear that I regard Freud as having
once been an ardent fellow traveler o f Bolshevism. Not at all.
That phrase o f mine appears in a paragraph that has nothing
to do with the Russian Revolution. What I do say, later, is that
although Freud “feared Russian extremism as strongly as he
was drawn to it,” he initially looked to the Soviet assault on
the old order for a political equivalent of his own scientific
revolutionism. It is Rice himself, in Freud's Russia^ who writes
of Freuds “revolutionary idealism, which lasted (with growing
reservations) into the early years of the Stalin era” (p. 12).
Again, Rice detects “some measure of optimism about ‘the
Russian experiment’ on Freud’s part, at the outset of Lenin’s

137
rule” (p. 166). And he quotes Freud himself, in a 1930 letter
to Arnold Zweig, to the effect that “any such hope [of human
improvement in Russia] that I may have cherished has disap­
peared in this decade of Soviet rule” (p. 166).
I am sorry if I saddled Rice with my personal sense of
Freuds lurking nihilism. Freud's Russia does show that Freud
was drawn toward what he and others perceived as a “Russian”
strain of nihilism, but more in the sense of a passion for
destruction than of exasperation with the defective human
race. Although there is plenty of evidence for this latter appre­
hension o f Freud, Rice’s disavowal of it should be noted.
Rice needn’t have insisted, however, that he takes a more
sanguine view of Freud’s accomplishments than I do. I made
the same point myself, referring to his and other authors’
“mixed feelings about Freud’s stature and the legitimacy of
psychoanalytic claims. ” Rice uncovers the fanciful character of
Freud’s analyses in every examined instance, but, like many
another humanist, he shrinks from facing the wholesale un­
foundedness of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic system. For
Rice, Freud is still a great if eccentric discoverer whose Inter­
pretation o f Dreams^ for example, deserves praise for its “in­
sight into the structure and function of dreams” (p. 60)—even
though Rice’s own unraveling of the Wolf Man’s dream speci­
men would seem to point in the opposite direction. My own
view is that people who write confidently about “the structure
and function of dreams” should first learn something about
controlled research on the topic, which seriously undermines
Freud’s claims.
Rice wants us to remember that Freud felt empathy as
well as dislike for Dostoevsky. Just how deeply Freud respect­

138
ed the novelist, however, seems more open to question than
Rice acknowledges, Dostoevsky endowed some o f his major
characters with a high degree of conscious psychological reflec­
tion, thus anticipating some features o f Freud s doctrine but
suspending them, as Freud could not, in sophisticated Active
uncertainty and irony. Such a flgure must have struck Freud
above all as a rival who deserved the treatment he always
reserved for his adversaries: reduction to a helpless example of
his own pet notions about unconscious infantile compulsion.
Rice also feels compelled to point out that Freud s inter­
ventions never caused fatalities. Had I said that psychoanalysis
is lethal? And is Rice really so complacent as to approve a
therapy on the grounds that its patients remain alive?
(Compare, above, the admission by the psychoanalysts
Herbert Peyser and Marian Tolpin that Freud’s errors “led to
much improperly imposed suffering” and “were extremely
harmful to some of his patients.”) In contrasting Freud’s
method to perilous drug therapy, moreover. Rice shows an
unawareness that Freud administered cocaine and morphine
to his early hysterics, at once endangering their health and
compromising any inferences he might otherwise have been
able to draw about the efficacy o f his “talking cure” alone.

139
 April 21, 1994

Ro B E R'r R. HO LT is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New

York University and the former director o f the Research Center
for Mental Health. He is the author of Freiid Reappraised, He writes:

In answering the objectors to his “The Unknown Freud,”

Frederick Crews wrote: “To my knowledge, no modern ana­
lyst has renounced the cardinal Freudian investigative tool of
‘free association,’ which is inherently incapable of yielding
knowledge about the determinants of dreams and symp­
toms.” Not to my knowledge, either, and for good reason:
because the alleged inherent incapability has not been
demonstrated. Instead of attempting to do that. Crews sim­
ply refers us to Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated, Chapter 15,
which he calls “a devastating critique.”
The burden of that chapter is easily summarized. Macmillan
reaches the radical conclusion that there “can not be any guide­
lines to how these data [those of the free association method]
should be interpreted” (p. 549) because “the absence of a sec­
ond script prevents any rules from ever being formulated”
(p. 564). That is, taking as inherent to the psychoanalytic
method Freud’s notion that for every manifest dream, there
exists a latent dream the text (script) of which can be discov­
ered, Macmillan makes the quite plausible argument that we
have no way o f ever directly accessing latent dreams. If that
were the only possible way o f devising guidelines for analyz­
ing psychoanalytic data, then the conclusion—the inherent
incapability o f which Crews speaks—would indeed follow.
But it is not, and hence Macmillan’s case collapses.

140
 About fifty years ago, when I was learning the art of
diagnostic psychological testing,* 1 was confronted with the
task o f reaching valid conclusions about the persons studied
in personality research and about psychiatric patients on the
basis o f their free verbal responses to such projective tech­
niques as the Rorschach ink blots and the pictures o f the
Thematic Apperception Test ( t a t ) . The problem with the
resulting data was that they were much more like free associ­
ations than like the results o f administering intelligence tests
or personality questionnaires. My mentors, Henry A. Murray
and David Rapaport, were at that time fully aware o f the pit-
falls of psychoanalytic interpretation, which make analysts
disagree with one another to an alarming extent, and had
discovered a way out. I have since tried to detail it and to
show its basic similarity to scientific method.^
The starting point is the realization that neither free
association, the TAT, or the Rorschach is a test—the sort of
attempt to measure a specific aspect of personality or ability
that we mean by that term. Hence, there is no single criterion,
no independent measure of the same construct against which
we can check the instrument we wish to validate. Instead,
free association (and the projective techniques inspired by it)
are sources of data, like interviewing or direct observation of

1. See D. Rapaport, M. M. Gill, and R. Schafer, Diagnostic Psychological Testing,

originally published in 1945 and later revised by me (International Universities
Press, 1968); and Henry A. Murray et al.. Thematic Apperception Test (Harvard
University Press, 1943).
2. R. R. \\o\x. Assessing Personality (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971); R. R.
Holt, Methods in C linical Psychology: Assessment, Prediction and Research,
2 volumes (Plenum, 1978).

141
behavior. Neither Crews nor Macmillan seems to have
grasped this basic fact. But how should you work with such
data? You can do so casually, irresponsibly, or in earnest
ignorance of ways to do it with any control over manifold
sources o f error, as most psychoanalysts do. Or you can record
your data objectively and analyze them in disciplined ways.
For that, you have to be clear on the difference between
getting insights and checking them.^ Alas, not only the prac­
titioners o f psychoanalysis but many of their critics seem
unaware that every science has two phases, which make quite
different cognitive demands: first you have to get hunches,
insights, or hypotheses; and then you have to test them. In the
former, creative phase, there are and can be no complete rules;
but that is true in all sciences. Kekule got the hypothesis of
the ring structure at the heart of organic molecules in a dream­
like reverie, but he realized that it was only a bright idea
until it was checked against independent data. Not so easy,
for at the time there did not exist the chemical equivalent of
a “second script” —a direct method of seeing the carbon ring.
So he had to draw inferences about what would happen in
various chemical experiments if his surmise was correct or if
other possible structures existed, and then check them out.
To work scientifically with psychoanalytic data, you
have to make inferences from them (interpret them) and
then attempt to refute those inferences by confronting them

3. Hans Reichenbach distinguished these phases as the context of discovery vs.

the context o f justification, c.g., in The Rise o f Scientific Philosophy (University of
California Press, 1951), p. 231; and Karl R. Popper used the terms conjectures
vs. refutations, e.g., in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth o f Scientific
Knowledge (Basic Books, 1962).

142
with additional, independent information. That is a great deal
easier for clinical psychologists, who have at their disposal
data from a variety of techniques of gathering relevant infor­
mation, than it is for practicing psychoanalysts. It has been
difficult for the latter to take seriously their plight: treating
patients exposes them to extraordinarily rich data, but the
nature of the situation restricts them to forming hypotheses
for others to verify or refute. Moreover, scientific work on
free associations requires that they be objectively recorded.
Hence, Hartvig Dahl has for decades been attempting to
persuade other psychoanalysts to join in assembling a library
of tape-recorded psychoanalyses."^ With the complete tran­
script in hand, one can get consensual judgments on the
degree to which any particular segment o f data are contami­
nated by suggestion. All that Griinbaum has done—pace
Crews—is to make a strong a priori case that psychoanalytic
data are thus contaminated; he has not proved that any par­
ticular set of free associations are useless as the basis of a
given type of inference.'’ All scientific data are subject to con­
tamination; that doesn’t make science impossible, only diffi­
cult. Scientific methodology is the study of ways to reach
useful and asymptotically valid conclusions on the basis of
fallible data gathered by fallible human beings.

4. See, for examples, Harrvig Dahl, “A Quantitative Study o f Psychoanalysis,”

Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, Vol. 1 (1972), pp. 2 ^ 7 - l‘y7\ and Dahl,
Horst Kachele, and Helmut Thoma, editors. Psychoanalytic Process Strategies
(Springer-Verlag, 1988).
5. See my critique o f Griinbaum: “Some Reflections on Testing Psychoanalytic
Hypotheses,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 9 (1986), pp. 242-244.

143
 Many critics of psychoanalysis (Crews and Macmillan
are not the only ones) make the understandable error of
believing that it is intrinsically impossible to do disciplined,
responsible scientific work with free verbal data on aspects of
psychoanalytic theory. Having devoted most of my career to
learning how to do it and, with the aid of my colleagues at
New York University’s Research Center for Mental Health,
carrying out a good deal of such research, I can testify that it
is not easy, quick, or inexpensive; it is no longer fashionable
or easy to fund; and the undertaking cannot be recommended
to a young scientist eager to get ahead in an academic career
—the payoff in publishable findings is too slow. Hence, the
future of psychoanalysis as a science is hardly rosy; but neither
is it merely a dream of self-deluded people. ^

MORRI S EAGLE, P H . D . , is a professor at the Derner Insti­

tute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University,
President-Elect of the Division o f Psychoanalysis, American
Psychological Association, and the author of Recent Develop­
ments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation. He writes:

There is one issue that, I believe, is the most substantively

central one in evaluating psychoanalytic theory or any other
theory that is not adequately addressed in Crews’s original
essay, in the letters responding to that essay, or in Crews’s
reply to these letters. That issue is the heuristic value of
psychoanalytic theory.
In presenting his indictment of psychoanalysis as a
pseudoscience. Crews appears to assume that psychoanalytic

144
theory belongs to the psychoanalytic establishment and that
its parochial practices are decisive for determining the status
of the theory. But psychoanalytic theory belongs to the intel­
lectual and scientific community and, as I will show, has had
a significant heuristic impact on that community. He also
assumes—and is able to do so because broadsides substitute
for careful argumentation—that psychoanalysis is a mono­
lithic entity. It is not. It consists of a somewhat hetero­
geneous body of propositions, formulations, assumptions,
and hypotheses, some of which are foundational assumptions,
some of which are indeed relatively immune to refutation,
and some of which are eminently testable. For example,
Freuds claim that the major part of mental life goes on out­
side o f conscious awareness could be seen as a foundational
assumption which, by the way, is shared by most contempo­
rary cognitive scientists. Freud s ideas about life and death
instincts can serve as a good example of a proposition rela­
tively immune to empirical test. And as a final example,
some of Freud s propositions regarding repression and the
wish-fulfillment theory of dreams seem eminently testable.
(It seems clear that sufficient evidence has accumulated to
lead one to conclude that the claim that unconscious wishes
represent an invariant component o f dreams has been falsi­
fied.) But in order to make these distinctions. Crews would
have to be more knowledgeable about and more interested in
the details o f psychoanalytic propositions than in other mat­
ters with which he is preoccupied.
A critical consideration in assessing the status of any
theory is its heuristic value in generating research and further
theory-building. This issue, far more important than any of

145
the other matters taken up in his essay, Crews totally ignores.
Let me provide merely one example: During the last number
of years, an exciting and important body of research on
“repressive style” and its correlates has appeared in scientific
psychology journals and books. ^ This work indicates that
people who are characterized as employing a repressive style
are more likely to show, among other things, higher physio­
logical arousal (including higher blood pressure and cardiac
rates) during stress, are more susceptible to certain physical
illnesses (e.g., hypertension), and show poorer immune
responses. Most important in the present context, this work
is clearly and explicitly generated by Freud s concept of
repression. Furthermore, the research thus generated is likely
to feed back and further operationalize and modify both the
concept of repression and the hypotheses surrounding it. Crews
does not appear to be aware of this kind of work. It certainly
does not enter into his evaluation o f psychoanalytic theory.
There may be and undoubtedly are other aspects of
Freudian theory that have not been heuristic and, indeed, may
be misleading and harmful. The task, then, for the intellec­
tual and scientific community is to identify and either modify
or reject these features of the theory. But such efforts are
characterized by careful, discriminating, and detailed appraisals
rather than wholesale condemnation or wholesale loyalties.

1. See P.J. David, “ Repression and the Inaccessibility o f Emotional Memories,”

in Repression and Dissociation, edited by J. L. Singer (University o f Chicago
Press, 1990), pp. 387-403; also G. E. Schwartz, “ Psychobiology o f Repression
and Health: A Systems Approach,” Singer, Repression and Dissociation, pp.
405-434; and D. A. Weinberger, “The Construct Validity o f the Repressive
Coping Style,” Singer, Repression and Dissociation, pp. 337-386.

146
 I would submit that in any serious evaluation o f the
status o f psychoanalytic theory, the kind of heuristic impact
I have briefly described is o f far greater import and signifi­
cance than the personal and admittedly juicier tidbits
emphasized by Crews. ^

ALL.EN ES P E R S O N graduated in physics from University

College, London, in 1958 and has lectured in mathematics
and physics. He is now an independent Freud researcher and
is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration o f the Work o f
Sigmund Freud. He writes:

I would like to correct some misconceptions which occur in

J. Schimeks response to Frederick Crews’s article “The
Unknown Freud.” Schimek’s findings contained in his 1987
paper “Fact and Fantasy in the Seduction Theory” were not
“taken out of context and misused” in my book Seductive
Mirage\ nor did I “conclude from [his] arguments that Freud
made up all the sexual material he got from his patients.” I
wrote the first draft of my account of the infantile seduction
theory episode in 1984; as I state explicitly in my book, the
chapter in question was written completely independently of
Schimek’s research. Hence I neither misused nor drew any
conclusions from his paper, the existence of which I was
unaware of until December 1988; the writings from which I
drew conclusions were Freud’s own. Schimek is also mistaken
in supposing that it was on the basis of the seduction theory
episode that I drew the conclusion that Freud made up all
the sexual material he got from his patients. (I would prefer

147
to say that, though he certainly resorted to invention on
occasion, he inferred most of that material on grossly inade­
quate grounds and misleadingly presented it as his “findings
of analytic research.”) As my book demonstrates, the evi­
dence for the dubious nature of almost all of Freud’s
supposed sexual findings can be found throughout his
work.
In regard to the seduction theory episode, it is a pity
that James Hopkins, like Schimek, did not take the trouble
to actually read my chapter on the subject before making
assumptions about its contents. Had he done so he would
have found (p. 20) that it contains an implicit refutation of
his claim that when Freud later wrote of his female patients
reporting paternal seductions in the context of his “error” he
was referring not to his self-proclaimed “source of the Nile”
discovery put forward publicly in the seduction theory
papers of 1896, but to an unpublished transitional notion he
adopted privately a little later. As Crews writes, this latter
notion was no more than a speculative theory for which Freud
determinedly sought analytic corroboration. Hopkins expresses
skepticism about the “alleged” contradictions and anomalies
to which several scholars have now directed attention, imply­
ing that for the most part they result from misinterpretations
of Freud’s words. The anomalies are too numerous to cite
here, but one example (the one Hopkins attempts to deal
with) is the discrepancy between the original claim of the
uncovering by analytic inference, in every one o f his current
cases (mostly women), of infantile sexual molestation by a
variety of carefully listed and grouped assailants (but no
fathers), and the belated (post-1924) claim that “almost all”

148
of his female patients around that same period reported
paternal childhood seductions. (The notion that the discrep­
ancy can be accounted for by discretion on Freud s part is
totally incompatible with the facts and is disposed o f in my
book [pp. 20-21]. It can also be seen that Hopkins’s pur­
ported explanation would have been inadequate even had it
not had an erroneous basis.) Then there is the curious fact
that it was only for the period during which he held to the
seduction theory that Freud claimed to have received such
numerous reports from his female patients. Again, one won­
ders why Hopkins apparently is untroubled by Freud’s claim­
ing one hundred percent success (in uncovering repressed
infantile sexual traumas) in 1896, an achievement unheard
of in the annals of psychiatry in regard to the confirmation
of any theory— and made even more remarkable by the fact
that it was a theory he was to abandon within a short time!
It can scarcely be a coincidence that it was at precisely
the time (1924—25) that Freud turned his mind to the
detailed development o f his theories of female sexuality that
the phony story o f reports from his early female patients of
paternal seductions was first published, thereby underwriting
the Oedipal theory. A corresponding only apparent coinci­
dence occurs in relation to the belated (1925) psychoanalytic
discovery that the first attachment of infant girls is to the
mother (SE, 19:251). In his second paper on female sexuality
(1931) Freud suddenly announced the “very common”
occurrence o f (analytically reconstructed) phantasies of
maternal seductions in regard to his female patients (SE,
21:232). Within a short time the story had become that his
female patients “regularly accuse” their mothers of seducing

149
them (SE, 21:238). The parallels with the seduction theory
discrepancy discussed above are too obvious to labor the
point, but they indicate that, far from that discrepancy being
innocuous, as Schimek would have us believe, it is an early
example of the fact (repeatedly demonstrated in my book)
that Freud s reporting of his clinical experiences is not to
be trusted.
May I conclude with a suggestion (proposed by Arthur
Koestler in a rather different context) for those who, while
not being zealots, still remain under the spell o f Freud. They
should be sentenced to a years hard reading. Crews has sup­
plied the initial booklist; in particular, anyone who has not
read Macmillans comprehensive critique Freud Evaluated has
scarcely begun to take the measure of current scholarly criti­
cism of the Freudian enterprise. And there is the promise of
more volumes to come from two other scholars, Han Israels
in Holland and, in Sweden, Max Scharnberg, who has
already published two volumes of his projected opus The
Non-Authentic Nature o f Freud's Observations (Acta Universi-
tatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Education, Uppsala,
Sweden). ^

F R E D E R I C K C R E WS replies:
In their long-standing concern to discriminate between the
wheat and chaff in psychoanalytic theory, Robert R. Holt and
Morris Eagle represent the highest standard of empirical
responsibility to which the Freudian tradition can lay claim. It
is telling, then, that neither of them appears capable of even
addressing, much less confuting, the specific charges against

150
psychoanalysis levied in my essay and in my subsequent
response to critics.
The issue dodged in Holt’s letter is whether, as I
claimed, free association is “inherently incapable of yielding
knowledge about the determinants of dreams and symptoms”
(italics added). Is there, even in principle, any trustworthy
path of inference from a patient’s verbal associations to the
causes of a given dream or symptom? My contention, cited
but then ignored by Holt, is that you can’t get there from here.
Let us review three well-established reasons why this is so.
In the first place, “free” associations aren’t free at all,
since they have been amply shown to lack the imperviousness
to suggestibility that Freud rashly ascribed to them. Freudian
therapists and patients come to share a causal outlook prede­
termining the kinds of factors that both parties will consider
significant, and both the patient’s verbal productions and the
therapist’s thematically pointed selection among them cannot
escape being influenced by that bias. As Morris Eagle himself
once put it, “suggestion and compliance, however subtle and
complex, are critical factors in generating these supposedly
confirming data,” and thus “each therapist, whatever his or
her theoretical persuasion, can reach the verdict that they con­
stitute confirmations.” *
Second, a patient’s free associations point at best to
current preoccupations that may or may not have begun
before the dream or symptom that is to be explained. Even an

1. Morris N. Eagle, “The Epistemological Status o f Recent Developments in

Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor o f
A dolf Griinbaum, edited by R .S. Cohen and L. Laudan (D. Reidel, 1983), p. 39.

151
enduring preoccupation is by no means necessarily a
pathogen. Only by invoking Freud’s purported “logic o f the
unconscious” could one maintain the contrary, but that logic
is precisely what stands in question here. Unfortunately, Freud
“discovered” it by fiat and defended it, as his followers still do,
merely by applying it interpretatively and treating the resul­
tant speculations as corroborative findings. To my knowledge,
the vast theoretical literature of psychoanalysis contains not a
single cogent effort to show how a mere theme in a patient’s
contemporary mind can be certified as an early determinant of
that patient’s neurotic disposition.
And third, even if associations did point to potential
causal factors, psychoanalysts would still face the obstacle of
trying to decide which ones actually governed a particular
dream or symptom. Freud himself acknowledged that some
factors must be “suppressed by others because they are too
weak, and they therefore do not affect the final result” (SE,
18:168). Moreover, Freud conceded, at the time of analysis
there is no way of knowing which factor is dominant: “We
only say at the end that those which succeeded must have been
the stronger” (SE, 18:168). Thus psychoanalysts guess blindly
at causes but later seek reassurance from the fact that a long
concatenation of such hunches has yielded a self-consistent
view of the patient’s case. Yet if the method of drawing causal
inferences from free associations is wild in each individual
occurrence, it must also be wild in the aggregate.
These circumstances help to explain why psychoanalysts,
as Holt reports, “disagree with one another to an alarming
extent.” Quite simply, they are winging it from start to finish.
This is not just my judgment but, if one reads carefully.

152
Holt s as well. Freudian practitioners, he tells us, habitually
neglect the crucial difference between forming hypotheses and
adequately testing them, and the “hardly rosy ’ future of psycho­
analysis as a science should be consigned to hands other than
theirs.
Holt’s proposed rescue operation, such as it is, entails
the extraction o f taped free associations as data that can be
assessed (presumably by investigators o f a Freudian bent, since
no one else would be interested) for the degree to which those
data are contaminated by suggestion. Two questions about
this scheme immediately spring to mind. First, how could
psychoanalytically trained researchers be expected to mark the
limits o f suggestion in any given case when, as critics have
decisively shown, the whole process of analyst-patient interac­
tion is steeped in indoctrinating effects? And second, how
much impact could such studies have on what Holt calls the
“earnest ignorance” of analysts in their daily therapeutic
work?
I am afraid that Holt’s invoking of methodological com­
monplaces from Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper serves no
purpose beyond a cosmetic “scientizing” one. More to the
point is Poppers judgment of psychoanalysis as it is actually
conducted: “those clinical observations’ which analysts naively
believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the
daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice.”^
Though Holt does not say so explicitly, it is apparent that he
agrees with Popper in this regard.

2. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth o f Scientific

KnowledgCy second edition (Basic Books, 1965), pp. 37-38.

153
 Morris Eagle’s letter can be answered more briefly, for it
rests on a manifestly untenable premise. This is that “heuristic
value,” or stimulation to further insight, ought to be weighed
more heavily than intrinsic plausibility in the scrutinizing of
propositions about the mind. When, I wonder, did Eagle
arrive at this quixotic means of safeguarding his favorite
notions? 1 find no trace of it in any of his previous writings—
including the most recent—that evaluate points of psycholog­
ical doctrine.^ Quite typical, for example, is a paper of 1983
where he denounces certain post-Freudian claims that “are
either incoherent or without any evidential support.”^
According to his revised outlook. Eagle should instead have
scolded people who fail to look beyond such narrow consider­
ations as coherence and supporting evidence.
Psychoanalysis has indeed borne many heuristic conse­
quences, but most of them have proved, to borrow Eagle’s
words, “misleading and harmful.” Moreover, repression—
Eagle’s one example of a heuristically fruitful psychoanalytic
idea—has been involved in every pernicious instance that could
be named, from the supposed causes of homosexuality and
female irrationality through false memory syndrome. One
may doubt whether the alleged conceptual breakthrough of

3. See, e.g., Eagle’s “Critical Notice: A. Griinbaum’s ‘The Foundations o f

Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique,’ ” Philosophy o f Science, Vol. 53 (1986),
pp. 65-88; “Theoretical and Clinical Shifts in Psychoanalysis,” American Journal
o f Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 57, pp. 175-185; Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis:
A Critical Evaluation (Harvard University Press, 1987); and “The Dynamics o f
Theory Change in Psychoanalysis,” in J. Earman et al.. Philosophical Problems o f
the Internal and External Worlds: Essays on the Philosophy o f A dolf Grunbaum
(University o f Pittsburgh Press, 1993), pp. 373-408.
4. Eagle, “ Epistemological Status,” p. 49.

154
“repressive style” is adequate recompense for all the inconve­
nience, anguish, and confusion wrought by Freud s theory of
repression. And even if it were, repression would still have to
stand or fall on its own empirical merits, not on its having
contributed an adjective to the name of a cluster of behaviors.
As Eagle well knows, but now chooses to forget, the identify­
ing of an authentic psychological “style” does not thereby
validate any given explanation o f how that style gets develop-
mentally formed.
Finally, Eagle is mistaken in saying that I overlook the
heterogeneity of psychoanalytic propositions. They are so hetero­
geneous, I have argued, as to constitute a self-condemning
jumble of dubious and incompatible claims. I am concerned
to explore the laxity of method that makes such chaos
inevitable. So, too, is Allen Esterson, whose Seductive Mirage
can be recommended to all readers who have sensed that
Freud’s “scientific greatness” is now ripe for thoroughgoing
reappraisal.

155
"fH E ß^EVENGE OF T H E
J^E P R E S S E D
 PART

I.
Throughout the past decade or so, a shock wave has been
sweeping across North American psychotherapy, and in the
process causing major repercussions within our families, courts,
and hospitals. A single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints
—that o f unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood —
has grown in this brief span from virtual nonexistence to epi­
demic frequency. As Mark Pendergrast shows in his recently
published Victims o f Memory^ if we put together the number
of licensed American psychotherapists (roughly 255,000) with
survey results about their beliefs and practices, it appears that
well over 50,000 o f them are now willing to help their clients
realize that they must have endured early molestation.* Those
professionals have been joined by countless untrained operators

1. Pendergrast, Victims o f Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives (Upper

Access. 1995), pp. 357-358.

159
who use the yellow pages and flea market ads to solicit “incest
work.” It is hard to form even a rough idea of the number of per­
suaded clients, because most of them take no publicly recorded
action against the accused, but a conservative guess would be a
million persons since 1988 alone (see Pendergrast, p. 358). The
number affected is of course vastly higher, since, as all parties
acknowledge, virtually every case sows dissension and sorrow
throughout a family.
When one explanation for mental distress rockets to promi­
nence so quickly, we ought to ask whether we are looking at a med­
ical breakthrough or a fad. However, the choice between those
alternatives is not always simple. As its main proponents insist,
“recovered memory” is by now not just a diagnosis but a formi­
dable sociopolitical movement. In the words of one of that move­
ments founders, the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman,

The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes

legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordi­
nation of women and children. Advances in the field
occur only when they are supported by a political move­
ment powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between
investigators and patients and to counteract the ordi­
nary social processes of silencing and denial.

The larger movement in question is, of course, womens liber­

ation, including what Herman calls “a collective feminist
project of reinventing the basic concepts of normal develop­
ment and abnormal psychology . . .”^

2. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992), pp. 9, ix.

160
 However uneasy one may feel about an ideologically
driven “reinvention’ of scientific notions, it is possible that
the feminist critique of received psychological lore is sub­
stantially right. Feminists were certainly warranted, in the
1970s and 1980s, in declaring that the sexual abuse of chil­
dren was being scandalously underreported. If they now go
on to claim that untold millions of victims, mostly female,
have forgotten what was done to them, their claim cannot be
discredited by the mere fact that it sprang from an activist
commitment. Obviously, it needs to be assessed on indepen­
dent grounds.
Yet such grounds are hard to come by. How can one
count authentic cases of repressed memory when the very con­
cept of repression stands in doubt? And what, for that matter,
do the champions of recovered memory mean by repression?
It is fruitless to press them very hard on this point, since most
of them show an impatience with or outright ignorance of
conceptual subtleties. Thus in the movement’s most influen­
tial document, The Courage to Heal, first published in 1988,
Ellen Bass and Laura Davis proclaim that “none o f what is
presented here is based on psychological theories.”^ Instead,
Bass and Davis appeal directly to “the experiences of
survivors” — who, however, may or may not be survivors of
abuse, depending on whether they have actually learned the
previously repressed truth or succumbed to therapeutically
induced delusion.
Although it is no secret that the idea o f repression

3. Bass and Davis, The Courage to H eal: A Guide fo r Women Survivors o f Child
Sexual Abuse (1988; third edition, Harper Perennial, 1994), p. 18.

161
derives from Sigmund Freud, fevv^ of the movement’s practi­
tioners have actually studied his texts. Consequently, they are
unrestrained by certain ambiguities and outright contradic­
tions implicit in the Freudian theory of repression."^ Freud’s
uncertainty, for example, \vhether events or fantasies make up
the typical content o f the repressed gets resolved in favor of
events; as Herman puts it in the opening sentence of Trauma
and Recovery, “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish
them from consciousness.” Again, whereas Freud confusingly
treated repression as both a conscious and an unconscious
mechanism, his activist successors think o f it as strictly
unconscious—so much so, indeed, that they can routinely
regard a young incest victim as leading two parallel but
wholly independent lives, one in the warm daylight o f normal
family affection and the other in continually repressed horror.
And while Freud only occasionally portrayed the dissolving o f
repression as yielding undisguised, accurate information about
a patient’s early past, contemporary “retrievers” entertain no
doubts on the point; with the right coaxing, their patients
can allegedly reproduce the exact details of their long-
repressed traumas.

4. On this point, sec Matthew H. Erdelyi, “ Repression, Reconstruction, and

Defense: History and Integration of the Psychoanalytic and Experimental
Frameworks,” in Repression and Dissociation: Implications fo r Personality Theory,
Psychopathology, and Health, edited by Jerome L. Singer (University o f Chicago
Press, 1990), pp. 1-32. Remarkably, Erdelyi welcomes Freuds unclarity as pro­
viding a sound basis for integrating the “dynamic” with the cognitive uncon­
scious. The idea is that since Freud didn’t really know what he meant by repres­
sion, we are free to bring the concept into alignment with current research while
still thinking o f ourselves as Freudians.

162
 By today, recovered memory has enlisted the enthusiasm
of many psychotherapists who lack the explicit feminist
agenda of Herman, Bass and Davis, and other advocates
whose views we will examine later. But all parties do share the
core tenet o f repression—namely, that the mind can shield
itself from ugly experiences, thoughts, or feelings by relegating
them to a special “timeless” region where they indefinitely
retain a symptom-producing virulence. Clinical experience,
the therapists agree, has proven the cogency of this tenet in
numberless successfully resolved cases.
But has it, really? When arbitrary assumptions leak into
“clinical experience,” confirming results can be pumped out as
easily as bilge water. That is why research psychologists would
insist that the concept of repression be required to pass tests in
which variables are controlled and rival explanations for the
gathered data are weighed. Yet while psychoanalytic loyalists
have repeatedly attempted to conduct just such experiments,
their positive results have at best shown a compatibility with
repression, not a demonstration of its existence. As David S.
Holmes recently concluded after reviewing a sixty-year history
of such efforts, “there is no controlled laboratory evidence
supporting the concept o f repression.”^
O f course, repression cannot be experimentally dis­
proved, either. Since the concept entails no agreed-upon
behavioral markers, we are free to posit its operation whenever
we please—just as we are free to invoke orgone energy or

5. David S. Holmes, “'Fhe Evidence for Repression: An Examination o f Sixty

Years o f Research,” in Singer, Repression and Dissociation, pp. 85-102; the quo­
tation is from p. 96.

163
chakras or the life force. Indeed, as Elizabeth Loftus and
Katherine Ketcham remark in their lively new^ book, The Myth
o f Repressed Memory, belief in repression has the same standing
as belief in God.^ I'he idea may be true, but it is consistent
with too many eventualities to be falsifiable—that is,
amenable to scientific assessment.
It is possible, however, to mount experimental chal­
lenges to corollary tenets that are crucial to recovered memory
therapy. That is just what Loftus, a highly regarded researcher
and a professor of psychology at the University of Wash­
ington, has done in her own experimental work— and that is
also why she has been pilloried by the recovered memory
movement as an enemy of incest survivors. The Myth o f
Repressed Memory recounts some of that vilification and tries
to head off more of it by taking a conciliatory tone wherever
possible. But there is simply nothing to negotiate over. The
burden of Loftus’s argument is that memory does not function
in anything like the way that writers such as Bass and Davis
presuppose.
Thus, Loftus offers no encouragement to the retrievers'
notion that “videotaped” records of events are stored in a
special part o f the brain and then suddenly yielded up to near­
perfect recall. Empirical science, she reports, has established
that memory is inherently sketchy, reconstructive, and un-
localizable. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, it decays
drastically over time, though less so if the experience in ques­
tion gets periodically “rehearsed” —just the opposite of what

6. Loftus and Ketcham, The Myth o f Repressed Memory: False Memories and
Allegations o f Sexual Abuse (St. Martins, 1994), p. 64.

164
the retrievers' theory would predict. Furthermore, memory is
easily corrupted, if not with an experimenters deliberate inter­
vention or a therapists unwitting one, then with a normal
“retrospective bias” that accommodates one’s sense of the past
to one’s present values. Flashbacks to an early age, then, are
highly unreliable sources of information about any event. All
in all, Loftus finds no basis for thinking that repression, as
opposed to a gradual avoidance and atrophy of painful recol­
lections, has figured in a single molestation case to date.
Once we have recognized that a memory can disappear
because of factors other than repression, even the best anec­
dotal evidence for that mechanism loses its punch. Consider,
for example, the closely watched case of Ross Cheit, a Brown
University professor who has recently proved beyond question
that his suddenly recalled 1968 molestation by a music camp
administrator was real.^ But had that abuse been repressed in
the first place? In a phone conversation with me on September
7, 1994, Cheit declared that while he takes no position on the
existence of repression, he is inclined to doubt that he abruptly
and completely consigned his experience to oblivion. What
Cheit does fervently believe is that this forgotten ordeal, and
not any others that he may have remembered or some further
unspecified factor, is responsible for anguish that he experi­
enced many years later as an adult. But that belief is only a

7. Later: A full and sympathetic account o f Cheits experience, based on inter­

views with him, can be found in Mike Stantons two-part article, “ Bearing
Witness: A Man’s Recovery o f His Sexual Abuse as a Child,” Providence Jou rn al-
Bulletin, May 7 and 9, 1995, pp. lA and following. See also Miriam Horn,
“Memories Lost and Found,” U.S. News & World Report, November 29, 1993,
pp. 52-63.

165
supposition. The possibility—indeed, the likelihood—that
Cheit lost track o f the incident at issue through an ordinary
process of atrophy renders the example of his restored memory
useless as a proof of repression.^
Useless, that is, from the standpoint o f logic. For
another purpose, that of inducing popular belief in the theory
of repression, anecdotes can be powerfully effective. The very
idea of repression and its unraveling is an embryonic romance
about a hidden mystery, an arduous journey, and a grati-
fyingly neat denouement that can ascribe our otherwise
drab shortcomings and pains to deep necessity. When that
romance is fleshed out by a gifted storyteller who also
bears impressive credentials as an expert on the mind, most
readers in our culture will be disinclined to put up intellectual
resistance.
One such narrator, of course, was Freud, whose shifting
views about the content o f the repressed will prove pivotal to
an understanding of the recovered memory movements intel­
lectual ancestry. But Freud’s stories purportedly explaining
tics, obsessions, and inhibitions among the turn-of-the-century
Austrian bourgeoisie are beginning to seem not just remote
but eccentric. Not so the case histories recounted by the mem­
ory retrievers’ most distinguished and fluent ally, Lenore Terr,

8, Later: This paragraph has been rewritten to exclude an error pointed out to
me by Professor Cheit. Originally, I had speculated that perhaps “the adult Cheit
refocused h\s faded but unrepressed experiences after he had read a book about
pedophilia (as he did) and became morally exercised about it.” At the urging of
his psychotherapist, Cheit did read that book, Mic Hunters Abused Boys:
Neglected Victims o f Sexual Abuse (Lexington Books, 1990). But since the reading
occurred afier Cheit’s memory had returned, my speculation was off the mark.

166
who is not only a practicing therapist but also a professor of
psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.
Terrs deftly written book, Unchained Memories: True Stories o f
Traumatic Memories^ Lost and Founds has already been
welcomed both by the Book of the Month Club and by
reviewers who perceived it as a balanced and learned brief
for repression.
The publication o f Unchained Memories has been espe­
cially cheering to recovered memory advocates because Terr is
not afraid to challenge their bête noire^ Elizabeth Loftus.
“ [P]sychological experiments on university students,” Terr
writes, taking dead aim at Loftuss work,

do not duplicate in any way the clinicians observa­

tions. What comes from the memory lab does not
apply well to the perceptions, storage, and retrieval of
such things as childhood murders, rapes, or kid­
nappings. Trauma sets up new rules for memory.
(Terr, pp. 51-52)

From Loftus s vantage, o f course, such a passage begs the ques­

tion o f how these new rules are to be validated without suc­
cumbing to the notorious circularity of 'clinical experience.”
Isn’t Terr simply handing herself a conceptual blank check?
Nevertheless, she scores a strong rhetorical point with her
animadversion against hothouse science. If Terr is right about
the special character of real-world trauma, we may have to fall
back on sheer stories after all.

9, Basic Books, 1994.

167
 2,
Among Terr s own stories, none carries more weight than the
George Franklin/Eileen Lipsker case, which occupies the first
two chapters of her book. The case, in which Terr herself
served as an expert witness “to explain,” as she says, “ ‘repres­
sion and ‘the return of the repressed’ ” (Terr, p. 30), came to
national attention in 1989 with newspaper and television
reports of Eileen Franklin Lipsker’s long-buried but amaz­
ingly lucid recollection of the way her father, in her terrified
presence in 1969, had raped her eight-year-old best friend in
the back of his Volkswagen bus and then shattered the girl’s
skull with a rock and covered the body on a wooded hillside
south of San Francisco. In Terr’s rendering, this story has
about it a ring of unanswerable truth, backed up by the sober­
est of corroborators, a jury in a murder trial.
But Terr’s account is not the only one available. It was
preceded by Harry N. MacLean’s scrupulous book-length
retelling of the murder story. Once Upon a Time, and now it
has been scrutinized by MacLean himself, by Elizabeth Loftus
and Katherine Ketcham in The Myth o f Repressed Memory, and
by Richard Ofshe, professor of sociology at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Ethan Watters in their even more
trenchant book, Making Monsters. In view of their findings,
the Franklin matter may come to serve as a very different
object lesson from the one that Terr intended. If so, a man’s

10. See MacLean s Once Upon a Time: A True Story o f Memory, Murder, and the
Law (HarperCollins, 1993), and Ofshe and Watters. M aking Monsters: False
Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (Scribners, 1994). See also
MacLeans critique o f Terr in the September 1994 False Memory Syndrome
FouncLition Newsletter (Philadelphia, PA).

168
freedom hangs in the balance—not a good man, surely, but a
man who may have been wrongly convicted.
During the 1990 murder trial in Redwood City,
California, it turned out that no concrete evidence implicated
Franklin in Susan Nasons death. On the contrary, Franklins
junked van from 1969, located and microscopically studied
by police investigators, bore no trace o f the twenty-year-old
crime (Terr, p. 23). Until a recollection on the part of
Eileen’s vindictive sister Janice was conveniently revised
under therapy, Franklin had a solid alibi for his whereabouts at
the time of the abduction (Ofshe and Watters, p. 259). The
jury, however, determined with little difficulty that Eileen
Lipsker’s recovered memory too closely matched the known
facts of the unsolved murder to be considered specious.
As a result, Franklin is now serving a life sentence in state
prison, and the theory of recovered memory has acquired an
imposing trophy.
Lenore Terr appears to have assumed from the outset that
Franklin was guilty as charged, and she was eager to make her­
self useful to the prosecution. Awkwardly, however, her
research interest in actual cases o f repressed memory was quite
new (see Terr, p. 30; Ofshe and Watters, p. 264); it seems to
have postdated the writing of her 1990 book, Too Scared to Cry^
which contains no index entry for “repression” and which
reports on cases of continuously remembered rather than

11. Later: On April 3, 1995, U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen reversed
George Franklin’s conviction, citing several improprieties in the trial and noting
that the reliability o f recovered memories such as Eileen Lipsker’s has not been
scientifically established. On June 19, 1995, Judge Jensen set Franklin’s bail at $1
million, thus ensuring that he will remain imprisoned while awaiting a retrial.

169
forgotten t r a u m a T e r r s expertise on sudden recall, more­
over, dated from her first interview with Eileen Lipsker her­
self—and was then swelled by a flood of highly dubious anec­
dotes about other womens therapeutically prompted visions
of incest. But Terr is a thoroughly trained Freudian, and as
such she felt qualified, after all, to offer the Franklin jury what
she calls “an education” in the reality of repressed memory and
its retrieval (Terr, p. 40). Coordinating strategy with the pros­
ecutor and tailoring her testimony, as she now relates (pp.
38-40), to the job of rendering Eileen Lipsker a wholly cred­
ible witness, Terr exceeded the expectations of her temporary
employers.
O f course, Terr testified, an expert such as herself can
verify the authenticity of a recovered memory through careful
interpretation of the subjects symptoms. In some cases, she
continued, the expert can even reliably infer the nature of an
unknown trauma. Indeed, she herself had recently done exactly
that, deducing from Stephen Kings novels and films the cer­
tain knowledge that in his childhood King had watched a
playmate die under the wheels o f a railroad train.
As Terr now recounts, she mentioned that feat of detec­
tion in order to create a helpful analogy in the jurors minds.
She hoped they would see that, like Stephen King in his
violence-ridden fiction, Eileen Franklin, for five years after the

12. Terr, Too Scared to Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood (Basic Books, 1992).
13. Whether Terr had actually detected anything is open to doubt. The upset­
ting death o f King’s boyhood friend was already familiar to her from King’s
autobiography— where, however. King reports that, so far as he knows, he did
not witness the accident in question. Thus Terr’s courtroom example of
trustworthy clinical reasoning— proceeding from obsessive themes in King’s

170
murder, had symptomatically acted out the awful scene that
she had observed but almost immediately repressed. Accord­
ing to prosecutors, between the ages o f nine and fourteen
Eileen had continually pulled out all the hair from one seg­
ment of her crown, leaving what Terr calls “a big, bleeding
bald spot” (Terr, p. 35). That spot uncannily corresponded
to the part of Susan Nasons head that had allegedly been
smashed by George Franklin. Eileen, then, had apparently
turned herself into a living hieroglyph of a crime that Terr
could have inferred all by herself, simply by translating the
language of Eileen’s symptomatic behavior into its mnemonic
source within her repressed unconscious.
In an ordinary trial, caught up in claims and counter­
claims about the purport o f submitted evidence, the mes­
merizing quality of Terr’s self-depiction as a Freudian Sherlock
Holmes could scarcely have assumed much importance. But
this was no ordinary trial. Factually impoverished, it came
down to little more than a twelve-person referendum on the
photographic return o f the repressed. According to the
later word o f several jurors, and to Terr’s great present satisfac­
tion, her testimony was decisive in obtaining George
Franklin’s conviction.
What most impressed both Terr and the jury about
Eileen Lipsker’s recovered memory was its extraordinary vivid­
ness and precision. The brands of beer and cigarettes consumed

eventual artistic productions to a “repressed” fact about one early day in his
life— actually dealt with a still uncorroborated detail superadded to a story in the
public domain. Insofar, then, as the Franklin trial hinged on Terr’s testimony
about Stephen King, it appears that one no-evidcncc case was decided on the
basis o f another.

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by George Franklin at the murder scene; Susan Nasons raising
her right hand to ward ofF the fatal blow; the glint of the sun
in her clear blue eyes as George brought the rock down on her
head; “a crushed, stoneless, silver child’s ring” (Terr, p. 4) on
the now lifeless hand —all of these details and more were as
fresh to Eileen in 1989, Terr says, as they had allegedly been
twenty years before. How, then, could they not be authentic
and conclusively damning?
One answer to that question was provided at the trial by
none other than Elizabeth Loftus herself, an expert witness on
the other side. Tests on thousands of subjects have shown con­
clusively, Loftus told the court, not only that memory always
fades with the passage of time but that it readily incorporates
“post-event information” (whether true or false) that becomes
indistinguishable from the actual event (Loftus and Ketcham,
p. 62). Those nvo facts together suggest that the sharpness of
Eileen Lipsker’s “memory” must have been caused by recent
images— and, as we will see, there was no shortage of such
potential contaminants at hand.^"^
With coaching from Terr, however, the prosecution was
ready to remove the sting from Loftus’s reported findings. Did
any of her experiments, she was asked in cross-examination,
deal with memories that were two decades old? Wasn’t it the
case that her experimentally induced distortions of memory

14. Eileen Lipsker’s problems with memory are echoed by Terr’s own in her
capacity as storyteller. Eileen never testified about seeing what Terr calls “white
socks and white child-size underwear” in the rape scene, but only something
white. And Terr, bent upon condemning George Franklin as a rapist, has lately
supplied the useful “fact,” which is false, that semen was found in the dead
Susan Nason’s vagina (MacLean, FM S Newsletter).

172
affected only some details and not loss of the brute fact that an
event had occurred? And had she ever studied a repressed
memory? No, she hadn’t, for two excellent reasons: she wasn’t
sure that such memories exist, and even if they do, she couldn’t
imagine how one could get at them for controlled study.
Regrettably, however, this answer occurred to Loftus
after she had left the stand. What she replied instead was that
post-event information would probably corrupt a repressed
memory in just the way that it assuredly corrupts a non-
repressed one. The concept o f repression was thus left unchal­
lenged, and the befuddled jury had no recourse but to side
with the rival expert witness— the one who boasted intimacy
with the dark and subtle workings o f the unconscious.
But Lenore Terr first needed to tiptoe across a theoreti­
cal minefield o f her own. Her studies o f children who had
lived through the notorious Chowchilla bus kidnapping and
the Challenger explosion had shown unambiguously that such
experiences do not get repressed. Why, then, should the jury
believe that Eileen Lipsker had repressed her harrowing
ordeal? Just in time for the trial, but too late for prior publi­
cation, Terr came up with a face-saving theory. True, she
granted, one-time trauma victims always remember the event;
but victims of multiple trauma like Eileen Lipsker, whose
father had been a bullying drunk and a sexual abuser of two of
his other daughters, turn repression into a daily routine. By
the time o f the murder, according to Terr, Eileen had become
an old hand at stuffing bad memories into the mental freezer.

15. See Terr, “Childhood Traumas; An Outline and Overview,” American

Journal o f Psychiatry, Vol. 148 (1991), pp. 10-20.

173
 Terr’s brainstorm was remarkable in several respects. For
one thing, it overlooked the fact, later acknowledged in
Unchained Memories^ that Eileen had always remembered her
fathers violence around the house (Terr, p. 11). Second, it
contradicted universal human experience of protracted duress.
Has anyone past the age of, say, six who has survived racial
persecution, a famine, a bombing campaign, or a brutal
enemy occupation ever forgotten that it occurred? Terr had
evidently confused the normal fading o f individual instances of
repeated, patterned mistreatment with willed unawareness of
that mistreatment. And third, Terr was refusing to grant any
distinction in memorability between George Franklin’s usual
brutality and the witnessed rape and murder of Eileen’s best
girlhood friend.
Beyond the already mentioned dubieties in Terrs ver­
sion of the Franklin case lie a good number of others empha­
sized by MacLean, Loftus and Ketcham, and Ofshe and
Watters, and more briefly by Mark Pendergrast in his Victims
o f Memory as well. The cardinal point is that Eileen Lipsker’s
certainty that she had attended the murder of Susan Nason
did not overwhelm her in a single unprompted flash on what
Terr calls “a quiet winter afternoon in 1989 ” (Terr, p. 3). That
was the least plausible of five distinct stories that Lipsker kept
changing to forestall objections. As the trial record shows,
Lipsker, whom Terr characterizes as having known “nothing at
all” about repression (Terr, pp. 3-4), had already been con­
sulting two therapists who were helping her probe her child­
hood “memories” and her conscious, long-standing suspicions
about the murder. Both practitioners employed the theory of
repression and had discussed it with her. Moreover, Eileen was

174
aided in producing increasingly bizarre visions of George
Franklin committing another murder — this one not just
unsolved but completely unknown to police or anyone else —
with herself as a witness (MacLean, Once Upon a Time, pp.
244-247) and of his raping or otherwise sexually abusing her,
sometimes in the presence o f oblivious family members, from
the ages of three through fourteen. She even came to believe
that George had physically assisted her godfather in raping
her. Incredibly, though, none of these barbarities had left a
glint of long-term memory in her conscious mind.^^’
Terr omits any mention of George’s second “murder”
committed in Eileen’s presence, but she does cite the equally
implausible memories of witnessed incest scenes. In doing so,
however, she offers no clue that all this knowledge emanated
from a regimen of therapeutic dowsing and that some of it
preceded the original murder flashback. This latter fact is
important because Eileen’s newly formed belief that she had
spent her childhood being molested provided her with an
extra motive for wanting to see George imprisoned. Terr as
author is no more interested in dwelling on such motives than
the prosecution was. She uses Eileen’s sexual “memories” only

16. Indeed, as Terr reports, so unaware was Eileen that her subsequently
divorced father had been raping her that she went off to live with him for a
while at age fourteen, right after the alleged eleven years o f violation had ended
(Terr, p. 36). Later, the two o f them drove across the country together to
Florida, employing the back o f the VW van, the supposed site o f Susan Nasons
rape, as their joint sleeping quarters. For Eileen’s nineteenth birthday celebra­
tion, she took a similar trip with George to Ensenada in the same vehicle. How
strange that “the repressed” produced no symptoms or qualms to warn her
against taking those risks with the rapist-murderer!

175
in the partisan and highly effective way that they were used in
the trial, to establish that a beast like George was just the sort
of person who could have raped Susan Nason and then blud­
geoned her to death.
The fact that memory therapy lay at the very heart of
the Franklin case was manifested in little-noted testimony
from one of Eileen’s therapists, Kirk Barrett. According to
Barrett, as Ofshe and Watters report,

Eileen’s memories “developed” over the course of the

therapy sessions and often during the encounter itself.
With the relaxation exercises and the free-association
techniques, these memories often became more detailed
during their hour-and-a-half meetings__
Barrett remembers that from June [1989], when
she initially visualized the first element of what was to
become the crime scene, through July, Eileen worked
both in and out of the sessions trying to sort out the
meaning o f her feelings, visualizations, and memories.
He assured Eileen at the time that it “wasn’t important...
whether her visualizations were real or not,” and that
they could “sort that out later.” In and out of therapy
the details slowly cohered into a narrative. One day she
came in and reported to Barrett that she had seen a flash
image of someone hitting Susan with a rock—but that
she couldnt make out who the person was. According to
Barrett it was several sessions later, in a highly emotional
moment, that Eileen revealed that she was finally able
to see the face of the man who killed [Susan]. It was
her father’s. (Ofshe and Watters, p. 257)

176
 Eileen Lipsker originally told her brother that the
murder scene had revealed itself to her in hypnosis during her
therapy. Later, she told a sister that she had dreamed the
crucial knowledge —an equally suggestive fact, since re­
covered memory therapy often employs either hypnosis or
dream analysis or both. Lenore Terr wants us to regard these
statements as forgivable “lies” and to put our trust in the more
enchanting image of Eileen’s single flashback to the murder
scene. It makes a good deal more sense to suppose that Eileen
only belatedly learned that evidence from hypnosis had
recently been deemed Inadmissible in California courts
(MacLean, Once Upon a Timey pp. 156-157).
Kirk Barrett’s neglected testimony does exculpate
Eileen Lipsker in one respect: she had sincerely come to believe
that her father was the murderer. Once committed to having
him put away, however, she allowed her “memories” to evolve
as expediency required, picking up new details and dropping
others as newspaper reports disclosed the content o f old police
records. As Ofshe and Watters remark, virtually the only cor­
rect details in her original report were “that Susan had been
killed with a rock and that her ring had been crushed —facts
that she had told Barrett she had known all her life.” ^^

17. Ofshe and Watters, p. 258. Intriguingly, one o f the tiny errors that survived
in Eileen’s testimony, having to do with a confusion between two rings on Susan
Nasons hands, corresponded exactly to a mistake made in a newspaper story in
1969. That could only mean that Eileen’s “memories” were tainted by misinfor­
mation that she had either heard or, more probably, read in old clippings or on
microfilm. Quixotically, however, the judge ruled all journalism from the murder
period inadmissible— as if the only possible question to settle were whether Eileen
was revealing the sheer truth or telling lies, instead perhaps o f unknowingly

177
 There remains, however, the one striking detail that
captivated both the jurors and, I am sure, the early readers of
Terrs book: the bleeding bald spot that was said to have
marred Eileen Franklins pate for five straight years after the
murder. Quite simply, it turns out to be a figment of Eileen’s
adult imagination. As Ofshe and Watters discovered, more
than forty photographs of her in the relevant period— poten­
tial exhibits that the prosecution wrongly withheld from the
defense —show no trace of missing hair. Eileen’s mother, Leah,
who has changed her mind about George’s guilt after finding
the narrative in Unchained Memories so erroneous, has told
Ofshe and Watters that she couldn’t have failed to notice any
such disfiguration if it had occurred even once. An older and
a younger sister have also refuted this claim. If, as Terr
believes, every symptom tells a story, in this instance the story
is a fairy tale.
Once understood in its true lineaments, the Franklin/
Lipsker matter turns out to be highly typical of other recov­
ered memory cases. There is, in the first place, the eerily
dreamlike quality of the ‘ memories” themselves, whose float­
ing perspective, blow-up details, and motivational anomalies
point to the contribution of fantasy.^® There is the therapist’s

recycling second-hand lore. Such bits o f truth and error were available to her at
all times, thanks to the fact that within her family George Franklin had always
been considered a suspect in the Nason murder.
18. As for anomalies, why did George Franklin take his daughter along to watch
the rape and murder of her dearest friend? How could he not have expected to
be found out? Why would he then make Eileen witness another killing? Why
did no one in a crowded living room notice George inserting his finger in
Eileen’s vagina? Etc.

178
reckless encouragement of the client to indulge her visions and
w^orry “later ”—usually never—whether or not they are true,
along with his “supportive” absence of concern to check the
emerging allegations against available knowledge. There is the
interpretation of the “survivor’s” moral frailties as further evi­
dence that she is a “trauma victim.” There is also, we can
infer, the therapist’s false promise that excavation o f the
repressed past will lead to psychic mending instead of to the
actual, nearly inevitable, result— disorientation, panic, venge­
fulness, and the severing of family ties. And there is the flout­
ing or overlooking of what is scientifically known about
memory, leaving the field free for dubious theories exfoliating
from the original dogma of repression.
One remaining feature of the Lipsker case turns out to
be reproduced in nearly every controversy over therapeutically
assisted recall. The Franklin jury members, like many people
who must weigh the credibility o f “survivors,” felt that they
had to accept Eileen’s story because she stood to gain nothing
and lose everything by accusing her own father of murder. O f
course, that was an oversimplification; Eileen felt that the
pedophile George was a threat to her own child, and besides.

19. As Loftus and Ketcham say, “With that diagnosis all the quirks and idio­
syncrasies o f Eileen Franklins personality could be explained away. Yes, she lied
about being hypnotized. . . but that’s understandable because she is a trauma vic­
tim. Yes, she used drugs and was arrested for prostitution. . . but her behavior
makes sense given that she is a trauma victim. Yes, she repressed the memory for
twenty years. . . but that’s a defensive reaction common to trauma victims.
Anything the defense might say in an attempt to undermine Eileen’s credibility
as a witness could be turned around and presented as an ongoing sym ptom . . . ”
(pp. 61-62).

179
as many observers perceived, she had a distinct taste for
fame.^® In a deeper sense, however, the jury was right: Eileen
had opened a Pandoras box of bitterness and recrimination
that will probably trouble her for the rest of her life.
Nevertheless, the cardinal point about all this self-destructiveness
went completely unnoticed. Eileen Lipsker did not decide to
send her mind into a tailspin after making rational calcula­
tions about the opposing claims of justice and filial loyalty; she
was progressively encouraged to do so by therapists who
believed that full psychic health must wait upon a vomiting up
of the repressed past.
Disastrously missed at the trial, this cardinal fact slipped
away once again on a subsequent Faith Daniels talk show
where, for the first time, Eileen Lipsker and Elizabeth Loftus
sat down together. “Why would you want to suffer if you
didn’t have to?” asked one member o f the audience who, like
nearly all the others, believed Eileen’s story and considered
Loftus a heartless crank. “Why would you want to put
yourself through it? There’s no logic behind it” (Loftus and
Ketcham, p. 71). As Loftus now tells us in her book, she
smiled stoically as the audience continued to berate her and
rally to Lipsker’s cause. And then the program was over.
Reading about this episode, one experiences an extreme
frustration. Couldn’t Loftus have pointed out that other

20. Lipsker quickly become a heroine in psychotherapeutic circles, appeared on

Sixty Minutesу collaborated on an as-told-to book, and found herself flatteringly
portrayed by Shelley Long in a made-for-TV movie about the case. Her book
and movie contracts, negotiated by a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, were
signed before the case had gone to trial.

180
parties besides Eileen had “put her through it”? That, however,
was four years ago, when no one yet had an explanatory han­
dle on the burgeoning plague that still besieges us. Now at
last, thanks to the inquiries of Loftus and others, it is starting
to make an eerie kind of sense.

3.
The Franklin/Lipsker case, so attractive to Lenore Terr as
Exhibit A o f validated repression, actually shows how a “mem­
ory” originating in conscious hunches and resentments can be
crystallized by protracted therapeutic suggestion, or the sub­
liminal contagion of ideas between a dominant and a subor­
dinate party. That is what we regularly find when missing
elements of recovered memory stories are filled in; where
repression was, there shall suggestion be. Indeed, someone
who reviews many such cases will eventually realize that the
salient question isn’t whether or not a bona fide instance of
repression can be found, but rather whether there are any
limits at all to the malleability of the human mind. Therapists,
it seems, are helpful but not strictly necessary to the produc­
tion o f wildly fantastic memories. Given a facilitating belief
structure, the compliant subject can use the merest hints as
triggers to delusion.
To illustrate this fact, there is nothing quite like the
sequence o f events recounted in Lawrence Wright’s Remem­
bering Satan, a short but gripping and brilliantly constructed
book that began as a pair o f articles in The New Yorker in
May 1993.^* Wright tells o f Paul Ingram, an Olympia,

21. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

181
Washington, sheriff’s deputy, a born-again Christian, and the
chair o f his county Republican committee, who was eventu­
ally thought to have raped both of his daughters as well as one
o f his sons innumerable times, to have passed the daughters
around sexually as poker nights at home turned into gang
rapes, to have hideously tortured the girls and forced them
and his wife to have sex with goats and dogs, and to have mur­
dered and cannibalized many babies at huge gatherings of his
Satanic cult —where, be it noted, long gowns, pitchforks, and
“Viking hats” were de rigueur. The still greater novelty, how­
ever, is that Ingram, though he initially remembered none of
those atrocities, succeeded in visualizing most o f them
through the exercise o f prayerful introspection. Indeed, he
labored so hard to admit to new crimes that his tale-spinning
daughters sometimes fell behind his pace.
All this would be hilarious Thurberesque Americana if it
were not also inexpressibly sad. Whereas the Franklin house­
hold, when Eileen Lipsker went public with her vision, no
longer contained a married couple or any children, in the
Ingram case a devout family of seven was shattered for good.
Moreover, Ingram, who is now serving a twenty-year term in
prison after having confessed to six counts of child molesta­
tion, came close to being joined there by others who were
caught in a widening net of lunacy— and at least two of them,
who were in fact jailed briefly and then kept under house
arrest for five months each, will never recover their reputa­
tions. Even those men had to think long and hard about
whether they might have unknowingly lived double lives; and
Ingram’s wife, Sandy, did conclude that she must have been a
secret Satanist. She has moved away now and lives under a

182
different name, as does the only one o f her five children who
hasn’t fled Olympia.
What is most arresting about the Ingram calamity is
how little suggestion—indeed, how little /гí/í6>-suggestion —
was required to set it in motion and then to keep it hurtling
toward its climax. Ericka Ingram had a history o f making
unsubstantiated sexual charges prior to her “realization” at age
twenty-two that her father had been raping her. That insight
did not occur during therapy but at a Christian retreat
in August 1988 at which a visiting charismatic healer told
Ericka the news, relayed to her by the Holy Spirit, that she
had been molested as a child. Ericka immediately accepted
the diagnosis— and, six years later, she apparently still
does.^^
Similarly, during the second day o f his questioning Paul
Ingram easily allowed himself to be led into a trance, resulting
in his confession to all of the crimes with which he was
eventually charged after prosecutors had deleted the witches’
sabbath material, which could have raised awkward questions
in jurors’ minds if the case had come to trial. Ingram’s prolific
later admissions were facilitated not only by prayer but by
“relaxation techniques,” one of which he had picked up from
a magazine. And two of his sons also developed a knack of
instantly becoming “dissociated” in order to provide inquisi­
tors with the required lurid reminiscences.

22. At the sentencing, Ericka was instrumental in seeing that her father receive
the stiifesr allowable punishment, and afterward, like Eileen Lipsker, she
advanced her cause on the tabloid talk shows. Today, I gather, she is still con­
cerned with denouncing a coven o f Satanists within the Olympia police
department.

183
 This is not to say that the Ingram family generated hallu­
cinations entirely under its own steam. To begin with, Paul
Ingrams police colleagues exerted unscrupulous (though hard­
ly unusual) pressure on him, extending the second interroga­
tion over a mind-buckling eight-hour period and using his
piety as a wedge to confession. They lied to him about what
others had revealed and assured him that if he would only
begin by admitting his guilt, the relevant memories would
come flooding back.^^ By that second day, furthermore, Paul
was being advised by a Tacoma psychologist whose recent prac­
tice had included Satanic abuse cases, and who later helped
Pauls son Chad to conclude that his remembered childhood
dreams were proof of molestation. An assistant pastor in the
Church of Living Water also helped both Paul and his wife to
sustain the cleansing flow of visions. During five months of
interrogation, no fewer than five psychologists and counselors
kept the heat on Paul, preventing him from ever stepping back
to test whether the grimmer yet more tentative of his two
memory systems—his “horror movie,” as he called it—was
anchored to actual events.
When all this pressure has been duly weighed, however,
the fact remains that the Ingram case displays a breathtaking

23. The Olympia police authorities never conducted an investigation in the

usual meaning o f that term. “Believe the children” was their tacit motto from
the word go. To this day they haven’t realized the unfairness o f collecting a
mountain o f absurd and contradictory stories from patently unstable witnesses,
lopping off the charges that would be most likely to arouse a jury’s suspicions
about the reliability o f those sources, and using the remaining, equally unsub­
stantiated, charges to hustle a respected colleague off to prison. Nor, in Wright’s
words, did the detectives “ever consider the possibility that the source o f the
memories was the investigation itself” (Wright, p. 195).

184
readiness on the part of its major players to form lasting
“memories” on very slight provocation. And this is important
for grasping the explosive potentiality o f recovered memory
allegations. There was nothing exceptional about the Ingram
family’s prelapsarian makeup or the Olympia scene in general.
Apparently, a community steeped in Biblical literalism on the
one hand and Gernldo on the other needs only a triggering
mechanism to set off a long chain reaction of paranoia.^"^ Yet
such a community epitomizes a good portion o f North
America. The potential for mass havoc from “memory”-based
accusations is thus no smaller today than it was in the seven­
teenth century. In fact, it is incomparably greater, thanks to
the power of our sensation-seeking media to spread the illness
instantaneously from one town or region to another.
As Lawrence Wright properly stresses, one further in­
gredient acts as a multiplier o f trouble. Not surprisingly, it is a
shared belief in the theory of repression. Only a few hours into
his first grilling, Paul Ingram was ready to state, “I did violate
them and abuse them and probably for a long period of time.
I’ve repressed it” (Wright, p. 8). His questioners, of course,
held the same view, which took on firmer contours as more
psychologists were called in; before long, the official version
was that Paul had repressed each of his myriad offenses just as
soon as he had finished committing it. A county under-sheriff
(himself falsely accused o f Satanism, but still an enthusiastic

24. One month before Paul Ingram was summoned to police headquarters for
his first grilling, the Ingram family sat down to watch Geraldo Riveras prime­
time special, D evil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground. The previous days
program, which they may or may not have seen, was called Satanic Breeders:
Babies fo r Sacrifice.

185
believer in its reality) became so enamored of this notion that
he started moonlighting as a counselor to survivor groups and
writing theoretical papers about the effects of repression.^^
One can only second Lawrence Wrights conclusion: “ [w]hat-
ever the value of repression as a scientific concept or a thera­
peutic tool, unquestioning belief in it has become as danger­
ous as the belief in witches” (Wright, pp. 199-200).
Some secular-minded readers may feel that the Ingram
case, in view o f its fundamentalist soil and its resultant exotic
blossom of Satanism, is too outlandish to tell us much about
the prudent and responsible search for incest memories. Yet
the more one learns about the scare over “Satanic ritual
abuse,” the more porous its boundary with the larger recov­
ered memory movement appears to be. According to surveys
taken by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, at least 15
percent of all memory retrievers come to recall Satanic torture
in childhood—this despite a lack of evidence to support the
existence o f any sadistic devil-worshiping cults in North
America or anywhere else.^^’ The fact is that “memories” of
baby barbecues and the like are usually evoked through the
same techniques of psychic exploration commended by pres-

25. Ingram himself learned, pathetically, how to talk the self-pitying lingo o f the
recovered memory movement. “1 have also been a victim since I was five years
old,” he told an interrogator, “and I learned very early that the easiest way to
handle this was to hide it in unconscious memory . . . ” (Wright, p. 173)
26. For a reliable account of the way that the mania over “Satanic ritual abuse”
has blended with the recovered memory movement, see Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic
Panic: The Creation o f a Contemporary Legend (Open Court, 1993). For the
FBI’s inability to locate any such abuse, see Kenneth V. Fanning, “Satanic,
Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective,” The Police C hief
October 1989, pp. 62-83.

186
tigious academics such as Judith Herman and Lenore Terr.
Indeed, as she testified at the Franklin trial, Terr herself has
treated “victims” who thought they recalled having been
forced to watch ritual human sacrifices.
Until the recovered memory movement got properly
launched in the later 1980s, most Satanism charges were
brought against child-care workers who were thought to have
molested their little clients for the devils sake. In such prose­
cutions, which continue today, a vengeful or mentally
unhinged adult typically launches the accusations, which are
immediately believed by police and social workers. These
authorities then disconcert the toddlers with rectal and vagi­
nal prodding, with invitations to act out naughtiness on
“anatomically correct” dolls with bloated genitals, and, of
course, with leading questions that persist until the child
reverses an initial denial that anything happened and begins
weaving the kind of tale that appears to be demanded. As
many studies have shown, small children can be readily
induced to believe that they have experienced just about any
fictitious occurrence. In this respect, however, they do not
stand fundamentally apart from their elders. The only real
difference is that the grown-ups, in order to become as gullible
as three-year-olds, must first subscribe to a theory such as that
of demonic possession or its scientific counterpart, Freudian
repression. They then become putty in the hands of their
would-be helpers.
As it happens, the most impressive controlled illustration
of this fact to date came directly from the Paul Ingram case,
after the prosecutors— not the defense!— had invited the social
psychologist Richard Ofshe to Olympia as an expert on cults

187
and mind control. Perhaps, they thought, Ofshe could cast
some light into the murky Satanic corner of the affair. But
Ofshe, immediately struck by the conditional quality of
Ingrams confessions and by their suggestion that a scene was
taking place in the minds eye (“I would’ve,” “I must have,”
“I see it,” etc.), decided to test Ingram’s suggestibility by propos­
ing a false memory for him to accept or reject.
“I was talking to one of your sons and one of your
daughters . . . , ” Ofshe told Ingram. “It was about a time when
you made them have sex with each other while you watched.”
This was one charge that had not been levied and would never
be, but one day later, Paul proudly submitted a new written
confession:

... I ask or tell Paul Jr. & Ericka to come upstairs__

I tell Ericka to knell [sic] and to caress Paul’s genitals.
When erect I tell her to put the penis into her mouth
and to orally stimulate him__ I may have told the
children that they needed to learn the sex acts and how
to do them right__ I may have anal sex with Paul, not
real clear___ Someone may have told me to do this
with the kids. This is a feeling 1 have.

When Ofshe then informed Ingram that this memory was

specious, Ingram refused to believe him. “It’s just as real to me
as anything else,” he protested (Wright, pp. 144-146).
When, months later, Ofshe phoned Ingram in jail and
begged him not to plead guilty, Ingram wavered but declined.
Apart from consideration for the daughters who had so egre-
giously betrayed him, he cited the likelihood that he was still

188
repressing material that would make the whole case clear.
Protected at last from the ministrations of his “counselors,” he
did change his mind shortly thereafter, but his guilty plea had
already been accepted by the court, and two subsequent
appeals have failed.
The criminal cases we have examined suffice to show
that the “return of the repressed,” however bland its uses with­
in the amorphous aims of Freudian therapy, can turn noxious
when it is considered by police, prosecutors, jurors, and even
accused malefactors to be a source of unimpeachable truth. In
the light of the actual recovered memory movement, however,
the Franklin and Ingram examples can be seen to lack a bale­
ful but typical ingredient. So far as we know, neither Eileen
Lipsker nor Ericka Ingram (not to mention Paul Ingram him­
self) was systematically recruited by self-help books to believe
that certain despicable deeds must have been committed and
then wholly repressed.
Just such solicitation—we can think o f it as suggestion-
at-a-distance—has by now been brought to bear on myriad
vulnerable people, mostly women, by advocates in search of
ideological and/or financial gain. The result has been a wide­
spread tragedy that is still unfolding before our incredulous
eyes. To lay bare not just its nature but also its causes, both
proximate and remote, is a socially urgent task. With the help
of several excellent new critical works, we will explore that
ground in the concluding portion of this essay.

November 17, 1994

189
 P A R T -p W o

L
Throughout the American 1980s and beyond, the interroga­
tion of small children for their memories o f recent sexual
abuse played a role in many a criminal case against accused
molesters who had not, in fact, done anything wrong. The
social and financial costs have been enormous. To take only
the most famous example, staff members o f the McMartin
Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, who were accused
of every imaginable horror associated with devil worship, had
to endure the longest (almost seven years) and most expensive
($15 million) trial in American history before the case col­
lapsed from the weight o f its accumulated absurdities. In other
instances, draconian sentences are being served and plea bar­
gains are still being coerced in the face o f transparently clear
signs that the charges are bogus. Even today, our criminal jus­
tice system is just beginning to erect safeguards against the
error that makes such outrages possible: the assumption that

191
children are still reliable witnesses after exposure to their par­
ents’ and inquisitors’ not-so-subtle hints that certain kinds of
revelations are expected of them.
Not even that much progress, however, is being made
with respect to curbing parallel travesties involving the
therapeutically manufactured memories of adults who decide
that they must have been molested in their own childhood.
On the contrary: by extending their statutes of limitation to
allow for thirty years and more of nonrecollection, our states
have been codifying a pseudoscientific notion of repressed-
yet-vividly-retrieved memory that can cause not merely
injustice but enormous grief and havoc. Obviously, the impe­
tus for such legislative backwardness is not coming from rep­
utable psychological research—which, as we have seen, offers
no support to the concept of repression even in its mildest
form. The momentum comes rather from a combination of
broad popular belief and a relatively narrow but intense
crusading fervor.
Since 1988, the most successful communicators o f both
the belief and the fervor have been Ellen Bass and Laura
Davis, through their “recovery manual” The Courage to Heal,
A teacher of creative writing and her student, Bass and Davis
were radical feminists who lacked any background in psychol­
ogy. Their knowledge base consisted o f stories they had heard
from women who clearly remembered that they had been sex­
ually abused in childhood but who had been rebuffed by
uncaring therapists and family members. Noting the high
numbers of such cases reported within women’s collectives,
and further noting that other women in such groups eventu­
ally produced incest “memories” of their own, Bass and Davis

192
soon decided that repressed abuse must be even more perva­
sive than remembered abuse. The more likely explanation of
the late-blooming cases—namely, that the dynamics of the
group encouraged false memory formation by making victim-
hood into a test of authentic belonging—has yet to dawn on
these collaborators.
Precisely because their minds were unclouded by
research findings, Bass and Davis uncannily reflected the ideo­
logical spirit o f their moment and milieu. As Mark Pender-
grast relates in Victims o f Memory, the mounting (and very
legitimate) concern about the underreported incidence of real
child molestation formed only one corner of the picture. Bass
and Davis also spoke to a public mood of impatient moral
absolutism; an obsession with the themes, popularized by
John Bradshaw and others, of codependency, the “dysfunc­
tional family,” and the “inner child”; a widespread sus­
ceptibility to occult beliefs; the rise o f “lookism” and other
manifestations of hypersensitivity to the violation o f personal
space; and the angry conviction in some quarters that all
men are rapists at heart. While Andrea Dworkin and Susan
Brownmiller were hypothesizing that American fathers regu­
larly rape their daughters in order to teach them what it means
to be inferior, Bass and Davis set about to succor the tens of
millions o f victims who must have repressed that ordeal.
No single book, of course, can make a social movement.
Although The Courage to Heal had already sold over three
quarters of a million copies before its recent third edition
appeared, and although its spinoff volumes constitute a
small industry in their own right, Bass and Davis have been
joined by a considerable number o f other writers who

193
share their slantJ Moreover, the recovered memory business
quickly outgrew the motives of its founders. By now, as the
books by Pendergrast and by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
show, it has evolved into a highly lucrative enterprise not just
of therapy and publishing but also of counseling, workshop
hosting, custody litigation, criminal prosecution, forced
hospitalization, and insurance and “victim compensation”
claims.
Bass and Davis’s movement, it must be plainly under­
stood, is not primarily addressed to people who always knew
about their sexual victimization. Its main intended audience is
women who aren’t at all sure that they were molested, and its
purpose is to convince them of that fact and embolden them
to act upon it. As for genuine victims, the comfort they are
proffered may look attractive at first, but it is o f debatable
long-term value. T/7e Courage to Heal and its fellow manuals
are not about surmounting one’s tragic girlhood but about
keeping the psychic wounds open, refusing forgiveness or
reconciliation, and joining the permanently embittered corps
o f “survivors.”
In the eyes of the movement’s leaders, as many as half of
all American women are veterans of childhood sexual abuse
(Blume, p. xiv). If so, the logic seems to run, you can hardly
fail to unearth a victim wherever you look and by however
desultory a means of detection. But a revealing game with

1. Other key movement documents include Renee Fredrickson, Repressed

Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse (Fireside/Parkside, 1992); E.
Sue Blume, Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its AJierejfects in Women
(Wiley, 1990); and Patricia Love, The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What To Do
When a Parents Love Rules Your Life (Bantam, 1990).

194
definitions is being played here. For writers like Bass and
Davis, Renee Fredrickson, and E. Sue Blume, sexual molesta­
tion occurs whenever the victim thinks—or later comes to
believe that she must have thought—that an inappropriate
kind of contact is occurring. Blume, indeed, denies that phys­
ical touching need be involved at all. “Incest,” she explains,
“can occur through words, sounds, or even exposure of the
child to sights or acts that are sexual but do not involve her”
(Blume, p. 5). And still another movement writer denounces
what she calls “emotional incest,” which can be committed by
parents who “appear loving and devoted,” “spend a great deal
of time with their children and lavish them with praise and
material gifts,” but do so merely “as an unconscious ploy to
satisfy their own unmet needs” (Love, p. 1).
From the standpoint of public health, what’s most
disturbing here is a likely growth in the number of “false
positives” —women who were never molested but who are
enticed into believing that they were. The mavens o f recovered
memory concern themselves almost entirely with means of
reinforcing incest suspicions, not with means o f checking them
against solid evidence pro or con. Their advice to friends and
counselors of a woman who has been led to suspect early
molestation is generally the same: never cast doubt on those
suspicions. So, too, she herself is urged to stifle all doubts. In
Renee Fredrickson’s words, “You may be convinced that your
disbelief is a rational questioning of the reality versus unreal­
ity o f your memories, but it is partially a misguided attempt
to repress the memories again” (p. 161).
It is little wonder, then, that Bass and Davis, through
the first two editions of The Courage to Heah had yet to

195
encounter a single woman who ‘ suspected she might have
been abused, explored it, and determined that she wasn't.”^
Now, in a third edition that is beginning to sound nervous
about “the backlash” in general and pending damage suits in
particular, it is admitted that some therapists “have pushed
clients to acknowledge abuse... that did not occur” (p. 485).
But even those few bad apples, in Bass and Daviss still erro­
neous judgment, cannot “create new memories in their
clients” (p. 508); and the women who change their minds
after leaving therapy “represent only a tiny fraction of the
millions o f actual survivors. . . ” (p. 509).
The “false positives” problem has been exacerbated by
the checklists o f telltale symptoms that adorn the movements
self-help manuals and advice columns. Smarting from
criticism of their earlier checklists, Bass and Davis adopt a
warier posture now; nevertheless, they still leave the implica­
tion that if you “feel different from other people” (p. 39),
incest is a likely cause. E. Sue Blume tells you that you were
probably molested if you speak too softly, or wear too many
clothes, or have “no awareness at all” o f having been violated
(pp. xviii-xxi). If you have checked the questionnaire items “I
neglect my teeth” or “There are certain things I seem to have
a strange affection or attraction for,” Renee Fredrickson knows
why (p. 49). And according to the ubiquitous John Bradshaw,
a victim can be spotted either by her sexual promiscuity or, as
the case may be, by her lack of interest in sex.^ These are all

2. Bass and Davis, The Courage to Heal, second edition (HarperPerennial,

1992), p. 347.

196
sterling examples o f what experimentally minded psycholo­
gists dryly call a “confirmatory bias.”^
Once she is drawn into memory therapy, a client will
find her suspicions of abuse verified by one or more tech­
niques o f investigation that are, in Fredricksons words, “as
unlimited as human creativity” (p. 141). With or without
the therapists direct assurance that the patients symptoms
are “consistent with abuse,” repression can supposedly be
dislodged through “feelings work,” “body work,” “dream
work,” “imagistic work,” “trance work,” and “group work”;
through the production of journals and pictures that are sure
to yield symbols of violation; through the cultivation of flash­
backs, which are always deemed to reveal the truth of a past
situation rather than compliance with current expectations;
through administration of the tongue-loosening “truth serum”
sodium amytal; and, of course, through hypnosis, including
its deep-end forms of “age regression” and even “past life
regression.”^ The considerable body o f technical literature
showing that none o f these methods reliably leads to uncont­
aminated memories is simply ignored.

3. John Bradshaw, “ Incest: When You Wonder If It Happened to You,” Lear's^

August 1992, pp. 4 3 -4 4 .
4. Controlled research indicates that there is nothing easy about identifying
incest victims from their symptoms. See, e.g., Thomas M. Horner et al., “The
Biases o f Child Sexual Abuse Experts: Believing Is Seeing,” Bulletin o f the
American Academy o f Psychiatry LaWy Vol. 21 (1993), pp. 281-292. Horner
found that forty-eight experts, all examining the same material, could reach no
significant agreement as to whether a child had been molested by her father.
5. See Loftus and Ketcham, The Myth o f Repressed Memoryy pp. 167-169,
162-164, 158-160, 156-158, 24, 169-171, 160-162, and Pendergrast,
Victims o f Memory ypp. 118, 122-123, 108ff.

197
 The recovered memory movement’s feminist affinity
should not lead anyone to suppose that its incitement to mil­
itant victimhood serves the best interests of women. It is
precisely women who make up most of the movement’s casu­
alties. Once a patient is invited to believe that her inner child
was suffocated at an early age, she may well put the major
blame on her mother; that is just what we see in a significant
minority of cases. Estrangement between sisters—one con­
verted to hellishly revised memories of their years together, the
other refusing to go along—is also a regular aftermath of ther­
apy. But above all, the chief sufferer usually turns out to be the
female patient herself
Self-help manuals preach the doctrine of “abreaction,”
whereby a patient must painfully relive each repressed memory
if she is to stand a chance of freeing herself from it. The expe­
rience is guaranteed to be rough. In Lenore Terr’s version of
this truth, “Clinicians find that once repression lifts, individ­
uals become far more symptomatic. They become anxious,
depressed, sometimes suicidal, and far more fearful of items
suggestive of their traumas.”^’ Bass and Davis agree. “Don’t
hurt or try to kill yourself..., ” they feel compelled to advise.
“Sit tight and ride out the storm” (p. 75). For many women,
however, the storm doesn’t end, or else it ends all too abruptly
with suicide. And even in the best of cases, a “survivor” is
coached to reject the happiest actual memories of her

6. Terr, Unchained Memories, p. 52. Renee Fredrickson goes a step farther,

remarking that patients may not notice any symptoms at a ll “until they are
immersed in the process o f dealing with their memories” (Repressed Memories,
p. 36). Then the torment begins.

198
childhood as being inconsistent with the stark truth of
molestation. The result is a lasting sacrifice of resilience, secur­
ity of identity, humor, capacity to show affection, and con­
nection to the people who have cared most steadily about this
womans happiness.

2.
Although much of this woe is irreparable, there is no need for
fatalism about its indefinite extension to new cases. On the
contrary: the tide is already being turned. The current books
that are hastening this shift of opinion follow upon influential
exposes by such courageous journalists as Michael Morris,
Debbie Nathan, Stephanie Salter, the late Darrell Sifford, and
Bill Taylor, along with trenchant warnings by academics like
Carol Tavris, Paul McHugh, and Robyn Dawes. And a num­
ber of other book-length critiques are just now arriving on the
scene.^ Above all, steady progress in public enlightenment has
been forged, over the past two and a half years, by the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation, most of whose members are
themselves slandered relatives of “survivors.”

7. See Michael D. Yapko, Suggestions o f Abuse: True and False Memories o f

Childhood Sexual Trauma (Simon and Schuster, 1994); Hollida Wakefield and
Ralph Underwager, Return o f the Furies: An Investigation into Recovered Memory
Therapy (Open Court, 1994); Claudette Wassil-Grimm, Diagnosis fo r Disaster:
The Devastating Truth about False Memory Syndrome and Its Impact on Accusers
and Fam ilies (Overlook, 1995); and Charles R. Kelley and Eric C. Kelley, Now I
Remember: Recovered Memories o f Sexual Abuse (K /R Publications, 1994). Other
important recent books include Eleanor Goldstein and Kevin Farmer,
Confabulations (SIRS Books, 1992) and True Stories o f False Memories (s ir s
Books, 1993).

199
 All three o f the most convincing new books on
false memory—those by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine
Ketcham, Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, and Mark
Pendergrast—address the full tragedy and folly of the recov­
ered memory movement. All are astute, scientifically in­
formed, and compassionate toward the movements casualties;
all contain wrenching accounts of sudden accusation and
insult, alienation, family grief, false imprisonment, and death
without reconciliation. Any of these overlapping works would
serve a reader well as a survey, analysis, and call to corrective
action. But the most unflinching and broadest-ranging studies
appear to be Ofshe and Watters’s Making Monsters and
Pendergrast’s Victims o f Memory.
As befits a coauthor (Ofshe) whose research specialty has
been the tactics of exerting undue influence. Making Monsters
is finely attuned to the thralldom that would-be healers
impose upon their clients, whose mundane initial complaints
are typically supplanted by anxiety, suggestibility, and a des­
perate dependency. What distinguishes this book is its focus
on the resultant psychological transformation of patients. For
Ofshe and Watters, the speciousness of the so-called memories
is incidental to the real tragedy, a “brutalization and psy­
chological torture” of people who get stripped of their actual
early memories, infused with fanatical hatred of their parents,
and disabled for normal coping in the world beyond the drift­
ing lifeboat of survivorship (Ofshe and Watters, p. 7). The
patients themselves become grotesque in the very act of “mak­
ing monsters” out of the people who nurtured them.
Ofshe and Watters offer us the clearest account of
how the very inefficacy of memory treatment—its indefinite

200
postponing of an expected self-restoration—can lock the
patient and therapist in an ever more macabre embrace. Thus:

Therapists often find themselves forced to explain why,

after the first series of recovered memories, the clients
symptoms do not disappear as promised. The easiest
answer is to presume that the abuse must have been
more serious than originally thought, and that more
repressed memories are hidden in the patients uncon­
scious. As the therapist pushes to find more hidden
memories, the client, who is already trained in the
process, often comes up with still more accounts of hav­
ing been abused__ [Eventually,] the client s worst fears
are forged into memories. What could be more psycho­
logically damaging than being raped by ones father?
Having to have his baby. What could be worse than
having to give birth to your fathers child? Having to kill
the child. What could be worse than having to kill a
baby? Having to eat the baby after you’ve killed it. What
could be worse than all this? Having to do these things
during ritualized worship of the Devil, (p. 177)

At such a juncture, readers may suppose, both parties to

the '‘therapy” must surely awaken and realize that they have
been taking a magic carpet ride. But for reasons that Ofshe
and Watters supply, it doesn’t happen. The therapist feels
honor bound to avoid “revictimizing” the patient by expressing
doubts, and the patient, precisely by virtue o f having
renounced the actual memories that used to moor her identity,
has lost contact with reality and is desperate to retain the

201
 therapists approval. The outcome is a potentially lethal
folie a deux^
Making Monsters is a book about iatrogenesis, or the
molding of a patients illness by the incompetent doctor’s
own ministrations. The authors carry this theme quite far, not
just in explaining individual cases but also in challenging
an entire disease entity linked to false memory cases, so-called
multiple personality disorder ( m p d ) . They are hardly the first
parties to express misgivings about this staple of Hollywood,
sensational TV, and the criminal courts, where “one of my
other personalities did it” has become the murderer’s last
alibi. But Ofshe and Watters regard MPD as a pure product
of suggestion. They see it as a behavioral pattern learned
chiefly from hypnotherapists who tend, themselves, to be
believers in Satanic possession and other forms of conspirato­
rial mind control, and who characteristically prod their
patients not only to remember hideous ordeals but also to
manifest the dissociated selves that must have been brought
into being by flight from those ordeals. With M PD, Ofshe
and Watters argue, we stand at the outer edge of medical

8. Ofshe and Watters rightly perceive the Satanic connection as “the Achilles’
heel o f the recovered memory movement” (p. 194). Radical feminists who prefer
all-female “survivor families” to the nuclear family make strange bedfellows with
abortion-hating fundamentalists, but the record speaks for itself. “None o f us
want to believe such stories,” write Bass and Davis o f the ridiculous tales about
babies being forced to eat feces in Satan’s honor, “but for the sake o f the sur­
vivors we must” (Bass and Davis, p. 522). As M aking Monsters shows, Bass and
Davis’s own carte-blanche approach to the authenticating o f incest cases leaves
them with no way o f drawing a line between sane and crazy allegations made by
their Christian counterparts from across the ideological tracks.

202
derangement, yet well within the methodological boundaries
of the recovered memory movement/^
In their assault on MPi:), Ofshe and Watters are joined,
independently, by the investigative journalist Mark Pender-
grast, whose Victims o f Memory constitutes the most ambitious
and comprehensive, as well as the most emotionally commit­
ted, of all the studies before us. Pendergrasts book stands out
from the others in several respects. For one thing, it transcribes
his numerous interviews with therapists, “survivors,” “retrac­
tors,” and accused “perpetrators,” allowing the cruel unreason
of the recovered memory movement to be voiced with a min­
imum o f editorial mediation. Second, he is the author who
delves most deeply into the movements antecedents in witch­
craft lore, mesmerism, early hypnotherapy, and the treatment
of so-called hysteria—itself a faddish malady whose distribu­
tion was suspiciously well correlated with possession of the
means to pay for treatment. Third, Pendergrast offers illumi­
nating material about physiological states (sleep paralysis,
panic attacks) that have traditionally been mistaken for “body
memories” o f one lurid kind or another. And it is Pendergrast
who devotes the most effort to analyzing the contemporary
Zeitgeist in which the recovery movement thrives.
Like Loftus and Ketcham and Ofshe and Watters, Pen­
dergrast offers case histories that will wring the classic emo­
tions of pity and terror from any unbiased reader. But here.

9. In recently redesignating MPl) as “dissociative identity disorder,” the

American Psychiatric Association has started to back away from the syndromes
more lurid implications. So long as MPl) promoters remain influential within
the association, however, fundamental criticism such as Ofshe and Watters’s is
not to be expected.

203
too, there is a difference: the most affecting (though by no
means the most drastic) o f Pendergrast s stories is his own. He
himself has lost his grown daughters to the recovered memo­
ry movement. Within therapy that featured the overcoming of
repression, both of them came to believe that he did some­
thing awful—they won’t say what—to one of them, and both
have met his pleas for communication with the icy formalism
inculcated by The Courage to Heal—z book, ironically, that
Pendergrast bought and gave to one daughter when she first
mentioned that uncrystallized sexual scenes were beginning to
haunt her mind. Now both daughters have taken different last
names, and in concluding his book with a poignant letter to
them, Pendergrast further protects their identities by assigning
them fictitious first names as well. Let us hope that they will
read not just that letter but the whole of Victims o f Memory^
which, though it is hardly addressed to them alone, rests part­
ly on the desperate premise that a 603-page dose of history,
logic, and exhortation may be able to turn well-coached
zealots back into the amiable young women Pendergrast
once knew.
Finally, and understandably. Victims o f Memory is dis­
tinguished by the urgency and specificity o f its call to action.
Among other recommendations, Pendergrast wants profes­
sional associations and licensing boards to stop waffling about
repression and to insist that therapists acquaint themselves
with what is actually known about memory. He wants re­
consideration o f laws that have created standing “abuse
bureaucracies” and that have rashly extended statutes of
limitation. He favors third-party suits for damages against
therapists whose implanting of false accusations has destroyed

204
families and l i vel i hoods . He wants the adoption o f higher
standards for expert testimony and for the evaluation o f ther­
apists’ claims that they were mere bystanders to their patients’
mnemonic feats. And most pressingly, he asks for a special
judicial review o f criminal convictions that have been based
solely on the alleged retrieval o f long-dormant memories or on
the manipulated fantasies of small children.
Some people who have always remembered their own
sexual victimization will regard the legal and legislative parts
of this agenda as regressive, a signal to real molesters that they
can exploit children with impunity. Such fears are under­
standable; pedophiles will undoubtedly try to portray any
accuser as deluded by a trick o f memory. But that only makes
it more imperative that the air be cleared. Until our courts can
learn to apply the same evidential criteria to abuse charges that
they require for all others, they will remain enmired in phony
cases that persecute the innocent and squander resources that
are needed to address the real problem of child abuse.
Meanwhile, simple justice demands that prison sentences
resting on a combination of delusion and misinformation
be overturned.

10. The prototype o f such suits was brought by Gary Ramona o f Petaluma,
California, who won a $500,000 judgment in 1994 against a therapist, a psy­
chiatrist, and a hospital for their role in bringing about his daughter Holly’s
“memory” that he had molested her. Sued by Holly, Ramona had countersued
the other parties for compensation o f the loss o f his job, marriage, and reputa­
tion. (Lenore Terr, incidentally, put in her customary court appearance, offering
an expert opinion that Holly Ramona’s current aversion to pickles and bananas
confirms her childhood trauma o f forced oral sex.) The Ramona verdict will be
appealed, but for now, at least, it constitutes the darkest cloud hanging over the
recovered memory movement.

205
Once the bizarre and sinister features of the recovered mem­
ory movement are widely known, sophisticated readers will
not hesitate to distance themselves from it. But that very
likelihood holds out another danger, that bobbing for re­
pressed memories will be perceived simply as a ludicrous,
dismissible aberration from a fundamentally sound psy­
chotherapeutic tradition. If that view prevails, we will have
learned little of lasting value from the recovered memory
fiasco. It is essential to grasp that induced memory retrieval
emerged from mainstream ideas about the psyche and that
it bears a strong kinship with every other style of treatment
that ties curative power to restoration of the patients early
past.
Despite their feminist affiliation, the champions of
survivorship cheerfully acknowledge Sigmund Freud, the male
chauvinist par excellence, as their chief intellectual and clini­
cal forebear (see, e.g., Bass and Davis, pp. 479-480). They are
quite justified in that opinion. Indeed, the ties between
Freuds methods and theirs are more intricate and enveloping
—and immeasurably more compromising to both parties—
than they imagine. Precisely that kinship explains why other
therapeutic descendants of Freudianism ought to be doing
some soul-searching just now.
Needless to say, it is not classic psychoanalysis to which
writers like Bass and Davis feel indebted. They have in mind
the pre-psychoanalytic Freud, the one who supposedly took
pity on his hysterical patients, found that they were all har­
boring memories of early abuse, “listened and understood and
gave them permission to remember and speak of these terrible

206
events,” ^^ and cured them by unknotting their repression.
Unfortunately (the story continues), he then suffered a failure
of nerve; too many fathers were being identified as perpetra­
tors, and patriarchy itself threatened to teeter on its throne. As
a result, Freud withdrew into psychoanalysis, a doctrine that
ascribes incestuous designs not to adult molesters but, gro­
tesquely, to children themselves.
As I explained in “The Unknown Freud,” this fable con­
tains at least one nugget of truth: Freud had no empirical war­
rant for shifting to an oedipal perspective. The founding of his
signature doctrine was indeed a retreat—one designed, however,
not to shield guilty fathers but to keep in play his favorite con­
cept o f repression—“the cornerstone,” as he would later say, “on
which the whole structure o f psychoanalysis rests” (SE,
14:16)—after its already announced therapeutic victories had
failed to materialize. Freud finally had to cope with the
disagreeable thought that his hysterics’ “stories” of very early
abuse had been peremptory inventions of his own. He did so,
however, through a dumbfoundingly illogical, historically mo­
mentous expedient, ascribing to his patients’ unconscious
minds a repressed desirefor the precocious couplings that he had
hitherto urged them to remember having helplessly undergone.
That is how psychoanalysis as we know it came into being.
Even people who accept this well-founded correction of
the Freud legend may be slow to realize how high and dry it
leaves the dogma o f repression. Freud and Josef Breuer had
first invoked repression in 1893 to cover miscellaneous symptom-

11. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression o f the
Seduction Theory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 9.

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producing “things which the patient wished to forget” (SE, 2:10);
but Freud quickly became uncomfortable both with the
random character of the offending thoughts and with his
source of information about the repressed, namely, hypnosis.
Then, with the seduction theory, he adapted the idea of repres­
sion to cover the failure of patients to remember molestations
that he soon conceded to have been imaginary. Still later, it
covered fantasies (and some events) whose existence could be
known only by positing the action of repression itself. In none
of these phases do we encounter raw behavioral data that an
outsider would feel obliged to label “the repressed.” Thus we
really ought to redefine the repressed as follows: “inaccessible
and possibly nonexistent psychic material to which the theorist
or therapist is nevertheless determined to assign explanatory
power.” Exactly the same point applies to the repressed as it
operates in the discourse of the recovered memory movement.
Among the many respects in which the memory retriev­
ers’ glorification o f Freuds “seduction theory” misfires, the
least noticed has to do with his alleged sympathy for incest
sufferers. It is certainly true that after he became properly
“Freudian” and cast children as the would-be seducers, he
showed precious little pity for child sexual victims. Before
1897, for example, Freud could hardly have condemned the
fourteen-year-old Dora as abnormal for spurning “an occasion
for sexual excitement” proffered by her fathers married friend
(SE, 7: 28). Like Bass and Davis, however, the early Freud was
less interested in comforting certified veterans o f molestation
than in rounding up converts to his all-purpose diagnosis.
And the spirit of his interventions, as revealed in his papers
and letters o f the period, was not compassionate but

208
monomaniacal. It is little wonder that Ofshe and Watters
regard him as having “cut the very figure of a recovered mem­
ory therapist.”
Listen to Freud’s own words:

The work keeps on coming to a stop and they keep on

maintaining that this time nothing has occurred to
them. We must not believe what they say, we must
always assume, and tell them, too, that they have kept
something back__ We must insist on this, we must
repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible,
till at last we are really told something— There are cases,
too, in which the patient tries to disown [the memory]
even after its return. “Something has occurred to me
now, but you obviously put it into my head.”. .. In all
such cases, I remain unshakably firm. I . .. explain to the
patient that [these distinctions] are only forms o f his
resistance and pretexts raised by it against reproducing
this particular memory, which we must recognize in
spite o f all this. (SE, 2:279-280)^^

The patient’s typical response to such hectoring was

an agitation that Freud, like his counterparts a century later.

12. Ofshe and Watters, p. 293. Mark Pendergrast, too, understands the deep affinity
between Freuds methods and those of our contemporary retrievers. The odd book out
in this respect is Elizabeth Ixjftus and Katherine Ketchams, which puts a maximum
distance between memory therapy and what she calls Freuds “spare, elegant theories.”
13. This passage is cited in a pertinent article by Russell A. Powell and Douglas
P. Boer, “Did Freud Mislead Patients to Confabulate Memories o f Abuse?”
Psychological Reports^ Vol. 74 (1994), pp. 1283-1298.

209
paraded as validation o f his guesswork: “The behaviour of
patients while they are reproducing these infantile experi­
ences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption
that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is
being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest
reluctance” (SE, 3:204). Note as well how the psycho­
analytic concept of resistance (the memory retrievers prefer to
call it “denial”) was already pulling its weight in the mid-
1890s. When Renee Fredrickson now avers that the “exis­
tence of profound disbelief is an indication that memories are
real” (Fredrickson, p. 171), she is manifesting loyalty to the
sturdiest, as well as the most capricious, of Freudian
traditions.
Critics of recovered memory have remarked on the
movement’s puritanical alarmism, whereby a mere touch or
look gets invested with traumatic consequences that sup­
posedly remain virulent for thirty years and more. In this
respect, too, Freud anticipated the contemporary trend. So
long as he cared at all about molestation as an etiological fac­
tor, he completely overlooked its real psychological effects,
such as fear, moral confusion, and a diminished sense of
selfhood. Instead, he dwelt on mechanical cause-and-effect
relations between symptomatology and the premature
stimulation of one body zone or another. And he regarded
masturbation not only as a cause of indigestion, headaches,
and lassitude but also as a sign of prior “seduction.” The early
Freud’s truest contemporary heirs are those adults who see
toddlers playing doctor and immediately phone the police.

14. This is not a fanciful example. Last year Kenneth Bruce Perkins, a Texas

210
 It was Freud, too, who pioneered the modern memory
sleuths’ technique of thematically matching a patient’s symptom
with a sexually symmetrical “memory.” Before he decided that
it made no difference whether a trauma was real or imaginary,
Freud was tireless in his pursuit of such causal linkages.
Lesions in the mouth were signs that a penis had been there
first; dyspepsia or “worm irritation” must have stemmed from
the insertion o f a tongue or a finger in the former baby’s anus;
a paralysis of the lower limbs meant that the sufferer had been
“required to stimulate the genitals o f a grown-up woman with
his foot”; and so forth. Freud apparently arrived at such
quack conclusions in the same way that his incest-happy lega­
tees do, by taking the symptom as a puzzle to be jointly
addressed with the patient and then solving it through direct
probing, dream analysis, and the study o f tactically selected
verbal associations.*^

grandfather, was convicted and sentenced to four concurrent thirty-year terms

in prison after his daughter spotted her children engaging in sexual exploration
and inferred that he must have been molesting one or more o f them.
15. See, respectively, Freud-Fliess Letters, pp. 220, 223, and SE, 3:215.
16. It must be admitted, however, that no one has yet approached Freuds level
o f ingenuity in turning his own punning associations into knowledge about his
patients histories. See, e.g., the letter o f 1899 in which he tells Fliess about a
patient who “deflowers” women because he failed botany and who, as a teen­
ager, once masturbated in a contorted position so that he could keep the
Jungfrau in view (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 346). As Robert Wilcocks remarks in
a brilliant new book, “Surely only Freud (or perhaps Alfred Jarry?) could have
imagined a 14-year-old boy masturbating with a view o f that massive rugged
rockpile, his adolescent ardor aroused to ejaculation by the provocative moun­
tain because its name means 'virgin. See M aelzels Chess Player: Sigm und Freud
and the Rhetoric o f Deceit {Kov^mdin and Littlefield, 1994), p. 198.

211
 The early Freud must also be awarded precedence
for the cluster of ideas about memory that has landed so
many of our fellow citizens in litigation and/or prison. 1
refer not just to repression but to the minds ability to
take snapshots o f extremely early scenes and reproduce
them in detail several decades later. When Lenore Terr, for
example, uncritically accepts a mans “memory” from baby­
hood o f his sadistic mother having totally submerged him in
the bathtub as he was noticing “light gray walls all around me,
a foul smell in the air” (Terr, p. 116), she may be defying
what is known about brain development, but she is perfectly
in key with Freud. Let one example, a letter from 1897,
suffice:

The early period before the age of one and one half years
is becoming ever more significant. 1 am inclined to dis­
tinguish several periods even within it. Thus 1 was able
to trace back, with certainty, a hysteria that developed in
the context of a periodic mild depression to a seduction,
which occurred for the first time at 11 months[,] and [1
could] hear again the words that were exchanged
between two adults at that time! It is as though it comes
from a phonograph. (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 226)

Given that Freud here accepts a “phonographic” memory of

an adult conversation recorded when the patient was
presumably still struggling to say “mama,” this passage must
rank among his most credulous ever. Yet the claim being made
is scarcely more inane than any number of others from the
same epoch.

212
 Even the most adventuresome of modern memory
enthusiasts, those who believe in Satan cults and who induce
“past life regression” in their clients, had a predecessor of sorts
in Freud. Though he didn’t go in for reincarnation, Freud sub­
scribed to the Lamarckian idea that memory traces from pre­
history are passed along genetically ad infinitum, predisposing
us to traumas analogous to those once endured by our
hominid forebears and their progeny. Thus, in the same letter
(cited in “The Unknown Freud”) where he reported having
“obtained a scene” from a patient who saw herself being forced
to eat a morsel o f her circumcised labium minor, he mused: “it
is as though in the perversions, of which hysteria is the nega­
tive, we have before us a remnant of a primeval sexual cult,
which once was—perhaps still is—a religion in the Semitic
East. . . ” (Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 227).
In theory, Freud could have come upon such prehistoric
psychic material while exploring any given hysteric’s repressed
unconscious. That is presumably why he added, “1 dream,
therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that are carried
on secretly, and understand the harsh therapy o f the witches’
judges” (p. 227). As I have previously shown, Freud, amazing­
ly indifferent to the effects of suggestion, believed that the tor­
ture of accused witches elicited from them uncontaminated
fantasies deriving from their own sexual molestation in child­
hood. Only the absence o f a theological commitment, it
seems, prevented him from stumbling over the final step and
unearthing “Satanic ritual abuse.”

17. Or did it? Freuds muddled prose about his self-cannibalizing patient Emma
Eckstein makes her look like an actual victim o f such abuse. The “scene” in

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A Freudian’s predictable way of handling all such embarrass­
ments will be to say that they predated the birth of psycho­
analysis. Yes, but most of them also persisted far beyond it.
Long after 1897, Freud continued to badger his patients with
ready-made hypotheses and to dismiss their objections as mere
resistance; he still took their distress at his morbid insinuations
as a further signal of his correctness; he still regarded symp­
toms as allegories of repressed mental contents; his Flintstones
Lamarckism became more rather than less extravagant; and he
never flagged in his quest to forge precise causal links between
vividly reconstructed sexual events from infancy (either wit­
nessed or personally endured) and adult mental disturbance.^®
Without the éclat of psychoanalysis, moreover, our memory
gurus would never have been drawn to the molestation-
minded Freud whom they now prefer. Nor, lacking his impri­
matur, could they have bandied about notions of repression,
abreaction, and unconscious symbolism without feeling a
need to argue for their cogency.
A chasm does yawn, however, between the principles

question includes an apparently ritualistic drinking o f blood from the girls muti­
lated vaginal lip, which, Freud informs Fliess, “is even shorter today” (Freud-
Fliess Letters, p. 227). That assertion may or may not have been true (just how
could Freud have known?), but in either case it pertains to the realm o f fact, not
fantasy. The anatomical detail would seem to imply Freuds literal belief in his
patients devilish “scene.” If, on the other hand, he was trying to correlate a false
memory with a real disfiguration, his very sanity stands in doubt.
18. Indeed, as Frank]. Sulloway has pointed out, after the seduction fiasco
Freuds “theory o f the neuroses became, in significant part, a theory about infan­
tile . . . masturbation.” See Freud, Biologist o f the M ind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic
Legend (1979; revised edition. Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 185.

214
of the recovered memory movement and psychoanalysis in
Freud’s most familiar articulation of it. In contrast to Freud’s
own habit, the ideal Freudian therapist is supposed to be cool,
nonjudgmental, and slow to reach closure about diagnoses
and thematic connections. He is also asked to honor a number
of methodological niceties that deter simplistic translations
between any given sign and the event or wish that supposedly
brought it into being.
There is, for instance, the concept of “screen memories”
that are not to be taken at face value, and there are numerous
posited defense mechanisms that supposedly warp dreams,
symptoms, and errors into relatively obscure compromise
formations. Although these refinements brought about an
ominous problem of their own—in the full labyrinth of
hermeneutic possibilities, how can we ever know which is the
true path back to the supposedly originating scene?—they do
militate against Bass and Davis’s model of extracting repressed
truths from the unconscious like so many bills from an auto­
matic teller. Thus a classically trained psychoanalyst would
hesitate to claim, as the memory therapists do, that a dream—
supposedly a mosaic o f infantile and diurnal residues, o f wish
and defense, o f confession and concealment—could be
regarded as a direct source o f information about the dreamer’s
early history or the identity o f her suspected molester.
Then, too, there is the saving fact that psychoanalysis, in
continual retreat from its founding (but unfounded) thera­
peutic claims, has long since ceased advertising itself as
curative in any straightforward sense o f the term. That devel­
opment minimizes the risk that Freudian patients will be
devastated in the ways that once beset Freud’s personal

215
p r a c t i c e a n d that now beset the recovered memory profes­
sion. “Hysteria,” of course, has vanished along with the doc­
tors who battened on it; the psychic mysteries into which
Freudian patients now get initiated are reassuringly universal,
banal, and devoid o f clear implications for changing behavior;
and fastidious criteria o f selection tend to weed out nearly all
applicants who are suffering from anything more wrenching
than a wish to know themselves better. Though many recov­
ered memory clients, too, enter therapy with only vague and
mild complaints, the incest stories that are forced upon them
guarantee a more brutal jarring of their equanimity and iden­
tity than any Freudian patient can now undergo.^®
When all this is said, however, there remains an impor­
tant core of shared assumptions between psychoanalysis and
its hyperactive young successor. These are:
1. To become mentally healthy, we must vent our
negative feelings and relive our most painful psychic experi­
ences. The deeper we delve, and the harsher and more bitter
the truths that we drag to the surface, the better off we will be.
2. Through the aid of an objective therapist in whom we

19. To take an admittedly extreme example, Freud once treated a teen-age girl
for what he called “an unmistakeable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly
and radically under my care” (SE, 6:l46n). But her abdominal pains had the
ingratitude to recur, and two months later she was dead o f cancer—a fact that
caused Freud a rare access o f chagrin but prompted no second thoughts about
the correctness o f his diagnosis. Today, the borderline psychotics, epileptics, and
victims ofTourette’s syndrome who used to fare so badly under psychoanalysis
are safely steered into more appropriate regimens. But for a sense o f the way
Freudian treatment was still wreaking major havoc as late as the 1960s, readers
could learn much from John Balt, By Reason o f Insanity (Heinemann, 1963).
20. Later: This paragraph is now lamentably out o f date. See pp. 15-29 above.

216
invest authority, trust, and love, we can not only arrive at an
accurate diagnosis of our mental problems but also retrieve the
key elements o f our mental history in substantially accurate
form, uncontaminated by the therapist’s theoretical bias.
3. Our minds don’t simply keep functioning when con­
sciousness is absent; they feature an unconscious, a unique
agency possessing its own special memories, interests, and
rules of operation.
4. Everything that we experience is preserved in either
conscious or unconscious (repressed) memory; “even things
that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and
somewhere. . . ” (SE, 23:260).
5. The content o f our repressions is preponderantly sex­
ual in nature. Therefore, sexual experiences can be regarded as
bearing a unique susceptibility to repression and can accord­
ingly be considered the key determinants o f psychic life.
6. The difficulty we meet in trying to recall our earliest
years is attributable not, as neurologists believe, to the incom­
plete infantile development of our hippocampus and pre­
frontal cortex, but rather to extensive repression (see, e.g., SE,
7:174-176), which in some instances can be successfully lifted.
Inability to recall any other part of our past may therefore be
assigned to that same cause.
7. The repressed unconscious continually tyrannizes
over us by intruding its recorded-but-not-recalled fantasies
and traumas upon our efforts to live in the present. “A humil­
iation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a
fresh one throughout the thirty years... ” (SE, 5:578).
8. Symptoms are “residues and mnemic symbols o f par­
ticular (traumatic) experiences” (SE, 11:16), and “dreaming is

217
another kind of remembering” (SE, 17:51). Consequently, a
therapist’s methodologically informed study of symptoms and
dreams can lead (through however many detours) to faithful
knowledge of an originating trauma.
9. Challenging though it may be, this work o f
reconstruction is made easier by the existence of a universally
distributed store of unconscious equations between certain
symbols and their fixed sexual meanings.
10. As a result of all these considerations, the most pru­
dent and efficient way to treat psychological problems is not
to address the patient’s current situation, beliefs, and incapac­
ities but to identify and remove the repressions that date from
much earlier years.
All ten of these principles are, I believe, erroneous or
extremely open to doubt. Yet they are so widely believed as to
constitute what Richard Wollheim and Thomas Nagel, among
others, regard as the psychological common sense of our era.^^
For Nagel, indeed, this popularity serves as actual proof that
Freud must have been on the right track; if the Freudian rev­
elation has convinced people as savvy as ourselves, Nagel
thinks, there must be something to it.^^ He might entertain

21. Sec Wollheim, The M ind and Its Depths (Harvard University Press, 1993),
and Nagel, “Freud’s Permanent Revolution, ” The New York Review, May 12,
1994, pp. 3 4 -3 8 .
22. “1 believe that the pervasive Freudian transformation ol our modern working
conception of the self is evidence of the validity of his attempt to extend the psycho­
logical far beyond its conscious base. Common sense has in fact expanded to include
parts of Freudian theory. This in turn makes it credible that more extensive and
systematic insights of the same type can be developed by analysts who probe far
more deeply and uncover far more material for interpretation” (Nagel, p. 36).

218
second thoughts after realizing how the common sense o f the
1990s, not unlike that of the 1690s, has run amok when taken
literally by demonologists.
As Freud well appreciated when he chose as his epigraph
for The Interpretation o f Dreams Virgil’s line about stirring up
hell (SE, 4:ix), psychoanalysis is already demonology.^^ That is,
it allegorizes the psychologically unknown as a dark power that
must be coaxed forth, scrutinized, and kept in check by pro­
fessionals who, incorruptible themselves by virtue of their faith
and training, sniff out the hidden corruption of others. This
sanctioned prurience is the thread that Mark Pendergrast traces
from witch persecutions through mesmerism to hypnotherapy
to psychoanalysis itself and, full circle, to the detection of
Satanic abuse. Exactly that same compatibility between pre­
industrial and modern forms of superstition, we may recall,
proved the undoing of the Freudian Christian Paul Ingram,
who wrote in his diary after conferring with his fundamental­
ist pastor, “John thinks several spirits are in me yet, still in con­
trol of my unconscious__ [It] may take someone like John to
guide me around my defenses” (Ofshe and Watters, p. 172).
According to his confidant Sandor Ferenczi, the early
Freud used to hurl himself body and soul against the forces
that had invaded his patients’ minds. He “worked passionate­
ly, devotedly, on the curing of neurotics,” wrote Ferenczi in his
diary, “(if necessary spending hours lying on the floor next to

23. Note Freuds question to Fliess in 1897: “ Do you remember that I always
said that the medieval theory o f possession held by the ecclesiastical courts was
identical with our theory o f a foreign body and the splitting o f consciousness?”
(Freud-Fliess Letters, p. 224).

219
a person in a hysterical crisis).” Those were the work habits
not of a fifty-minute psychoanalyst but of an exorcist. It was
only after many therapeutic setbacks, Ferenczi reminded him­
self, that Freud came to call patients “a rabble,” good for noth­
ing but “to provide us with a livelihood and material to learn
from.”^"^ Eventually, his private pessimism about ever being
able to cast out our psychic demons crept over his whole afflu­
ent institution, which now, in the 1990s, stands suddenly
naked before the only skeptics it can’t ignore, the insurers who
decide what is and isn’t a reimbursable form of treatment. The
exorcist’s fervor has passed into coarser and more passionate
hands such as those of Bass and Davis.
But this is not to say that psychoanalysis is doomed to
stand by helplessly while young fanatics strut upon the stage
that Freud built. Since every Freudian concept and commit­
ment is révisable in a pinch, we may yet see the emergence of
a hybrid psychoanalysis that has borrowed new vitality from
the recovered memory movement. Portents of such an even­
tuality can already be found. The psychoanalyst Lawrence
Hedges, for example, has recently proposed that thera­
peutically retrieved molestation scenes are not exactly false;
they may be screen memories for inferrable bad experi­
ences suffered “ [i]n utero and in the earliest months
of life.”^^ In a new book from the Analytic Press, Lynda
Share similarly proposes that the interpretation of adult

24. The C linical Diary ofSdndor Ferenczi, edited by Judith Dupont, translated by
Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 93.
25. Lawrence E. Hedges, “Taking Recovered Memories Seriously,” Issues in Child
Abuse Accusations, Vol. 6 (1994), pp. 1-31. The quoted phrase is from p. 15.

220
dreams can give us detailed knowledge of real traumas from
early i n f a n cy . A nd in Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,
Charlotte Krause Prozan, who sensed which way the wind was
blowing long ago, reports that whereas analysts used to be
watchful for penis envy in women patients, today “we are
looking for sexual abuse.”^^
In a follow-up book, Prozan offers a case history that
dramatically embodies the blending o f elements from stan­
dard psychoanalysis and therapy for repressed abuse. Prozans
treatment of “ Penelope” was classically Freudian in its ground
rules, in its heavy reliance on dream interpretation, and in its
length—fourteen years. Although Penelope never did recall
any molestation, Prozan wasn’t fazed; as she reminds us, “ [t]he
phenomenon o f not remembering. .. is in itself a symptom
indicative o f a severe traumatic experience. As an appointed
termination date loomed, the frantic Penelope surrendered at
last to Prozan’s thirteen-year insistence that her dreams—of
setting fires, of a van crashing into a house, of being shot by a
man, of sex with Prozan herself—admitted of no other expla­
nation than the enduring of anal rape by a family friend when
she was nine years old.
Exiting psychoanalysis at age forty-nine, Penelope was
still smoking, drinking, and binge eating—the behaviors she
had entered treatment to bring under control. Now, as well,
she was estranged from her unbelieving mother and sister. But

26. Lynda Share, I f Someone Speaks, It Gets Lighter: Dreams and the
Reconstruction o f Infant Trauma (Analytic Press, 1994).
27. Jason Aronson, 1992, p. 207.
28. Charlotte Krause Prozan, The Technique o f Feminist Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy (Jason Aronson, 1993), p. 270.

221
she was glad, at least, to have puzzled out the identity
of her abuser, “ [t]hat SO N OF A BITCH ! It’s totally his
fault!” And she was eagerly looking forward to full-
throttle survivorship in what she called “the days o f being
powerfully angry.
The disapproval that most psychoanalysts would feel
upon reviewing this case is less significant than their substan­
tial sharing of Prozan’s axioms about the repressed uncon­
scious, its modus operandi, and its amenability to symbolic
decoding. Their confidence about such matters stems from the
same source that encourages writers like Bass and Davis to
trust their own findings—once again, “clinical experience”
and its replication by other members o f their sect. As Thomas
Nagel innocently puts it, each doubtful hypothesis “has to
find its empirical support in countless other applications to
other patients in other settings” (Nagel, p. 35). That is exactly
the home-team approach to validation that produces abun­
dant support for “facilitated communication,” Satanic mind
control, UFO abductions, previous incarnations, and telepa­
thy—this last a favorite pastime o f Freud’s.
In a refreshingly sane essay, Paul R. McHugh, director of
the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recently
depicted a long-term struggle, within the mental health disci­
plines, between what he called empiricists and romanticists—
between, that is, those who bind themselves to methodical
study of facts and those who “rely upon feelings for evidence.

29. Prozan, The Technique o f Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, pp. 303, 308.

222
reality, on inspiration and myth for g u i d a n c e . T h e essay is
especially pertinent because it relegates both psychoanalysis
and recovered memory therapy to the romanticist camp,
where they surely belong. But it also relegates them to history's
ashcan. In McHughs opinion, the empiricists are winning
hands down, because their insistence on real-world testing
allows them to deliver what they promise, proven remedies for
specific complaints.
In the long run this victory does look inevitable. For
now, however, I remain mindful of an earlier observation of
McHughs—that every ten years or so, “psychiatric practice has
condoned some bizarre misdirection, proving all too often the
discipline has been captive of the c u l t u r e . O u t in the rough-
and-tumble ps}xhotherapeutic marketplace, to which our men­
tal health associations discreetly turn their backs, Freudian
cliches are breeding promiscuously with those of religious
zealots, self-help evangelists, sociopolitical ideologues, and out­
right charlatans who trade in the ever seductive currency o f guilt
and blame. So long as “Freuds permanent revolution,” as Nagel
calls it, retains any sway, the voodoo of “the repressed” can be
counted upon to return in newly energetic and pernicious forms.

December 1, 1994

30. Paul R. McHugh, ‘ Psychotherapy Awry,” The American Scholar, Vol. 63

(Winter 1994), pp. 17-30; the quotation is from p. 17.
31. Paul R. McHugh, “Psychiatric Misadventures,” The American Scholar, Vol. 61
(Autumn 1992), pp. 497-510; the quotation is from p. 498.

223
EXCHANGE
 January 72, 1995

THERESA RE in Is the executive director of the American

Professional Society on the Abuse of Children ( a p s a c ). She
writes, on behalf of APSAC s Board of Directors:

In his two-part article, “The Revenge of the Repressed,”

Frederick Crews offered a cogent critique of many aspects of
the “recovered memory movement.” Crews quite rightly
denounces the naive use of diffuse “symptom checklists” and
very broad definitions in the diagnosis of a childhood history
of incest; reliance upon “therapeutic” modalities with no sup­
port in the empirical literature; insistence on unquestioning
belief in patients’ tentative emerging memories, no matter
how bizarre; and the poor training and marshy theoretical
basis o f some practitioners in this field. Crews argues reason­
ably against the presumed therapeutic benefits of unearthing
and “abreacting” all traumatic experiences, and trenchantly
analyzes the shortcomings of the Freudian concept of repres­
sion, which authorizes the irresponsible assertion that the
lack of memory for trauma is itself evidence o f trauma.
Because we share Crews’s belief in the necessity o f a
measured and well-informed response to adults’ allegations
of sexual abuse in childhood, we regret that Crews himself
strayed so far from the empirical evidence on which he rightly
insists we all rely, and reserved his skepticism for those who
make or believe allegations of childhood incest. We wish to
correct the misimpressions Crews’s intemperate article may
have left regarding (1) the criminal justice system response to
allegations o f sexual abuse in childhood, (2) the standard of

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therapeutic practice in this field, and (3) the concept of
repression. First, however, we would like to point out how
egregiously Crews commits the very sin he finds most damning
in others: that of credulity.
Crews praises the False Memory Syndrome Foundation
( f m s f ) —most of whose members are parents who have been
accused of incest by adult daughters—for making “steady
progress in public enlightenment” on the issue of adult recol­
lections of childhood incest. The cruel fact for all parties to
such accusations is that both the wrongly accused and the
rightly accused vociferously and convincingly deny the accu­
sations against them. Crews acknowledges, “Pedophiles will
undoubtedly try to portray any accuser as deluded by a trick
of memory.” When Crews refers to the members of FMSF as
“slandered relatives of survivors,” he claims an access to wis­
dom that Solomon himself would envy (not to mention the
thousands of American judges who, according to Crews’s car­
icature of the judicial system’s response to child sexual abuse
allegations, are doing so lamentable a job of adjudicating
these cases).
Crews displays a similar credulity in bestowing lavish
praise upon a forthcoming book by a Mark Pendergrast,
both of whose grown daughters have accused him of incest.
Crews lauds Pendergrast’s 603-page compilation o f inter­
views and lore (to be issued by the obscure “Upper Access”
publishers) as “the most ambitious and comprehensive, as
well as the most emotionally committed, of all the studies
before us.” While Pendergrast may be innocent of the charges
against him. Crews applies very different criteria in assessing
his work than in assessing that of “survivor” therapists. Whereas

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Crews finds “confirmatory bias” in the beliefs o f alleged sur­
vivors and their therapists, in Pendergrasts book he finds a
thoroughly laudable emotional commitment.
Crewss credulity for one set of claims is reflected in
significant bias throughout the article. Among the empirical
knowledge Crews flouts is that regarding the operation of the
criminal justice system in cases of child sexual abuse and
adult recollections of incest. Certainly, we would all have a
great deal to worry about were in fact accusations launched
by “a vengeful or mentally unhinged adult. .. immediately
believed by police and social workers,” or “draconian sen­
tences . . . being served and plea bargains. .. being coerced in
the face of transparently clear signs that the charges are
bogus.” However, empirical data regarding the operation of
the child protective services and criminal justice systems do
not support these crude caricatures.
In fact, a large percentage of reports o f child sexual
abuse—up to 60 percent in some states—are not substantiat­
ed by child protective services workers. Only 42 percent of
sexual abuse allegations that have been substantiated by child
protection authorities or reported to the police are actually
forwarded for prosecution, according to a study by the
American Bar Association. Moreover, because sexual abuse is
so frequently a crime without other witnesses or physical
corroboration, and prosecutors are concerned about chil­
dren’s credibility, people arrested for sexual offenses against
children are somewhat less likely to be prosecuted than are
other violent offenders. One detailed study of allegations of
sexual abuse in day care found that 82 percent of such alle­
gations were dismissed by investigators. When prosecutions

229
do occur, the majority—about 75 percent according to one
study—result in convictions. However, most of these convic­
tions (over 90 percent) result from guilty pleas and plea
bargains. Sexual abusers are convicted somewhat more fre­
quently than other violent offenders, probably because prose­
cutors are so selective in the cases they take to trial. Even
when convicted, however, child sexual abusers receive light
sentences. Three studies suggest that 32 percent to 46 per­
cent o f convicted child sexual abusers serve no jail time at all.
Only 19 percent receive sentences longer than one year, which
is about the same as those convicted o f other violent crimes.
Crews’s depiction o f the standard of practice among
therapists working with women who recall a childhood his­
tory of incest is similarly skewed. Crews cites with indigna­
tion the results of an unnamed “survey” indicating that “well
over 50,000” of America’s 255,000 licensed psychotherapists
are now “willing to help their clients realize that they must
have endured early molestation.” Victims of childhood phys­
ical and sexual abuse are, not surprisingly, heavily overrepre­
sented in clinical therapeutic populations. Since several
empirical studies indicate that 40 percent to 85 percent of
psychotherapy patients suffered abuse in childhood, we are
somewhat distressed to learn that only 20 percent of psy­
chotherapists may be willing to help their patients explore
this possibility.
More important. Crews leaves the impression that modal
practice in this field is carried on by wild-eyed zealots. O f
course bad practice occurs in the field o f child maltreatment,
as in any other. We fully agree with Crews that bad practice
in this field can have tragic results, and should energetically

230
be opposed. But no empirical evidence suggests that the
practice displayed on Geraldo is typical. Child interview
guidelines distributed by such major organizations as the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
(1985) and the American Professional Society on the Abuse
of Children (1990) specifically recommend against the coer­
cive and suggestive questioning practices that Crews suggests
are the rule. The writers and lecturers on “adult survivor”
therapy who are most admired and sought after by profes­
sionals in this field caution against the use of hypnosis and
sodium pentothal, and against the tenet that remembering
and “working through” all traumatic material is necessary or
positive. Given this and other evidence that modal profes­
sional practice is thoughtful and responsible, Crewss vitriol
against professionals is hard to understand, and his depiction
of zealous incompetence as the rule is indefensible.
Finally, Crews very effectively demolishes the naive
concept of repression in which memories are hermetically
sealed and stored intact for future revelation. However, he
fails to shed any light on the processes that are at work in the
very well-documented phenomenon of imperfect recall of
traumatic events. His categorical statement, “Reputable sci­
entific research . .. offers no support to the concept o f repres­
sion even in its mildest form,” is misleading. A vast scientific
literature on memory offers no consistent definition of
repression, but a great deal of information about variously
defined memory lapses. Full or partial amnesia for traumatic
events has been well-documented in combat veterans, people
who have survived natural disasters and other traumas, and
people who have experienced physical and sexual abuse in

231
childhood. Saying that such amnesia does not conform to
the naive depiction popularized on talk shows and in some
books or to the very narrow, specific definition of repression
used by Crews does nothing to explain how such amnesia
does occur, how once-forgotten or faded memories reemerge,
or how to assess the veracity of such memories.
The most conservative data available on the prevalence
of father-daughter incest suggest that 1.3 percent of American
women will experience it. These data are from upper-middle-
class white college students in the Northeast responding to a
paper-and-pencil questionnaire. Everything we know about
differential prevalence rates and the efficacy of different
methods of information-gathering suggests that this preva­
lence estimate is low. However, even at this low estimate, 1.6
million American girls and women are now or have been vic­
tims of father-daughter (or stepfather-daughter) incest. A
number of factors have converged in the last several years to
encourage these women to speak out about their victimiza­
tion, including a greater attention to child sexual abuse gen­
erally and a feminist reinterpretation of father-daughter
incest as, like rape, a victimization rather than a shameful
secret.
These allegations challenge us intellectually and emotion­
ally. Like many allegations of child sexual abuse, allegations
by adult women of childhood incest often pit one persons
word against another’s. In response to such extraordinarily
difficult epistemological situations, a natural impulse is to
make a summary judgment in favor of the least painful alter­
native. For the vast majority of Americans, that alternative is
to believe that adults do not victimize children in the ways

232
now being alleged. It takes the greatest discipline for individ­
uals and for the society to fairly weigh the veracity of these
reports. Crews very effectively chronicles the failure o f some
people to maintain this discipline. We regret that he was not
able to serve the readers of NYRB better by maintaining such
discipline himself ^

Richard P. Gartner, Ph.D., and Dodi Goldman, Ph.D., both

from the William Alanson White Institute in New York City,
and twenty-seven cosigners, nineteen o f them also members of
that institute, wrote an 800-word letter to The New York
Review that they did not wish to see republished here. Hence
this summary.
Although they joined Frederick Crews in criticizing
overly zealous recovered memory therapists who neglect the
corrupting influence of suggestion and fantasy, Gartner, Gold­
man, et al. wrote that the existence of forgotten sexual trauma
is well established. Psychiatrists working with confirmed cases
of molested children, they reported, have found that a signif­
icant minority of them are indeed known to have lost all
memory of their ordeals. In this connection, the correspon­
dents cited a 1992 study by Linda Meyer Williams purporting
to show that, in one instance, 38 percent of girls once hospi­
talized for sexual abuse subsequently lost their memory of that
abuse.
Gartner, Goldman, et al. criticized not only Crewss ap­
parent lack of compassion for people whose “loved caretakers”
have betrayed them, but also his equation of psychoanalysis
with the most objectionable features of recovered memory

233
treatment. Modern analysts, they pointed out, do not “advo­
cate traditional hypnosis or suggestion” or rely single-minded-
ly on abreaction (cathartic re-experiencing) when dealing with
survivors of abuse. Thus, the writers alleged, Crews’s appre­
hension of psychoanalytic theory and practice is drastically
out of date.
According to this letter, one important sign of Crews’s
ignorance of developments in contemporary psychoanalysis is
his failure to appreciate that victims of molestation typically
resort to dissociation, not repression, as their chief means of
managing trauma. The “emotional flooding and paralysis”
brought on by molestation typically prevents the sufferer from
taking cognizance of the act even while it is occurring. The
result can be various dissociative reactions not only to the
abuser—who may in fact be one of the child’s parents—but
also to the other parent, who is unconsciously blamed for hav­
ing allowed the abuse to proceed. Not just suppressed mem­
ories, then, but also clashing feelings of love and rage produce
in survivors “multiple experiences of self and others.”
Gartner, Goldman, et al. suggested that Crews might
improve his understanding of such matters by consulting “a
growing and rich psychoanalytic literature” about the treat­
ment of adult survivors, and in particular the following books:

Jody Messier Davies and Mary Gail Frawley,

Treating the Adult Survivor o f Childhood Sexual Abuse: A
Psychoanalytic Perspective (Basic Books, 1994).
Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg, The Intimate Edge:
Extending the Reach o f Psychoanalytic Interaction (Norton,
1992).

234
 Howard B. Levine, editor, Adult Analysis and
Childhood Sexual Abuse (Analytic Press, 1990).
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects o f Child­
hood Abuse and Deprivation (Yale University Press, 1989).

CHARLCyr rE K R A U S E P R O Z A N \s xhc 2i\Xl\\OX oiFem inist

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and The Technique o f Feminist
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is a licensed psychotherapist
and therapist in San Francisco and Associate Director of the
San Francisco Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis. She writes:

The current significant discourse on the issue of repressed

memory is not well served by the the snide, contemptuous
tone of Dr. Crews’s hit piece. Those of us who actually prac­
tice the professions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are
also deeply concerned about the issues o f truth and justice in
this field, but polarizing the topic by vindictive, bitter, and
emotional attacks against those who disagree with you serves
to shed no light on these vital questions, but only to polarize
and alienate and thereby divert our search for wisdom. I am
currently editing a book on the subject which will be pub­
lished in 1995, Construction and Reconstruction o f Memoryy in
which my goal is to integrate the knowledge o f a number of
important writers and thinkers on this topic and hopefully
further our understanding. I don’t believe Dr. Crews’s writing
is a contribution to this much-needed integration.
Specifically in reference to his personalized attack on me,
please allow your readers to see the full statement from which

235
Dr. Crews selected one phrase to quote: ‘ we are looking for
sexual abuse.” This gives a very distorted view of my thinking,
which actually supports some of Dr. Crews s concerns.

In 1973 and before, analysts were looking for penis

envy. In 1990, we are looking for sexual abuse. It is
true that, now as then, we are more likely to find what
we are looking for—the subjective component of our
scientific investigation. It is common for therapists
today to see a great number of women patients reporting
sexual abuse, because that is what they are reading
about and hearing about on radio and television.
Women in the 1950 s read and heard about happy
housewives; they came to therapists distressed because
they were unhappy and had concluded there must be
something wrong with them. The analysts’ answer was
that they envied their husbands. Patient and analyst are
living in the same culture, and are being formed by
similar trends. They may collude in what they believe
is an accurate diagnosis of the patient’s problems. But
because they are both culture-bound, the truth may
elude them both. (1992, p. 207)

I hope this foil quote will assure you and your readers that I am
not the simpleton Dr. Crews would like you to believe I am.
But I am most disturbed by his vicious attacks on our
patients, both my patient “Penelope” and Eileen Franklin
Lipsker. His alleged concern for the welfare o f all women and
his specific concern for women patients is belied by his
assaults on Lipsker and “Penelope.” As authors and speakers

236
we take upon ourselves the risk that by sticking our necks
out, someone might find some cruel satisfaction in cutting
them off. But why attack our patients? This, in my mind, is
unconscionable. To dismiss Mrs. Lipsker s testimony by say­
ing “as many observers perceived, she had a distinct taste for
fame” is beneath contempt. And who are these “many
observers”? Dr. Crews gives us no names or citations. And
we then learn that Elizabeth Loftus, whom he so admires, as
do I, appeared on a Faith Daniels talk show. Are we to con­
clude that Elizabeth Loftus is motivated solely by a “distinct
taste for fame” ? And what about writers who publish essays
in The New York Review o f Books, especially such highly con­
troversial articles? Does that entitle me to question Dr.
Crews s motives and dismiss his intelligence because he has a
“distinct taste for fame”?
As to my patient Penelope, he is most unfair and
mean-spirited in his characterization o f her as “frantic” and
as a simple pawn who “surrendered” to pressure from me.
“Penelope” is a highly intelligent and thoughtful woman and
I really resent Crews’s insult to her. His disrespectful dis­
missal of me I can brush off as the product o f a very bitter,
unhappy, and angry man, but please leave my patients out of
it. O f course she is incensed by it. But how can one have a
dialogue with someone who totally dismisses the concept o f
repression? It is futile. He even manages to convince himself
that Ross Cheit, the Brown University professor, simply
“refocused” his attention and just happened to be reading a
book on pedophilia. I mean after all, don’t we all just happen
to pick up books on pedophilia to read in our spare time?
Might there have been just a touch of “suggestion” in the

237
telephone conversation in which the no doubt surprised Dr.
Cheit is questioned by Dr. Crews as to the source of his
memory? 1 do wish to point out, however, that it is a
lose-lose situation with these cynics. If I had made the diag­
nosis in the first weeks of therapy, I of course would be dis­
missed as a crank. But the fact that it took us fourteen years
of work to be certain of the diagnosis means that my motive
for this long treatment was “ideological or financial gain.”
Give me a break.
Crews was most dishonest in referring to Penelopes
symptoms as overeating, drinking, and smoking. It stretches
the imagination beyond limits to believe he simply forgot to
mention that Penelope’s most serious symptom, and the one
that led to my suspicion that she may have been sexually
abused, was severe promiscuity. This symptom was completely
relieved by our analysis. He states she left analysis with the
same symptoms with which she entered. Living in the San
Francisco Bay area. Crews must know that being able to
completely stop a lifelong pattern o f picking up men in bars
could easily have saved her life in this AIDS infested city.
There is only one reference in this entire piece to the
concept of dissociation, which is perhaps even more impor­
tant than repression in these cases, and that is in the refer­
ence to a book Repression and Dissociation edited by Jerome
L. Singer. I am curious, since Dr. Crews apparently read the
book, why he never once mentions dissociation. That, in my
view, is one of the key questions for our field. We are at fault
for not being clear enough about the differentiation between
these two mechanisms and that is one contribution I hope
my forthcoming book will make. Crews has omitted the

238
most important issue for us to address now, because it is in
fact dissociation and not repression which is at the heart of
the memory dilemma. #

“ P E N E L O P E ” is the pseudonym given Charlotte Prozans patient,

whose case is discussed above by both Frederick Crews and
Prozan. She writes:

I am “Penelope,” the patient whose case history Frederick

Crews refers to in his mean-spirited comments regarding the
work of my therapist, Charlotte Prozan, and her book The
Technique o f Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
Mr. Crews paints a picture for your readers of a Penelope
who did not exist. First, and most seriously distorted, is his
image of me as a helpless creature subject to the whims of a
therapist with a wild agenda o f her own. I put a tremendous
amount o f myself into the therapy process over years and
years, knowing even at the most difficult times that my
responsibility to myself was to confront the realities that my
dreams, my behavior and, finally, my memories were so clearly
indicating. (Crews states erroneously that I don’t recall any
molestation. My memories leave me no doubt whatsoever of
the fact that I was!) What is wrong with this man Crews that
he must use belittling, sarcasm, and a snide, one-sentence
summary o f fifteen years of my hard work on my dreams in
an attempt to convince your readers that my therapist (who
of course was spending an equally arduous fifteen years) was
only interested in being correctly aligned with the so-called
prevailing winds. There could not be a better therapist than

239
Ms. Prozan. If your readers wish to see for themselves true
scholarship and conscientious professionalism on the subject
of repressed memories of sexual abuse, they will surely find
them in Ms. Prozan’s books.
Not only was I not helpless and misguided, I was not
“frantic,” as I terminated this successful fifteen-year therapy
which truly saved my life. I was instead healing. Weight loss,
exercise regimens I still adhere to, a major promotion and
success as a supervisor at work, and a dramatic decrease in
depression are all the proof I need to confirm the effective­
ness of my final years in therapy, learning how to be angry at
the right person (yes, the man who molested me is a son o f a
bitch, and yes, it is his fault).
The real tragedy, completely missed by Crews, is that the
serious damage inflicted by the molestation and subsequent
repression could not have been attended to earlier. There were
few tools, few therapists, and no recognition of the long-lasting
effects of this crime when I was growing up. I am glad there
now are, but I am nevertheless a woman bereft of children,
and one who still has to work at learning to trust men. ^

Janna Malamud Smith, C.S.W , declined permission to repub­

lish her 900-word letter. She, too, agreed with Crews that the
recovered memory movement possesses an “extreme, fanciful,
and destructive dimension.” She maintained, however, that
Crews’s all-out attack had not sufficiently credited the preva­
lence of real molestation and its terrible effects. The incidence
of sexual abuse. Smith wrote, is much higher than that of false
memory formation.

240
 Nevertheless, Smith argued, people are known to forget
traumatic experiences under many circumstances. She cited
the documented occurrence of traumatic amnesia—for example,
that of the jogger who was brutally raped in Central Park
several years ago but who failed to remember the experience.
Alcoholic blackouts. Smith maintained, are also relevant in
this regard. Smith has come across many such instances in her
own experience as a social worker who has practiced psycho­
therapy. If the concept of “repression” is an unsatisfactory one,
we must seek new explanations for the complex workings of
memory.
Like Gartner, Goldman, et al.. Smith found Crews appar­
ently “oblivious to the terrible suffering o f trauma patients.”
She wondered what Crews would recommend that she do
with a hypothetical patient who exhibited a considerable
number o f the symptoms that would seem to suggest a history
of molestation. Shouldn’t the therapist at least look into the
possibility that such a patient had been sexually abused?
In conclusion, Smith suggested that the battle over
memory is connected to a number of important social issues,
including “health care and money,” animus against long-term
psychotherapy, and “the fear men have o f women becoming
slightly more powerful.” She regretted Crews’s failure to explore
those matters.

FREDERICK CREWS replies:

1. Each o f these letters addresses part of my reasoning in
“The Revenge o f the Repressed” but necessarily loses sight of
the whole. A précis, then, is in order.

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 Our country, along with several others, has recently
been caught up in a plague of false charges based on “memo­
ries” that fit the expectations of therapists who believe that any
number of grave or trivial adult symptoms are strongly indica­
tive of long-repressed sexual abuse. That belief lacks credible
empirical support. There are sound reasons to distrust the
techniques by which therapists and patients have been form­
ing and bolstering their convictions about previously un­
remembered events. Some of those techniques originated in
early beliefs of Freuds that still flourish within psycho­
analysis— beliefs, for example, in repression, the unconscious,
the capacity of dreams and symptoms to disclose long-past
traumatic events, and the need to lay primary therapeutic
emphasis on a patients reconstructed early years. My essay
ends by predicting that until the unfoundedness of the
Freudian system becomes generally known, we can expect to
keep encountering new forms of therapeutic mischief in the
name of recovering “the repressed.”
Most of the letters above depict me as a callous person
who lacks all compassion for victims of abuse. That is at best
a misperception, at worst a smear. My essay does not focus on
actual victims, except to acknowledge that some of them can
indeed forget their abuse for long periods. I feel as much sym­
pathy for them as my detractors do. But precisely because
molestation is such a grave matter, we must condemn and rec­
tify the casualness with which false accusations are now being
generated within an ideologically inflamed therapeutic fad.
2. Theresa Reid is executive director of the American
Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. Her letter is an
adroit brief for her guild’s rank and file, making a token

242
acknowledgment of improprieties by “some practitioners”
(nonmembers, no doubt) but generally projecting a Pan-
glossian contentment with the status quo. Our criminal
justice system, she maintains, is doing a fine job o f discrimi­
nating between innocent and guilty parties; the educational
efforts of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation needn t be
credited, since some of its members may conceivably be
pedophiles; and existing practices in the interrogation o f small
children leave little to be desired. The only significant flaw in
the system, according to Reid, is that too few therapists have
dedicated themselves to smoking out perpetrators.
Where to begin? Since APSAC is committed to the wel­
fare of children, let me turn first to the matter o f child inter­
rogations. Reid apparently thinks that if humane guidelines
have been issued by her organization, and if most practition­
ers follow those guidelines, there is nothing to worry about.
But it is still a common enough occurrence for both “child
protection” workers and police to overreact as soon as an
excitable adult has voiced a suspicion that a day-care worker
or relative may have been molesting children. Attention is
concentrated upon those children who reject the adults
hypothesis. Their punishment is to be subjected to frightening
and humiliating physical poking and to repeated, relentless,
prurient questioning. Both of those practices torment and cor­
rupt initially truthful children, breaking down their sense of
trust, arousing morbid fears about bodily invasion, and coaching
them to confabulate.
Abusive practices of interrogation must be stopped alto­
gether, not only because children are being psychologically
damaged but because each case o f coerced testimony bears the

243
potentiality of condemning innocent adults to prison. One
such case, that of the New Jersey day-care teacher Margaret
Kelly Michaels, is in the news even as I write. Michaels had
been convicted on 115 counts of sexual abuse after a three-
year-old was heard to make a suggestive remark about her
behavior, and the witch hunt got under way. She served five
years of her forty-seven-year sentence before being released
when an appellate panel o f judges ruled that “her trial was full
of egregious prosecutorial abuses, including questioning o f the
children that planted suggestions, tainting their testimony”
{The New York Times, December 3, 1994).
That is progress, of course; and New Jerseys Supreme
Court, unlike most others, has recently taken cognizance of
the need for noncoercive questioning and for videotaped
records of initial interviews with children in criminal cases.
But Theresa Reid’s near-perfect system clearly failed Margaret
Kelly Michaels. So, too, it failed the Massachusetts school-bus
driver Robert C. Halsey, who is serving two consecutive life
terms for far-fetched misdeeds unwitnessed by any adults; and
Frank Fuster, whom Janet Reno helped to put away for 165
years in another bizarre and fantasy-ridden case in Florida; and
Robert Fulton Kelly, Jr., who is serving twelve consecutive
life terms in the North Carolina case whose fraudulence was
exposed in the PBS documentary Innocence Lost, Kelly will
be eligible for parole in 240 years. ^

1. Later: On May 2, 1995, a three-judge panel o f the North Carolina Court of

Appeals ordered a new trial for Kelly and for Dawn Wilson, formerly a cook in
Kelly’s day-care center, who had received a life sentence for alleged acts o f child
sexual abuse. Kelly remains behind bars; Wilson is under electronic house arrest
at her mother’s home, where she is caring for her two-year-old son.

244
 It can be seen, I trust, that when Theresa Reid refers to
the “light sentences” received by child abusers, she is mostly
referring to the fate of actual sex criminals who are caught abus­
ing a single child, and who are therefore eager to plea bargain.
It is no coincidence that life terms tend to be reserved for the
innocent, since, in a climate of rumor and panic, one false
accusation against an individual easily breeds many others.
As for standards of therapeutic prudence, Reid expresses
satisfaction that the “most admired” authorities caution
against reliance on drugs and hypnosis to extract memories.
The fact that other admired authorities say the opposite and
that those tools continue to be widely employed does not
appear to interest her.^ Moreover, she misses the more crucial
point that drugs and hypnosis are not needed for generating
false memories; one needs only a vulnerable client, a therapist

2. In 1993, Debra A. Poole and D. Stephen Lindsay surveyed randomly chosen

Ph.D.-level therapists (that is, the most scientifically sophisticated cohort) who
treat a substantial number o f female patients. O f 151 respondents, 75 percent
admitted to using one or more aids to recovered memory, including hypnosis,
“body memories,” dream interpretation, guided imagery, and age regression.
Again, 25 percent said not only that they place emphasis on recovering memo­
ries o f abuse but that they have sometimes overridden their clients’ initial
denials and, indeed, that they have occasionally been able to form their conclu­
sions after a single session. (Poole and Lindsay’s paper is in press.) Another
researcher, who distributed a questionnaire to over a thousand psychotherapists
at conventions in 1992, found that 47 percent o f the respondents believed that
“psychotherapists can have greater faith in details o f a traumatic event when
obtained hypnotically than otherwise.” In fact, 28 percent o f them averred that
hypnosis can produce accurate memories o f past lives. This is the “modal profes­
sional practice” that Theresa Reid so admires. See Michael D. Yapko, Suggestions
o f Abuse: True and False Memories o f Childhood Sexual Trauma (Simon and
Schuster, 1994), pp. 57-58.

245
who is strongly predisposed to regard symptoms as “consistent
with abuse,” and a copy o f The Courage to Heal—which is,
pace Reid, overwhelmingly the most widely consulted and rec­
ommended book in the field.
Reid sneers at Mark Pendergrast, an investigative journal­
ist whose well-researched book she hasn’t even seen, for his
inability to find a mainstream publisher. When she does peruse
Victims o f Memory,, she will find that it discusses the run­
around Pendergrast was given by major houses, which wanted
no part o f an “accused perpetrator” —even though an earlier
work of his was chosen by The New York Times as one of the
“Notable Books” o f 1993. Reid tries to incite Pendergrast’s
prospective readers to sustain that ostracism, just as she warns
them away from the unsavory FM SF. But it is her own tactics
that are truly unsavory. To slander cogent and important pre­
sentations of evidence by implying that the presenters may be
sex criminals is the McCarthyism of the Nineties."^

3. As Paul Ingrams case among others illustrates, even less is required for con­
fabulation to occur. See Maryanne Garry and Elizabeth Loftus, “ Pseudomemories
without Hypnosis,” InternationalJournal o f C linical and Experiinental Hypnosis,
Vol. 42 (1994), pp. 363-378.
4. To gather from Reids letter, the gullible Crews believes that all members o f
I MSI' are “slandered relatives o f survivors.” What I actually wrote is that most o f
them are. Does Reid wish to dispute that claim and maintain that a majority are
active pedophiles? It must be puzzling to her that such non-shady figures as
Martin Gardner, Rochel Gelman, Lila Gleitman, Ernest Hilgard, David
Holmes, Philip Holzman, Paul McHugh, Ulric Neisser, Martin Orne, Thomas
Sebeok, and Donald Spence are all represented on the I MSI' board. I have
recently joined that board myself
For the record, Reid is in error when she writes that Mark Pendergrast’s
daughters have accused him o f incest. One o f them acquired in therapy a belief
in some sexual misdeed that she has never specified— a belief that is rendered

246
 Reid counts me among those naive people who refuse to
believe that widespread child abuse occurs. My essay, howev­
er, makes repeated mention of that abuse, while continually
seeking to emphasize the need to differentiate between real
and ersatz cases. That Reid herself lacks any real concern to do
so is manifested in her statement that as many as 85 percent
of all psychotherapy patients were abused as children. Games
with statistics are rife in this field, but it is safe to infer that a
figure as wild as that one came from investigators who not
only define abuse very broadly but also add questionable
“repressed” cases into their totals. It is Reid who is credulous
here; she is counting claims of abuse that are confided to
importuning therapists as if they had been authenticated.^
On the issue of whether repression exists, Reid displays
her taste for “measured” and “responsible” stands by implying
that only a fanatic would want to reach any conclusions from
the “vast scientific literature” out there. When generally accepted

suspect by plentiful evidence o f her affection and trust up till then. For Theresa
Reid, however, an accusation once made, even though it may have been gen­
erated by an illegitimate exercise o f influence, becomes an indelible stain, and
in Pendergrast s case she seems eager to make sure that the mud stays on.
5. Other figures cited by Reid are equally irrelevant and obfuscatory. 'Fhere is no
comfort to be found in her statement that up to 60 percent o f reported molesta­
tions “are not substantiated by child protective services workers” ; the question is
whether a significant number o f erroneous reports are “substantiated.” The same
objection applies to Reid s figures on dismissal o f day-care charges. And why
should we rejoice that 75 percent o f prosecutions result in convictions, given
that some significant proportion o f those convicted may be innocent? What
Reid s figures, taken together, actually imply is that baseless charges o f molesta­
tion are now as common as rain. Moreover, she conveniently overlooks the per­
manently scarring effects o f unproven allegations, especially when they are taken
to trial.

247
criteria of scientific judgment are applied to that literature,
however, the full-blown psychoanalytic concept of repression
can be seen to lack appreciable independent support. And that
fact is crucial for determining whether “expert witnesses”
should be allowed to indoctrinate juries in the folklore of
repression, to say nothing of the zanier “robust repression”
that figures in most recovered memory cases.^
Reid beclouds the issue by invoking “variously defined
memory lapses” that no one would dispute, including organi­
cally determined traumatic amnesia and imperfect recall of

6. New Hampshire Superior Court Justice William J. Groff recently issued a

decision that could serve as a model for every jurisdiction:
Before testimony o f the victims memory o f the alleged assault may be
admitted, a hearing shall be held at which the burden shall be upon the
State to establish that the phenomenon o f memory repression and the
process o f recovery through therapy have gained general acceptance in
the field o f psychology. The State must establish the validity o f the phe­
nomenon and process by demonstrating that the reasoning or methodol­
ogy underlying the testimony is scientifically valid; and that it is capable
o f empirical testing and can properly be applied to the facts in issue.
{State V. Hungerford and Morahan, State o f New Hampshire Nos. 94-S-
45 through 47 and 93-S-1734 through 1936, September 14, 1994)
Later: Justice G roff then conducted just such a thorough hearing in the case at
hand, taking testimony from prominent expert witnesses on both sides of the
recovered memory debate. His subsequent ruling o f May 23, 1995, which is
widely regarded as a legal milestone, declared trial testimony about recovered
memory to be inadmissible. The heart of Justice G roffs thoughtful statement is
this sentence: “The Court finds that the testimony o f the victims as to their
memory o f the assaults shall not be admitted at trial because the phenomenon
o f memory repression, and the process o f therapy used in these cases to recover
the memories, have not gained general acceptance in the field o f psychology;
and are not scientifically reliable.”

248
remembered events. The key question that she tries to obscure
is whether therapeutically generated memories of otherwise
unknown and biographically anomalous early events tend to get
corroborated by hard evidence. The answer is: Never! That is
why the seeming rationality o f Reids ‘ moderate” position—
some memories are true and some are false—is deceptive. In
view of the facts, it amounts to middle-of-the-road extremism.
Reids letter, approved by a forty-seven-niember board
o f directors, is a disservice not only to truth and fair play but
also to children, who suffer when family members are need­
lessly pitted against one another, and who can still be torn
away from their parents, during rumor panics, by overzealous
“child protection” functionaries and police.^ I hope that those
members o f APSAC who actually care about the welfare o f the
helpless will hold their leadership accountable for Reid s whistle-
while-you-work response to a national tragedy.

7. Consider the case o f Andrew Myers, his young sister, and his baby brother,
who were abruptly seized from Greg and Jane Myers in 1984 and placed in fos­
ter homes while the “Scott County sex case” played out in Minnesota. After
three months o f grilling, the eleven-year-old Myers, who had been issued a new
name, began fabricating the demanded sex charges against his parents, who were
indicted along with twenty-two other defendants. With the “help” o f a county-
appointed therapist, Myers came to half-believe that he had been molested by
his innocent parents. Although the entire case resulted in only one conviction
and Myers was allowed to return home after a year and a half, his relationship
with his parents was poisoned thereafter by the lies that he had been forced to
tell about them and others.
Myers still recalls what his mother screamed as the police and social workers
were abducting him and his siblings: “This is America! This is America! You
can’t take my kids. This is America!’’ But it was the America o f Cotton Mather,
reincarnated as an incest bureaucrat. See M inneapolis Star Tribune, October 16,
1994, pp. 14A, 15A.

249
 3. Richard B. Gartner, Dodi Goldman, and their twenty-
seven cosigners write in the hope of putting maximum
distance between the excesses of the recovered memory move­
ment and their own psychoanalytically oriented practice. But
they offer few clues to how that practice deals with issues of
memory. Do they, for example, take pains to distinguish
between real and false reports of abuse, and if so, on what
basis? Have they renounced the traditional Freudian belief
that childhood fantasies of incest are as pathogenic as actual
rape? Do they concentrate on their patients’ supposed infancy
and early childhood, or do they address contemporary prob­
lems as such?^
And how long, and at what expense, do Gartner, Gold­
man, et al. typically treat an identified incest survivor? With­
out this last information, we have no way of knowing whether
the therapy offered by Gartner, Goldman, et al. is a cost-effective
and humane response to victims’ unique needs or a hewing to
the Freudian norm — namely, the subjecting of all patients,
regardless of their complaints, to the same roundabout regi­
men on the couch.
Gartner, Goldman, et al. are surely disingenuous in chid­
ing me for believing that “contemporary analysts... advocate
traditional hypnosis or suggestion when treating abused indi­
viduals.” My essay makes no such ridiculous claim. It does, how­
ever, emphasize suggestion in a quite different and more

8. An answer of sorts is suggested by one o f the books in Gartners bibliography,

Darlene Ehrenbergs The Intimate Edge\ “When massive dissociation and denial
occur, patients often come for treatment with no memories o f having been
abused, so that it is only late in treatment that this comes to light” (p. 161).
This looks like recovered memory therapy in its most reckless mode.

250
important sense: the subtly induced compliance of a subordi­
nate party with a dominant party’s wishes and beliefs. That is
the epistemic flaw not only in recovered memory treatment
but also within all “clinical evidence” gathered by psycho­
analysts. Gartner, Goldman, et al. show no sign of even begin­
ning to come to grips with it, and neither do the papers I have
read that bear the imprimatur of the William Alanson White
Institute.
I fail to see why Gartner, Goldman, et al. think they are
refuting me by pointing to studies showing the noncontrover-
sial fact that some people forget early incidents of molestation.
Perhaps, however, the authors mean to insert a subliminal
plug for repression, a concept that they otherwise manifestly
shun. Since they raise the point, I will mention that the main
account they cite, that of Linda Meyer Williams, fails to take
adequate account of the difference between second-hand
knowledge about abuse and purported memory o f abuse, or
between the significance of non-recall dating back to age
twelve years and o f that dating back to age ten months. And
since nearly all o f Williams’s women who failed to remember
one target incident did recall others, even the most sanguine
construction o f her results leaves the idea of chronic repression
unsupported.^

9. On this point, see pp. 305-307 of Ofshe and Watters’s M aking Monsters. The
authors cite a more recent report by Williams than the one mentioned by
Gartner, Goldman, et al.: “ Recall o f Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study o f
Women’s Memories o f Child Sexual Abuse.” This was a paper delivered to the
1993 annual meeting o f the American Society o f Criminology in Phoenix.
Later: It has been published in the Journal o f Consulting and C linical Psychology,
Vol. 62 (1994), pp. 1167-1176.

251
 The same point applies to another concept, dissociation,
that Gartner, Goldman, et ah, in concert with many other
memory therapists, are suddenly finding more congenial than
repression. That mechanism rests on no firmer scientific basis,
but it comes with a record of medical overreaching that is con­
siderably more lurid. In making mention of “the individuals
multiple experiences of self and others,” the signers would
appear to be endorsing the latest folly countenanced by the
American Psychiatric Association, “dissociative identity disor­
der.” As I mentioned in my essay, that is just a cosmetic name
for multiple personality disorder ( m p d ) . However designated,
MPD is a preponderantly or entirely iatrogenic (and now, in
both senses of the term, telegenic) phenomenon whose main
promoters constitute the Satan-fearing lunatic fringe of
present-day psychiatry. If Gartner, Goldman, et al. are looking
to shore up their scientific respectability, they have turned in
exactly the wrong direction.
A propos, one of Gartner’s recommended texts, Davies
and Frawley’s Treating the Adult Survivor o f Child Sexual Abuse,
places MPD at the far end of a dissociative continuum and, cit­
ing “the best psychiatric literature on the subject,” passes along
the ludicrous judgment that “between 88% and 97% of all
multiple personalities have experienced significant sexual and/
or physical abuse in childhood (Putnam, 1989; Ross, 1989)”
(p. 76). Aficionados of MPD will recognize these “best” author­
ities as Frank Putnam, who uses hypnosis and age regression
to locate “alters” in patients who weren’t previously suspected
of being MPD candidates, and Colin Ross, who is on record as
believing that since the 1940s the CIA has been using drugs,
electroshock, sensory deprivation, and “enforced memorization”

252
to create Manchurian candidates whom he must deprogram.
These are evidently the giants of “modern medicine” to whom
Gartner, Goldman, et al. now wish to entrust the desperate
fortunes of psychoanalysis.
4. To judge from her letter, Charlotte Krause Prozan,
too, has recently become a fan o f dissociation, an idea that is
only glancingly mentioned in her 562-page book of 1993, The
Technique o f Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. But that
book does embody Prozans enduring diagnostic and thera­
peutic principles, which now deserve a closer look. My essay
argued that psychoanalysis stands closer to recovered memory
theory and practice than its adherents will admit, but Prozan
has actually managed to fuse the worst of both traditions,
achieving, in the showcase example o f “Penelope,” an out­
come whose significance neither Prozan nor Penelope herself
now appears able to grasp.
Prozans starting point is a desire to retain as much of
psychoanalysis as can be reconciled with “feminism,” which
she construes not as a multifarious sociopolitical movement
but as a unitary body o f proven theory about the mind. On
one side, she looks to Freud for her faith in repression, the
unconscious, and the symbolic decoding of dreams. “Were it
not for my knowledge o f dream interpretation,” she acknowl­
edges, “I might never have known that Penelope had been sex­
ually abused as a child by a trusted friend of the family.. ..
But the psychoanalytic Freud, of course, could not have spurred
Prozan to pursue her hunch; for that purpose, “feminism”

10. Prozan, The Technique o f Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapyy p. 260.

Subsequent parenthetic citations refer to this book.

253
came to the rescue. In 1977, Prozan relates, she read one fem­
inist article dealing with the prevalence of consciously remem­
bered abuse, and, presto, “the case of Penelope developed into
an example of repressed sexual seduction and rape” (p. 248).
Penelope thus became the guinea pig for a novice memory
therapist who, in her own words, “had never been able to
bring back an actual case of molestation. .. and so ... had had
to piece it together as best I could from symptoms, memory
traces, screen memories, and dream analysis” (p. 262).
“The clinician,” Prozan writes, “must be able to recog­
nize symptoms o f incest and have the emotional capacity to
accept the patient and elicit the details” (p. 250). Needless to
say, this is rather different from discriminating between reliable
and specious signs o f abuse. Prozan tells us that she takes direc­
tion, not from the prudent authorities alluded to by Theresa
Reid, but from the “incest survivors’ aftereffects checklists” pro­
vided in E. Sue Blumes Secret Survivors and, predictably, in the
early editions of The Courage to Heal (Prozan, pp. 310-311).
Indeed, she regularly commends Bass and Daviss work to her
patients, and she told Penelope about Secret Survivors just as
soon as it appeared in 1990, while Penelope was in her four­
teenth and final year of trying to remember the molestation
scene that Prozan continually urged upon her (p. 280).
These facts bear upon Prozan’s charge that I quoted her
out of context when I had her saying that analysts today “are
looking for sexual abuse.” To be sure, that phrase was plucked
from a paragraph in which Prozan displayed a momentary
realization that diagnoses are subject to fashion. But in the
larger context o f her two books and her self-described “lead­
ing the witness” (p. 267) in Penelope’s case, the quotation

254
accurately reflects her policy. Indeed, to say that Prozan merely
“looks for” abuse would be a considerable understatement.
Penelope herself now informs readers o f The New York
Review that she did remember being anally raped at age nine,
but Prozan cannot bring herself to endorse that claim. How
could she, when her book is explicit about Penelopes acquisi­
tion of “insight into her emotional state as a child without $pe~
cific memory' (p. 308; italics added)? If by now Penelope has
turned her “insight” into visions, that proves only that she has
persisted in the work of self-deception so strenuously facilitated
by Prozan.
Prozan chides me for failing to grant that Penelopes
“most serious symptom,” sexual promiscuity, was “relieved by
our analysis.” That behavior did indeed abate, whether or not
through Prozans ministrations. But readers who study the case
history will discover that Penelopes sexual habits receive
minor emphasis, and for a good reason. She picked up men in
bars only “in the beginning o f her therapy,” thereafter pro­
gressing to a still troubling “married-man syndrome” that she
was unable to overcome (pp. 23-24). If Prozan had turned
this modest gain into the centerpiece of her case, as she now
belatedly attempts to do, she would have had to explain why
the hunt for the missing memory o f rape had to continue for
another dozen years or so. * ^

11. Note, by the way, how the matter o f promiscuity in this case fails to jibe
with Freudian expectations. Prozans letter states that it was Penelopes sexual
conduct that first alerted her to the likelihood o f molestation. Presumably, then,
Penelope would need to “derepress” her rape memory, or at the least to accept
its buried existence, before overcoming her symptom. Just the opposite occurred:
the symptom vanished and the struggle to induce belief went on and on and on.

255
 Now Penelope declares that she was “healing” for all of
her fifteen years under Prozan’s care. Again, however, the book
tells a different story. Not only were Penelopes highlighted
behavioral problems still in evidence at termination, but
Prozans narrative is a saga of thwarted efforts on Penelopes
part to overcome an emotional bondage (alias “transference”)
that was preventing meaningful advances. Penelope “acknowl­
edged that at times her smoking, drinking, and overeating
were done with a sense of secret rebellion in relation to me and
made her feel free and independent” (p. 27); and

I made many interpretations that Penelope was afraid 1

would be angry if she lost weight, was successful with
men, and left me. At other times she expressed the wish
for termination at points in the therapy when she still
had considerable work to do on her molestation, saying
she believed that if she left therapy she could lose
weight. This idea was both an avoidance of the fright­
ening subject o f her sexual molestation and also a recog­
nition that the dependency tie to me required, in her
mind, that she remain overweight, (pp. 187-188)

Prozan and Penelope both criticize me for saying that

Penelope turned frantic as termination approached. But
Prozans case notes for the period show Penelope weeping fre­
quently both in therapy sessions and at home, worrying about
her ability to be self-possessed on her own, repeatedly feeling
“very distressed” (pp. 303, 305), and telling Prozan that “Pm
afraid to stop therapy, I might lose control” (p. 303). In the
same period, however, she ceased doubting Prozans diagnosis

256
and began interpreting her own dreams in Prozans single-
minded style. That is what Prozan in her case notes proudly
calls “working independently” (p. 293). Instead, as I main­
tained, it seems to have constituted an intellectual surrender in
the face of prospective abandonment.
None o f this is meant to dispute the fact that Penelope
is now feeling better and conducting herself more self-assertively
than she did under Prozans tutelage. Indeed, according to
Prozans book, a dramatic improvement commenced ju st a$ soon
as the therapy was over—resulting, for example, in a thirty-
pound weight loss within Penelopes first six months of free­
dom (p. 309). Neither Prozan nor Penelope can detect the
irony in that fact—although, as we have seen, there were prior
signs of Penelopes well-founded belief that “if she left therapy
she could lose weight.” *^

12. Even if Penelope had made impressive progress over a fifteen-year period,
the question would remain whether the credit for that progress belonged to her
therapist. The gains could have been made despite Prozans efforts rather than
because of them. In fact, Prozans case notes hint at some responsibility on her
part for two o f the ongoing debits in Penelopes psychic ledger, her lack o f suc­
cess with men and her alienation from her mother. When Penelope, clinging at
age forty to a frayed strand of self-esteem, expressed a stubborn faith that “there
was a man for her out there,” Prozan intervened to convince her that the man
in question was only her oedipally desired but long-dead father. “Her realization
o f the source of this fantasy was a crushing blow,” we are told (p. 260). And
Prozans interpretations hammered home the point that Penelopes by then
elderly mother was “selling her out,” that she was “ insensitive,” that she “put
you in a vulnerable position,” and so on (pp. 265, 304, 306). More basically, it
was Prozan who widened the chasm between Penelope and her family by bur­
dening her with the tale o f molestation that both her mother and her sister
found so unbelievable and offensive.

257
 As I suggested in my essay, experienced psychoanalysts
will deplore this case history, but it is less parodic of their own
work than they might wish. Like Penelope, many an orthodox
Freudian patient finds in the “transference” a tar baby rather
than a clear path to independence and relief And what is there
to choose between mining dreams for knowledge of abuse and
for standard oedipal content? In either case the “unconscious
meaning” is produced through circular operations that lack
even a semblance of empirical authorization.
Two other points raised in Prozans letter remain to be
clarified. First, I have never phoned Ross Cheit; he surprised
me with a call after I had sent him a letter posing a number of
questions. And second, Eileen Lipsker’s “taste for fame” (and
money) expressed itself variously and was often remarked
around the time of the George Franklin trial; see pages
173-175, 181-182, 184,216, 328-329, and 478 of Harry N.
MacLeans Once Upon a Time, If Prozan recognizes no moral
difference between writing an article that denounces a horren­
dous epidemic of malpractice and getting a Hollywood agent
to negotiate the book and movie rights to ones adventures
shortly before obtaining a questionable murder verdict against
ones father, I am at a loss to help her.
5. Janna Malamud Smith falls into a number of traps
that may look familiar by now. She confounds the immedi­
ately detected molestation of children with recovered memory
cases; she fails to distinguish between inaccurate or incomplete
memory and the full obliteration of a painful incident; she
fails to note how the organically accountable amnesia of an
alcoholic or of a severely battered victim o f mugging differs
from the alleged repression of entire years’ worth o f habitual

258
fondling or rape; and she puts a glib political gloss on an issue
that is ultimately ethical and practical—namely, whether psy­
chotherapists shouldn’t finally begin making due allowance for
human suggestibility and for their own role in exploiting it,
however inadvertently and with whatever benign intentions.
Smith does raise one issue that must be on many readers’
minds: What should a therapist do with a patient who shows
every sign of having been abused? First, there are no empirically
established behavioral patterns that point unambiguously to
abuse; the recovered memory literature on this topic consists
of reckless speculation. Even the extremely disturbed patient
conjured by Smith would not automatically qualify as a sur­
vivor. Thus, to assume the contrary and begin probing for
memories of molestation would be to risk heading down the
path of mutual error and misplaced vengefulness.
And second, no one, either in the psychoanalytic tradi­
tion or in the newer school of Bass and Davis, has shown that
the exhuming of distant memories is psychologically beneficial
at all, much less that it is a treatment o f choice—and there is
much evidence that it can prove destructive, even to the point
o f inducing suicide. I would hope that Smith could address
her patient’s current symptoms, feelings, attitudes, and ideas
in the hope not o f “reconstructing” a dubiously accurate early
history but of fortifying the patient to deal with the challenges
lying directly before her.
I should add that psychotherapists rarely meet an initial
cluster o f symptoms as drastic as the one Smith portrays—
unless, of course, the patient has already been damaged by
other recovered memory therapists and is being handed down
toward the movement’s hell, the M PD ward. The stories of

259
brutal antipsychiatry that are beginning to reach us from that
quarter will, I predict, launch the wave of public nausea and
outrage that will finally put a stop to “therapy” surrounding
so-called repressed memories.

260
 February /, 1995

Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, coauthors of The Courage to Heal,

declined to allow their 600-word letter to be published here.
That letter alleged many inaccuracies in “The Revenge of the
Repressed,” of which only a few would be mentioned.
Bass and Davis denied that The Courage to Heal is
about clinging to victimhood. Rather, it is a compassionate
effort to promote healing and “moving on.” It deals less with
memory than with self-esteem, self-trust, intimacy, grief, and
other topics of direct usefulness to survivors. Bass and Davis
also denied holding a belief that repressed abuse is more
prevalent than remembered abuse. Some o f the book’s infor­
mants had indeed forgotten some or all of their traumatic
experience, but even those victims, when they regained their
memory, rarely did so with the assistance o f a therapist or a
support group. And others had always remembered their
abuse.
The Courage to Heal, said Bass and Davis, is not anti­
male, as Crews maintained. They were mystified by Crews’s
assertion that “women’s collectives” provided the reports on
which the book is based, and they declared that the problem
of child abuse is not gender specific. The Courage to Heal dis­
cusses female as well as male abusers, and the authors
expressed pleasure that it has proved useful to male as well as
female survivors.
The authors expressed regret that Crews did not exam­
ine the positive achievements o f their book, and that he chose
instead to indulge in the “mean-spiritedness” characteristic of
“backlash” literature, which creates a hostile atmosphere that

261
discourages the abused from coming forward with their stories.
As for themselves personally, however, Bass and Davis are not
made nervous by the backlash; nor, more particularly, are they
fearful of lawsuits, as Crews had inferred.

F R E D E R I C K C R E W S replies:
In their letter, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis present themselves
as innocents who are unaware of any social damage caused by
The Courage to Heal. Their chapters, after all, consist mostly of
tender advice and instructive stories and testimonials, all designed
to comfort and guide victims of sexual molestation. Where,
they want to know, is the harm in that?
The catch is that, by and large, the “survivors” to whom
their book makes its strongest appeal are not women who have
always remembered early sexual abuse. Most such women
have long since forged their individual strategies for coping
with painful memories and emotional wounds. By contrast,
those who desperately cling to Bass and Daviss counsel are
struggling to convince themselves or to stay convinced, in
opposition to everything they have previously believed or re­
called, that they were chronically raped in childhood, usually
by their fathers and/or other related males. The active core of
The Courage to Heal is precisely its “supportive” encour­
agement of that belief The authors exhortations to self­
esteem are thus quixotically premised on a shattering of their
readers’ prior sense of identity and trust. And the recom­
mended path to healing is strewn with tragic confrontations
and with the civil or criminal prosecution of heartbroken
relatives.

262
 Despite Bass and Davis’s protestation to the contrary,
very little “moving on” is to be found in their survivor narra­
tives. As they admit, “Some women. .. go through an emer­
gency stage that lasts several years__ [T]hey still feel suicidal,
self-destructive, or obsessed with abuse much o f the time”
(Bass and Davis, p. 76). The authors can’t comprehend that
this suffering is typically brought on by their own suggestions
and by those of the reckless therapists whom they have urged,
in their words, to “believe the unbelievable” about their
patients’ histories (second edition, p. 345).
Bass and Davis now insist on the “compassionate” char­
acter of their book. Among accused parents, however. The
Courage to Heal is known with good reason as The Courage to
Hate. “First they steal everything else from you,” it says, “and
then they want forgiveness too? Let them get their own__ It
is insulting to suggest to any survivor that she should forgive
the person who abused her” (p. 161). Instead, the authors pre­
scribe a cultivation o f rage:

A little like priming the pump, you can do things that

will get your anger started. Then, once you get the hang
of it, it’ll begin to flow on its own__ You may dream o f
murder or castration. It can be pleasurable to fantasize
such scenes in vivid detail. Wanting revenge is a natural
impulse, a sane response. Let yourself imagine it to your
heart’s content__ Suing your abuser and turning him
in to the authorities are just two of the avenues open---
Another woman, abused by her grandfather, went to his
deathbed and, in front of all the other relatives, angrily
confronted him right there in the hospital, (pp. 135, 139)

263
Bass and Davis’s compassion, it seems, extends only to the
women whom they have helped to wall off from the solicitude
of their grieving families.
The authors dispute my account of the “knowledge base”
underpinning The Courage to Heah but they misrepresent both
my argument and the known sources of their movement. In the
early 1980s, both Bass and Judith Herman, who says that her
intellectual home for the past two decades has been the Women’s
Mental Health Collective in Somerville, Massachusetts,^ belonged
to an informal Boston-area network of militant feminists who were
gathering (always recalled) molestation stories from workshops,
patient surveys, and support groups. By the mid-1980s, influenced
in part by such writers as Alice Miller, Diana Russell, and
Jeffrey Masson, those theorists of trauma were adding repres­
sion and dissociation into the mix, with the result that virtually
any unhappy woman, with a little effort and assistance, could
now lay claim to full membership in the corps of survivors.
In her recent book Trauma and Recovery, Herman notes
the contribution of social pressure in the eliciting of previously
unconscious material:

As each group member reconstructs her own narrative,

the details of her story almost inevitably evoke new
recollections in each of the listeners. In the incest sur­
vivor groups, virtually every member who has defined a
goal of recovering memories has been able to do so.
Women who feel stymied by amnesia are encouraged
to tell as much o f their story as they do remember.

1. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992), p. ix.

264
 Invariably the group offers a fresh emotional perspective
that provides a bridge to new memories.^

One might say that the recovered memory movement

was born when Herman, along with Bass and other anti-
patriarchal activists, failed to greet such “new memories” with
appropriate skepticism.
Bass and Davis s latest edition does show a dawning aware­
ness that some o f the accused and reviled may be innocent
after all. Meanwhile, however, the authors display an ominous
new interest in supposed women perpetrators and boy victims
(p. 14). As their gender bias thus becomes less prominent, the
net of their inquisition continues to widen. And their fallacious
diagnostic reasoning—epitomized in one quoted survivors
rhetorical question, “Why would 1 be feeling all this anxiety if
something didn’t happen?” (p. 92)—remains as virulent as ever.
The authors of The Courage to Heal profess themselves
indifferent to the threat of damage suits. I will take their word
for it. Along with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation,
I disapprove of prosecuting writers for the content of their
ideas; the only proper response to Bass and Davis is to
show how they have deceived themselves and others. No
one, however, should underestimate the reverberating havoc
they have unleashed upon vulnerable women and their
families.

2, Trauma and Recovery, p. 224. For further insight into the movement’s origins,
see Chapter 3 o f Mark Pendergrast’s Victims o f Memory.

265
 March 23y 1995

MATTHEW HUGH ERDELYI is a professor in the Depart­

ment of Psychology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate
School of City University of New York. He is the author of
Psychoanalysis: Freud) Cognitive Psychology. He writes:

Frederick Crews has tried to correct one “folly” by countering

it with the opposite folly. Just because many of the so-called
recovered memories in the modern literature turn out to be “false
recollections” (to use Freuds terminology), it is not logical to
assert that recovered memories and the phenomenon of repres­
sion are therefore false. Just because many apples are demonstra­
bly not green, it does not follow that Granny Smiths are a “myth.”
Within about one decade, and working by himself, with­
out the benefit of an army of funded researchers, cowriters, and
special conferences, Freud reached todays cutting-edge posi­
tion on recovered memories: He concluded that recollections
in therapy were typically distorted and emphasized, as any main­
stream memory scientist would today, that the recollection of
complex events from the past is a pastiche of fact and fantasy.
Freud also advanced, already in 1895, the empirical (note,
not romantic) observation, confirmed by experimental research
in the past decade, that hypnosis is not memory enhancing.
Also, although one would not suspect it from Crews’s
treatment, Freud’s stance against the credulous acceptance of
witness testimony is completely in keeping with the position
that memory scientists—and Crews himself—advocate. In 1906,
around the time Freud was withdrawing his infantile-seduction
hypothesis of hysteria (note, not denying childhood sexual

266
abuse), he published a brief article, “Psychoanalysis and the
Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law.” * “There is,” he begins,
“a growing recognition of the untrustworthiness o f state­
ments made by witnesses, at present the basis of so many judg­
ments in Courts o f Law ... ” (p. 115). He comments later on
cases where the witness is actually testifying against himself
—persons like Crews’s “Freudian Christian Paul Ingram”:

You may be led astray in your examination by a neu­

rotic who reacts as though he were guilty even though
he is innocent—because a lurking sense of guilt already
existing in him assimilates the accusation made against
him on this particular occasion. .. and it is indeed a
question whether your technique will succeed in dis­
tinguishing such self-accused persons from those who
are really guilty, (p. 124)

As for false witnessing, I was surprised to read in Crews’s

reference to my work:^ “Remarkably, Erdelyi welcomes Freud’s
unclarity as providing a sound basis for integrating the
'dynamic’ with the cognitive unconscious.” This is, perhaps,
a false memory o f Crews’s, not my position.
Crews also misrepresents the status of memory recovery
and repression in the scientific literature. He embraces the

1. The Collected Papers o f Sigm und Freud, 10 volumes, translated by E. B. M.

Horford (Collier Books, 1963), Vol. 1, pp. 115-125.
2. Matthew H. Erdelyi, “ Repression, Reconstruction, and Defense: History and
Integration o f the Psychoanalytic and Experimental Frameworks,” in Repression
and Dissociation: Implications fo r Personality Theory, Psychopathology, an d Health,
edited by Jerome L. Singer (University o f Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 1-32.

267
notion “that memory always facies with the passage of time,”
when a huge literature shows that recall can progressively
improve over periods of minutes, days, weeks, months, and
probably years. Several scientific reviews of the recent experi­
mental literature have been published over the past decade.^ My
in-press book, The Recovery o f Unconscious Memories: Hyper-
mnesia and Reminiscence (University of Chicago Press)
reviews and integrates a century of clinical and experimental
work on the phenomenon of upward-trending memory. The
Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric
Association ( d s m -IV) includes dissociative amnesia^ “an inability
to recall important personal information, usually of a trau­
matic or stressful nature. .. which may resolve spontaneously.
... Some individuals with chronic amnesia may gradually
begin to recall dissociated memories” (pp. 478-479).
Crews himself, in another section, seems to accept the
phenomenon he has elsewhere disclaimed, as when he states,
while criticizing repression: “Ross Cheit, a Brown University
professor, has recently proved beyond question that his sud­
denly recovered 1968 molestation by a music camp adminis­
trator was real.”

3. For some o f these reviews, see, in addition to the work cited in footnote 2:
Matthew H. Hrdelyi, “The Recovery o f Unconscious (Inaccessible) Memories:
Laboratory vStudies o f Hypermnesia,” in The Psychology o f Learning and
M otivation: Advances in Research and Theory, Vol. 18, edited by Gordon Bower
(Academic Press, 1984), pp. 95-127; David G. Payne, “ Hypermnesia and
Reminiscence in Recall: Historical and Empirical Review,” Psychological Bulletin,
Vol. 101 (1987), pp. 5-27; Henry L. Roediger 111, Mark A. Wheeler, and
Suprana Rajaram, “Remembering, Knowing, and Reconstructing the Past,” in
The Psychology o f Learning and M otivation: Advances in Research and Theory, Vol.
30, edited by Douglas L. Medin (Academic Press, 1993), pp. 97-134.

268
 Ignoring for the moment the question o f repression,
which is a vast red herring in Crews’s article, Cheit’s recovered
memory suggests that memory need not invariably decay over
time. Even if, for the sake of argument, we chose to deny the exis­
tence of repression as Freud defined it—the exclusion of some
memory or impulse from consciousness—inaccessible memo­
ries, forgotten for whatever reason, are still subject to recovery.
Although repression is not material to the existence of
delayed recall, this does not mean that repression does not
exist nor that what Crews suggests about repression is accu­
rate—for example, that repression needs to occur “abruptly
and completely.” Repression can be laborious and imperfect.
Jerome Singer’s edited book. Repression and Disassoci-
ation, includes a range of positions by mainstream scholars.
By highlighting the quote o f David Holmes, probably the
most constant critic of repression in psychology. Crews is not
accurately conveying psychology’s stance on the issue, which
is mixed. In my own cited chapter I suggest that a large part
of the problem is that the field has confused Sigmund Freud
with Anna Freud. Unlike his daughter, Sigmund Freud did
not insist that repression needed to be unconscious (he actu­
ally warned his readers that repression did not have to be
always conscious) and used, as 1 show in this and later publi­
cations, the terms repression and suppression interchangeably,
along with “inhibition,” “dissociation,” “thought avoidance,”
among others. I do not know of an experimental psychologist
who would dispute the phenomenon of conscious repression
or suppression. Experiments show"^ that avoiding thinking

4. See the work cited in footnote 2.

269
about a complex event leads to the classic memory “decay”
function of Ebbinghaus. Some of the “decayed” memories, how­
ever, can be recovered by the simple expedient of refocusing
thought upon the forgotten material. ^

F R E D E R I C K C R E W S replies:
If Matthew Erdelyi had carefully read “The Revenge of the
Repressed,” he could have spared himself some of the effort dis­
played above. Erdelyi has me saying, for example, that Freudian
repression is simply “false.” What I actually wrote was that
repression may conceivably occur but that it remains undemon­
strated by controlled studies— a point that Erdelyi himself has
often conceded. ^My full position, ignored by Erdelyi, is that the
idea of repression is too speculative and inflammatory to be harm­
less in the hands of impressionable patients, therapists, and juries.
Again, Erdelyi thinks he has caught me asserting that no
memories are ever recovered, thanks to the fact that “memory
always fades with the passage o f time.” I am allegedly contra­
dicting myself, then, when I discuss an authentic case of
recovered memory. My statement about decay, however, was
specifically addressed to what I called “the retrievers’ notion
that Videotaped’ records of events are. .. yielded up to perfect
recall.” Erdelyi has failed to grasp my dual point that (a) more
mundane processes than repression and derepression can

1. See, e.g., “ Issues in the Study o f Unconscious and Defense Processes:

Discussion o f Horowitzs Comments, with Some Elaborations,” in
Psychodynamics and Cognition^ edited by Mardi J. Horowitz (University of
Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 81-94. There Erdelyi grants that “the laboratory evi­
dence has failed to provide viable proof for the existence of repression” (p. 84).

270
account for the occasional instance o f belated recall, and (b)
the mere retrieval o f a memory does not establish the patho­
genic character o f the recalled event.
Erdelyi is that rarity, an experimental psychologist v^ho
clings to a prior Freudian faith. The contortions necessitated
by such divided loyalty are on view not only in the letter above
but also in the article I originally cited, “Repression, Recon­
struction, and Defense.” My brief account of that articles
strange logic, Erdelyi claims, sounds like the product o f a
“false memory” on my part. Let us see.
Erdelyi maintains that Freud, thanks to his “tendency
toward self-contradiction” (p. 13) and to “the impalpability of
the referents” (p. 10), held only a vague and unstable idea of
what repression entailed. The concept, Erdelyi shows,
answered to “a vast sprawl” of characterizations, from mere
“neglect” through “pushing [the unbearable idea] away” (p. 9).
Yet Erdelyi is undaunted by this sloppiness. Brazenly, he takes
the lowest common denominator o f Freuds many “repres­
sions” —namely, the mere “intentional not-thinking o f some
target material” (p. 4 )—and claims that it has been vindicated
by rigorous experiments on diminished recall:

The essential point is that not-thinking/repressing/dis­

sociating/ cognitively avoiding/leaving to itself/warding off
some to-be-remembered material for whatever reason—
psychological poverty, defense, experimental exigencies,
or what have you—can result in amnesia, (p. 11)

It seems, then, that Freud was right after all: when we cease
thinking about something, it becomes harder to remember!

271
 Erdelyi s article thus salvages repression by radically triv­
ializing its function in Freuds psychodynamic system. Now a
pea-sized repression, purged o f oedipal, etiological, and thera­
peutic implications, can be reintroduced as a conscious cogni­
tive skill, “an obvious and ubiquitous device” (p. 14) whose
general recognition can lead at last to “the integration of psycho­
analysis and experimental psychology” (p. 14). Erdelyi then
wills this integration into being by executing a neat pirouette.
He adds back in the classic defensive role o f repression that he
has just finished belittling, and concludes by declaring that
academic psychology must now embrace “conflict-fraught”
repression as the needed corrective to its “overemphasis of the
merely intellective” (p. 27).
Crucial to Erdelyi s special pleading is his claim that, on
the whole, Freud conceived of repression as a conscious rather
than an unconscious mechanism. Readers may wonder why,
after nearly a century of study by hundreds of investigators,
only Erdelyi has perceived that fact. The answer is that he has
jumbled the decision to repress, which Freud sometimes treat­
ed as conscious, with the continuous work of repression as a
supposed blocker o f access to consciousness. Pathogenic trau­
mas, Freud consistently maintained, “are never present in
conscious memory, only in the symptoms of the illness” (SE,
3:166). Otherwise, the rationale for protracted psychoanalytic
treatment would have immediately collapsed.^

2. If repression works unconsciously, moreover, Freuds and Erdelyi s idea o f a

conscious decision to repress becomes incoherent. Since the subject subsequently
fails to perceive that he is repressing, he must also have repressed the memory of
his decision to repress. So, too, this latter conscious choice must have undergone

272
 Erdelyi s remarks above about the prophetic Freud are a
throwback to the worshipful tradition of Ernest Jones. One
would never know from reading Erdelyi that it was Freuds
own rashness—first in prematurely declaring his “seduction
theory” proven, then in using even wilder guesswork to keep
in play the gratuitous idea o f repression—that made his
notion of memory appear so complex. Nor would one suspect
that it was precisely Freud s credulity about feats o f hypnotism
that inclined him toward repression in the first place. Freud
gave up hypnotism not (as Erdelyi urges) because he had
exposed its unreliability but simply because he was no good at
it. “I soon began to tire o f issuing assurances and commands,”
he confessed, “such as: ‘You are going to sleep!. .. sleep!’ and
o f hearing the patient. .. remonstrate with me: ‘But, doctor.
I’m asleep’ ” (SE, 2:108).
More tellingly, Freud never questioned the fateful infer­
ence he had drawn from others’ dexterity with hypnotism,
namely, “that my patients knew everything that was o f patho­
genic significance and that it was only a question o f obliging
them to communicate it” (SE, 2:110). This was the central
mistake that turned Freud into both a bullying therapist and
a feverish speculator about the buried infantile past. And
his favorite wild card o f repression enabled him to trump all
empirical challenges, ensuring that psychoanalysis would
remain a body o f dogma rather than a science.

repression, and so on ad infinitum, with increasingly implausible homun-culi

effacing their predecessors’ work within the psyche. It is, I suspect, Erdelyi’s
uneasiness about this dilemma (Zeno’s paradox) that inclines him toward the
heterodox view that repression itself operates consciously.

273
 Erdelyi draws our attention to a 1906 paper (SE,
9:103-114) in which Freud warns against ‘ neurotic” self­
incrimination by innocent suspects. Actually, this was a lec­
ture delivered to a class of Vienna law students, encouraging
them to make forensic use of C. G. Jungs word association
tests—the value of which Freud was later to deprecate. He
does address false confessions but characteristically overlooks
their most likely source, coercive and deceptive means of
interrogation. As always, Freud emphasizes the enduring
determinism of “the unconscious” while remaining blind to
compliance with the expectations o f an interested inquirer.
Sealed within the analytic bell jar, Erdelyi cannot per­
ceive the obvious Freudian underpinnings of our present
recovered memory movement.^ Nor can he comprehend that
his own experimental work on memory enhancement has no
bearing on the credibility o f that movement. Erdelyi s studies
favor the likelihood of some improved recall, mixed with
error, when occasions for rehearsal of previously presented

3. As my article maintained, the “scientific” pretensions o f that movement derive

from a number o f unwarranted beliefs that were directly propagated by Freud:
that repression is the normal human response to trauma; that experiences in infancy
produce long-term memories that can be accurately retrieved decades later; that
adult psychological difficulties can be reliably ascribed to certain forgotten events
in early childhood and not others; that sexual traumas are incomparably more sus­
ceptible to repression and the formation o f neurosis than any other kind; that
symptoms are themselves “memories” that can yield up the story o f their origin;
that dream interpretation, too, can disclose the repressed past; that memory
retrieval is necessary for symptom removal; and that psychotherapists can confi­
dently trace their clinical findings to the patients unconscious without allowing
for the contaminating influence o f their own diagnostic system, imparted directly
or through suggestion.

274
images, words, or stories are repeatedly supplied. That finding
dovetails with my own acknowledgment that cueing can
remind us of forgotten though unrepressed events. But it fails
to come anywhere near the key question surrounding our
recent epidemic o f dire accusations. This is whether we ought
to grant credence to highly anomalous “memories” o f multiple
sexual violations that were previously unremarked by the sub­
ject or anyone else—memories, moreover, “recovered” with the
aid o f hypnotism, sodium amytal, trance writing, and/or
other leading procedures administered by therapists who have
acquired a faddish belief that many adult symptoms are likely
indicators of childhood molestation.
In s\\on,pace Erdelyi, the question is not whether mem­
ory can ever be enhanced but whether otherwise incredible
tales, produced in a climate o f suggestion, should be allowed
to ruin peoples lives. Erdelyis misconceived quibbles over
repression will only lend encouragement to quacks whose
“therapeutic” depredations ought to be halted at the earliest
possible moment.

275
 April 20. 1995

MARCIA CAVELLis the author of The Psychoanalytic Mind:

From Freud to Philosophy. She will be a visiting professor of
philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in the
spring o f 1996. She writes:

I hadn’t been moved to protest Frederick Crews’s handling of

psychoanalysis until his piece on the “recovery” movement,
which midway turns into yet another occasion for him to
criticize Freud’s theories about repression. This is not the
basis of my quarrel, since I think Freud built a theory
around a relatively homely notion of repression, a theory
that has little to recommend it. I have in mind his views
about “primary process,” a “system Unconscious” that works
according to its own special laws, and “primary” (versus
“secondary”) repression.
What moves me are, first, Crews’s extremely mis­
leading picture of psychoanalysis (he never troubles to
distinguish between Freud and psychoanalysis now, but
it is the latter of which he presumably speaks); and
then, related to that, his inaccurate account of Richard
Wollheim’s and Thomas Nagel’s defense of Freud in these
pages.
Crews lists what he calls “an important core of shared
assumptions between psychoanalysis and its hyperactive
young successor” (the “recovery” therapists). O f the ten
assumptions he comes up with I’ll mention only the first
two, since what is wrong with them suggests the sort of
thing that is wrong with all the rest.

276
 1. To become mentally healthy, we must vent our
negative feelings and relive our most painful psychic
experiences. The deeper we delve, and the harsher and
more bitter the truths that we drag to the surface, the
better off we will be.
2. Through the aid of an objective therapist in
whom we invest authority, trust, and love, we can not
only arrive at an accurate diagnosis of our mental
problems but also retrieve the key elements o f our
mental history in substantially accurate form, unconta­
minated by the therapist s theoretical bias.

Probably there are some psychoanalysts who believe

these things, but I don’t know any. Even Freud thought
some bitter truths best left in the dark. One o f the marks
distinguishing well-trained psychoanalysts (for Crews this
must be an oxymoron) from “psychic healers” who are less
well-trained and less responsible is the care the former
take not to attack defenses that are perhaps better left in
place. And a great many psychoanalysts have been so
impressed by the currently fashionable denigration of
objectivity that they have traded in the ideas o f diagnosis
and truth-telling for the idea o f coherent narrative. I think
this is unfortunate. But one might as well get one’s misfor­
tunes straight.
So while I agree with Crews that these along with the
other eight “shared assumptions” are “erroneous or extremely
open to doubt,” so, I believe, would most o f the psychoana­
lytic establishment.

277
 Crews goes on to say: “Yet they [these ten erroneous
principles] are so widely believed as to constitute what Richard
Wollheim and Thomas Nagel, among others, regard as the
psychological common sense of our era.” I would bet my bottom
dollar that neither philosopher accepts any one of these prin­
ciples, nor regards them as any part of “psychological common
sense.” It would be fun to try to articulate what that is. ^

FREDERICK CREWS replies:

Marcia Cavell starts to go wrong as soon as she complains that
I never “distinguish between Freud and psychoanalysis now.”
I have done so frequently—for example, in my reply to several
letters responding to “The Unknown Freud,” when 1 pointed
out that “merely by refraining from reliance on such backward
ideas as inevitable female masochism and the fateful conse­
quences of masturbation, any contemporary therapist would
have a head start over Freud.” The question I went on to raise,
though, is how we are expected to choose on scientific grounds
between Freud s notions and those of his improvers. Since all
parties accept his question-begging principle that “uncon­
scious ideas, unconscious trains o f thought, and unconscious
impulses [are] no less valid and unimpeachable psychological
data than conscious ones” (SE, 7:113), all are playing the
knowledge game with the same loaded dice. In their own writ­
ings about psychoanalysis, Richard Wollheim, Thomas Nagel,
and Cavell herself have traced elegant philosophical orbits
around this point without ever meeting it squarely.
Cavell now maintains that, on the whole, todays “psycho­
analytic establishment” would not subscribe to any o f the ten

278
principles which, I claimed, the recovered memory movement
derived from Freudian precedent. If so, the retreat o f psycho­
analysis from its original therapeutic and theoretical pretensions
has gone farther toward unconditional surrender than I had
thought. In any event, my ten points were drawn not from the
dwindling and demoralized ‘ establishment” but from the
Freudian revelation as it colonized the West, bequeathing to
psychotherapy at large its main agenda o f symptom decoding,
memory retrieval, and purgation of the repressed.
Whether she realizes it or not, Cavell herself has bought
shares of that agenda; on no other grounds could she be so cer­
tain about what she calls, in her recent book The Psycho^
analytic Mind^ the “momentous discoveries of psychoanalysis.”
Thus when Cavell counterintuitively asserts that a man typi­
cally retains his repressed childhood wish to be “buggered by
his father” and that Little Hans’s famous horse phobia was
brought on by castration fear rather than by the actual horse
that had fallen down in his presence, she is willy-nilly ratifying
Freud’s key premises and the alleged catharses, cures, and
recovered memories that underwrote them.^
But Cavell wants to lay her bottom dollar on a different
proposition: that neither Thomas Nagel nor Richard Wollheim
accepts a single one o f my ten Freudian points about the mean­
ing o f symptoms and dreams, the operation of the unconscious,
its predominantly sexual content, the tyranny of the repressed,
and so forth. This is a dumbfounding claim, since both Nagel
and especially Wollheim have argued vigorously for the gener-

1. Cavell, The Psychoanalytic M ind: From Freud to Philosophy (Harvard

University Press, 1993), pp. 77, 191, 182-185.

279
al correctness of the classic Freudian outlook. Although Nagel,
for example, keeps his detailed affirmations to a minimum,
he must have had some standard tenets in mind when he
recently declared that “there is now, in advance of all [defini­
tively probative] experiments, substantial reason to believe in the
unconscious and psychoanalytic explanations which refer to it.”^
Cavells appeal to Richard Wollheim is odder still. Woll-
heim is a Freud idolator of the old school who has character­
ized his hero as having done “as much for [humanity] as any
other human being who has l i v e d . H i s trust in Freud admits
no impediment. Unsurprisingly, then, his texts not only show
explicit support for most of the items I named but cast the net
of faith far beyond them. Not content with defending the
entirety o f Freud’s “discoveries” and “clinical findings,”
Wollheim also looks favorably on the whole assortment of
constructs, including even the death instinct,"^ that Freud sup­
posedly derived from them.
Thus, whereas Cavell doubts that Wollheim or any other
modern Freudian holds that a psychoanalyst can accurately retrieve
a patient’s infantile past, that is exactly what Wollheim pro­
claims. “A line can...be traced,” he writes, “from certain adult
or adolescent activities to certain infantile experiences.” He is
disposed to accept at face value, for example, Freud’s recon-

2. Thomas Nagel, letter to The New York Review, August 11, 1994, pp. 55-56.
3. Richard Wollheim, Sigrnund Freud (1971; reprinted by Cambridge University
Press, 1981), p. 252. In outward form, this book is a mere exposition o f Freuds
ideas. In fact, however—as the quoted sentence manifests—it is a sustained act
o f advocacy for those ideas.
4. Richard Wollheim, The M ind and Its Depths (Harvard University Press,
1993), p. 58.

280
struction o f the Wolf Mans having defecated on the floor, at
age one and a half, when he supposedly saw his parents copulat­
ing from the rear—all this and much more having been deduced
from a dream allegedly experienced at age four but reported to
Freud only in adulthood.^ No practitioner of recovered mem­
ory therapy could lay claim to sharper gnostic vision than that.
Moreover, Wbllheim still affirms the unique ‘‘processes
and modes o f operation” of the unconscious, the preeminent
role o f sexuality in causing neurosis, the interpretability of
dreams and symptoms as symbolic expressions o f the repressed,
and the practical efficacy o f such interpretations in removing
symptoms.^ All of these points appeared in my list of root psycho­
analytic assumptions, along with still another that Wbllheim
appears to approve—that the fixed meanings o f universal sex­
ual symbols can come to the aid o f clinical interpretation.^
According to Cavell, my passing references to Nagel
and Wollheim constitute an “inaccurate account o f [their]
defense of Freud.” Incomplete, yes; inaccurate, no. Nagel and

5. Wollheim, Sigm und Freud, p. 172; The M ind and Its Depths, p. 99; and
Sigmund Freud, The Case o f the WolfM an: From the History o f an Infantile
Neurosis, introduction by Richard Wollheim, etchings and woodcuts by Jim
Dine (Arion Press, 1993).
6. Wollheim, Sigm und Freud, pp. 183, 86, 88, 203, 146, 149-150, 172, 231,
166-167; introduction to The Case o f the W olfM an, p. 11.
7. Thus, according to Wollheim, Freud “interpreted without difficulty” a schizo­
phrenic’s habit of squeezing blackheads “as representing in the first instance
masturbation, and secondly castration where this is consequential upon mastur­
bation. Accordingly, the blackhead represents the penis, and the squeezed-out
cavity represents the vagina in the sense o f that which is left when the penis has
been lopped o ff” {Sigm und Freud, p. 190). The effortlessness o f detection cited
here is surely ascribable to the standard meanings o f protuberances and concavi­
ties as expounded in The Interpretation o f Dreams.

281
Wollheim seek to prop up Freud in more ways than I indicat­
ed, but none of them could impress a reader who hadn’t already
decided that psychoanalytic truths are unassailable.
Thus Nagel and Wollheim bow to the pretension o f ana­
lysts to be uniquely situated, in Nagel’s words, to “probe far
more deeply and uncover far more material for interpretation”
than others, garnering “extensive and systematic insights”®
that we ought to believe. “It is impossible,” declares Wollheim,
“to have access to the mass o f clinical evidence that a given
hypothesis [of Freud’s] subsumes,” and hence we cannot know
“how the match of one case to a hypothesis is enhanced by a
consideration of all parallel cases.Consequently, Wollheim
hands a blank check to the master without pausing to worry
that “parallel cases” might reflect a parallel methodological
extravagance. And as I mentioned in my article, Nagel displays
the same laxity, averring that each Freudian hypothesis or
interpretation will “find its empirical support in countless
other applications to other patients in other settings.” ^^
Both thinkers minimize the besetting epistemic problem
of suggestion, maintaining that we needn’t concern ourselves
with that well-authenticated phenomenon until its dynamics are
better understood. Moreover, both o f them urge that because
Freudian notions are hard to test experimentally, they are there­
fore exempt from the necessity of such testing. ^^ (As an example,

8. Thomas Nagel, “Freuds Permanent Revolution,” The New York Review^

May 12, 1994, p. 36.
9. Wollheim, Sigm und Freudy p. 237.
10. Nagel, “Freuds Permanent Revolution,” p. 35.
11. Wollheim, The M ind and Its Depthsy pp. 102-111, and Nagel, “Freuds
Permanent Revolution,” p. 35.

282
Nagel cites the supposedly illuminating idea that melancholia
features “abuse by the ego of the internalized object.”) Thus
psychoanalysis, in the charitable view of Wollheim and Nagel,
deserves special indulgence for what other observers consider
to be its worst vice, the proliferation of concepts and entities
that stand at several removes from experience.
Again, one might expect two keen philosophers to be
troubled by the fact that the “insights” produced by all schools
of analysis amount to a tangle of contradictory propositions.
Doesn’t that fact suggest an epistemic flaw in the fundamental
method o f knowledge acquisition—the study of free associations
—that those schools share? But Wollheim and Nagel allow the
point to escape them. And this lapse is doubly remarkable in
view of the fact that they themselves favor different versions of
the Freudian gospel. Thus, Nagel dissents from what Wollheim
calls Melanie Klein’s “proper continuation” of Freud’s thought,
whereby, for example, every nursling reportedly “seeks to
destroy the inside of the mother’s body, and uses its urine and
faeces for this purpose.” In this instance, Nagel’s doubts
appear to rest on legitimate empirical considerations. One
waits in vain, however, for him to acknowledge that similar
considerations vitiate mainstream Freudian dogma.
Finally, Wollheim and Nagel alike attempt to shield
psychoanalysis from criticism by assimilating it to a bland-
looking intuitive “form of understanding” ^"^ that is said to

12. Wollheim, The M ind and Its Depths^ p. 52.

13. Klein, quoted in The M ind and Its Depths, p. 58; cf. Nagel, “ Freuds
Permanent Revolution,” p. 36, and Nagels letter, p. 56.
14. Nagel’s letter, p. 56.

283
characterize psychological explanation in general. This tactic
serves a joint strategy o f claiming that Freud, rather than hav­
ing derived eccentric dogmas from overzealous guesswork,
merely “added to the commonsense conception” of the mind
so as “to accommodate new mental phenomena that he had
discovered.” *^ Unfortunately, Wollheim and Nagel offer no
reason for us to agree that Freud did discover new mental phe­
nomena, much less that his explanations of them deserve to be
believed.*^’ Their oversubtle arguments, like Cavell’s own, boil
down to special pleading for a tradition whose waywardness
has by now become generally apparent.

15. Wolheim, The M ind and Its Depths, p. 92; see Nagel, “ Freuds Permanent
Revolution,” p. 34.
16. Nagel adds that in any given act of interpretation, “what is unintelligible to
naive common sense may be seen as ‘justified,’ after all, from a concealed aspect
o f the subject’s point o f view” (Nagel’s letter, p. 56). But once again the argu­
ment is circular, since the question at issue is precisely whether or not people
“conceal” motives o f a Freudian kind. The fact that patients can be maneuvered
into acquiescence to an analyst’s surmises about such motives hardly warrants
the assumption that the motives inhabited the patients’ preexisting “point o f view.”

284
 a f t e r w o r d :
(CONFESSIONS OF A
pREUD ßASHER
In its issue o f November 18, 1993, The New York Review o f
Books published a review essay of mine, “The Unknown Freud,”
to which the adjective “controversial” hardly seems adequate.
The article attracted, and continues to attract, more attention
than all of my previous writings combined, dating back to my
fledgling literary-critical efforts in 1957. For several ensuing
months, an unprecedented number o f protesting letters to the
editor poured in, mostly from psychoanalysts outraged by the
indignities I had heaped on their honorable profession and its
founder. Two rounds of published exchanges, the first of which
alone consumed more ink than The New York Review had ever
devoted to the aftermath o f an article, left the overwhelming
majority of complainants fuming on the sidelines.

This essay originally appeared, in slightly different form and with the editors’
preferred title, “Cheerful Assassin Defies Analysis,” in The [London] Times
Higher Education Supplement, March 3, 1995, pp. 20-21.

287
 As several correspondents remarked in injured tones, the
main burden of “The Unknown Freud” could have been pre­
dicted from several earlier writings of mine. In my essay
“Analysis Terminable” of 1980, and in several following, I had
made a similar two-pronged argument: that Freuds scientific
and ethical standards were abysmally low and that his brain­
child was, and still is, a pseudoscience.^ Why, then, did this
recent essay prove so upsetting?
A number of answers come to mind. For one thing,
Freudian loyalists were shocked to find my judgments aired in
the pages of The New York Review, where Freudian issues are
often discussed but only rarely with such negative adamancy
as mine. Thus the editors of The New York Review appeared
almost like pet owners who had negligently or maliciously
consigned their parakeet to the mercies o f an ever-lurking cat.
My essay also contained some disturbing biographical infor­
mation which, though known to Freud scholars, either was
new to most analysts—for example, the story of Freud’s greedy
and fatal meddling in the life of his disciple Horace Frink—or
had been discounted by them as atypical and insignificant,
such as the infamous sequel to Emma Eckstein’s nasal surgery,
when Freud made so bold as to accuse that unfortunate
woman of “bleeding for love” of himself.
Then, too, there was my report of what a number of
scholars have independently discovered about the birth of
psychoanalysis—namely, that Freud, amid the ruins of his
untenable “seduction theory,” peremptorily and gratuitously
saddled his patients with a repressed desire for the incestuous

1. See Chapters 2-5 o f Skeptical Engagements (Oxford University Press, 1986).

288
acts that he had until then been unsuccessfully goading them
to remember. (His later contention that they had told him
about having been molested in early childhood character­
istically reshaped facts to comply with theory.) My readers
were thus invited to confront the unsettling fact that psycho­
analysis arose from nothing more substantial than a confused
effort on Freuds part to foist his explanatorily worthless
hobbyhorse o f repression onto the fantasy life of his patients—
patients who, moreover, far from being cured by his revised
ministrations as he would eventually claim, had for the most
part already lost faith in him and abandoned his practice. My
essay left a plain impression that such opportunistic impro­
vising, which was to become Freuds chronic reaction to the­
oretical crises, could not have been the work of a genuine
scientific pioneer.
Beyond those provocations, however, a more general factor
must have swelled the uproar over “The Unknown Freud”: the
gradual but accelerating collapse of psychoanalysis as a respected
institution. The “fear and rage” that one analyst (David S.
Olds) noted among his colleagues when my essay appeared
would not have spread so rapidly without a preexisting sense
that Freudianism could ill withstand another setback. Indeed,
one sign of that desperation pervaded the very letters disputing
the conclusions of my article. Whereas those who objected to
“Analysis Terminable” in 1980 had flatly denied my entire case
against psychoanalysis, these recent statements mostly took
the plaintive form of “yes, but___” Although virtually all of
my charges were conceded in one letter or another, each cor­
respondent clung to some mitigating factor that might justify
the continuation of psychoanalytic business as usual.

289
 Yes, one analyst conceded, Freudian grand theory is a
mess, but some o f its lower-level formulations still prove
helpful when patients invest belief in them (Herbert S.
Peyser). Yes, the idea of repression remains undemonstrated,
but cant we acknowledge that it possesses “heuristic value in
generating research and further theory-building” (Morris
Eagle)? Yes, “Freuds tendentious arguments... were extreme­
ly harmful to some of his patients and to the field he tried so
hard to establish,” but “psychoanalytic scholars continue to
study Freud s theories and case histories as part of the ongoing
effort t o ... widen knowledge about a still largely unknown
psychological universe...” (Marian Tolpin). Yes, Freud was
a bit of a scoundrel, but at least “he did not sleep with
his patients, nor found a lucrative ashram” (David S. Olds).
And yes, American psychoanalysis is in decline, but the blame
can be laid entirely on tight-fisted insurance companies that
fail to appreciate the need for lengthy treatment (Lester
Luborsky). To judge from such temporizing, psychoanalysis
appears destined to end not with a bang but with a querulous
whine.
Meanwhile, many Freudians who were stung by my
article answered it with a tactic that Freud himself had devel­
oped in combat with such defectors as Fliess, Jung, Adler,
Rank, and Ferenczi. Instead of addressing my criticisms, they
treated them as symptoms o f my own dysfunctional state. “I
wonder,” wrote one unpublished correspondent, “if Frederick
Crews was aware when he wrote his vitriolic attack on Freud,
that he laid himself bare to Freudian interpretations that
would be numerous enough to fill as much space as his
article.” Another agreed: “We are all post-modern enough to

290
understand the writing of his review as an acty an act about
himself and not...about psychoanalysis itself.” These and
other writers, though they usually deem years o f daily clinical
inquiry to be scarcely sufficient for grasping a patients deep
unconscious structures, did not scruple to diagnose my own
fixations by return mail.
Crews, wrote one petitioner to The New York Review^ can­
not see “that he is trapped in a transference which began as an
idealization of [Freud], and which proceeded in normal fashion
to hostile rejection__ [Thus] he is stuck on Freud-bashing.”
Peter Aspden said much the same thing in The Times Higher
Education Supplement? Eugene Goodheart, mounting a cautious
endorsement o f psychoanalysis in Dissent, summarily dismissed
my criticism of Freud as an act of “parricide”—as opposed, say,
to one of consumer protection.^ My old student Murray
Schwartz explained in sorrow to Lingua Franca that the problem
is indeed oedipal: Crews is “after the sins of all the fathers.”"^And
the psychoanalyst and sociology professor Jeffrey Prager, writing
in Contention, depicted me as a “jilted lover” with an irrational
vendetta against my erstwhile soulmate, Freud. By persecuting
Freud, Prager divined, I am attempting to repress my Freudian
past—“to pretend that it never happened.”^

2. Peter Aspden, “Oedipus, the Final Act?,” The [London] Times Higher
Education Supplement, May 20, 1994, pp. 13» 21.
3. Eugene Goodheart, “ Freud on Trial,” Dissent, Vol. 42 (Spring 1995),
pp. 2 3 6 -2 4 3 ; the quoted word appears on p. 236.
4. Adam Begley, “Terminating Analysis,” Lingua Franca, Vol. 4 (July/August
1994), pp. 24-30; the quotation is from p. 29.
5. Jeffrey Prager, “On the Abuses o f Freud: A Reply to Masson and Crews,” Con­
tention, Vol. 4 (Fall 1994), pp. 211-25; the quotations are from pp. 217 and 218.

291
 Other Freudians looked beyond my individual sickness
to that of the age. Critiques like mine, said Eli Zaretsky in
Tikkun, “are continuous with the attack on the Left that began
with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968__ They con­
tinue the repudiation of the revolutionary and utopian possi­
bilities glimpsed in the 1960s__ Paul Williams, writing in
The Sunday Times, took a slightly different tack, noting “the
return of the (literally and militarily) repressed” after the fall
of communism in 1989:

So let’s get Freud. He brought up all this stuff. He said

that civilisation was a veneer over polymorphous per­
versity, incest, rapaciousness, man as a wolf to other
men. . The analysts and therapists are held responsi-
ble for evoking all these things that I cannot bear to
know about my friends, my family and myself as
found].^

In short, then, according to Williams, “Freud-baiting is

above all a political activity. Those who wish to smear and dis­
mantle Freud’s work seek opportunities to define and manage
what the rest of us think and believe about the way our minds
and bodies function” (Williams, p. 18). (Does anyone besides
me hear an echo of Dr. Strangelove in this last sentence?)
Whatever their specific hypotheses about my motives.

6, Eli Zarersky, “The Attack on Freud,” Tikkun, Vol. 9 (May/June 1994),

pp. 65-70; the quoted words are from p. 67.
7. Paul Williams, “It’s All in the Mind,” The [London] Sunday 77w«, June 26,
1994, pp. 18-19; the quotations are from p. 19.

292
most Freudian commentators agreed that “The Unknown
Freud” had been composed in a state o f bitter anger by a
malcontent with a vicious disposition. Indeed, this assump­
tion was so common that Adam Begley, writing a profile of
me in Lingua Franca some months later, considered it news­
worthy to report that I am “quiet, unassuming, the kind
of guy you just have to call mild-mannered,” and that my
academic associates consider me “a kind and gentle man.”^
Am I a Jekyll-Hyde, or could it be that taking an uncompro­
mising line toward Freud and Freudianism is actually consis­
tent with human decency?
Even Begley, to be sure, added that Crews “really hates
Freud” (Begley, p. 24)—but he was wrong. Rather, I am com­
pletely lacking in respect for Freud, a very different matter. I don t
hate Freud any more than, say, Karl Popper hated him, or than
Ralph Nader hated General Motors. In each case the skeptical
writer feels prompted to denounce a combination o f unsub­
stantiated claims, inflated reputation, and deleterious practical
consequences. The act of denunciation can be cheerful and con­
fident as well as public-spirited. That was my mood, I clearly
recall, during the writing of “The Unknown Freud.”
In theory at least, Freudians ought to have been well
equipped to guard against mistaking their anger for my own.
Their pertinent doctrine of projection, after all, lay ready to
hand for acts o f ironic self-scrutiny. In failing to make use of
it, however, my adversaries were being loyal to the Freudian
tradition in a more fundamental sense. Despite Freud s own
self-analysis and the training analyses that came later.

8. Begley, “Terminating Analysis,” pp. 24, 29.

293
psychoanalysis has always been tacitly employed as a psychol­
ogy for the others, not for the interpreter him- or herself. As
Ernest Gellner has shown, Freudianism rests on an outlook of
‘ conditional realism” whereby psychological truth is thought
to be monopolized by, and fully available to, those who have
removed their deeply programmed barriers to clarity. The ana­
lyzed and the doctrinally faithful are thus exempt from their
own otherwise remorseless hermeneutic o f suspicion. Since
the quintessential Freudian assertion is, in Gellners words, “I
am freer of inner veils than thou,” recourse to ad hominem
argument becomes all but irresistible.^ This is why the numer­
ous slurs on my personality that circulated in the wake of
“The Unknown Freud” were not deviations from but typical
instances of the Freudian way with dissenters.
In rendering their diagnoses-at-a-distance, my critics
appear to have been guided by a principle that struck them as
too obviously warranted to bear articulating—namely, that
“Freud bashing” is itself a sign of mental illness. They simply
knew, after all, that Freud, despite some occasional missteps
and out-of-date assumptions, had made fundamental discov­
eries and permanently revolutionized our conception of the
mind. As three of the unpublished New York Review corre­
spondents put it, Freud had proved once and for all that our
behavior owes a great deal to unconscious emotions and ideas,
that the mind can prove extraordinarily devious, and that
humans fall ill when the real and the ideal, or desire and neces­
sity, or the rational and the irrational are out of harmony.

9. Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or The Coming o f Unreason

(London: Paladin, 1985), p. 97.

294
 These and similar formulations were noteworthy for
their high quotient o f generality and vagueness, approaching,
in thinness o f atmosphere, the perfect vacuum achieved by the
historian and Freud apologist Peter Gay, who has character­
ized Freud s “central idea” as the proposition that “every human
is continuously, inextricably, involved with others--- It is
hard to dispute any o f these statements about “humans,” but
it is also hard to see why they couldn’t be credited as easily to
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche—if not indeed to Jesus
or Saint Paul—as to Freud. Was it really Freud who first dis­
closed such commonplaces? Or, rather, has the vast cultural
sway of Freud’s system caused us to lose focus on his more spe­
cific, highly idiosyncratic, assertions, to presume that a num­
ber of them must have been scientifically established by now,
and to transform him retrospectively into the very personifi­
cation of “human” complexity and depth?
Freud bashing begins to look less self-evidently patho­
logical when we lower our sights to Freud’s actual, far from
modest, claims to discovery in four major categories of
knowledge:
1. The causes and cure o f neurosis. We needn’t pause over
Freud’s pretensions in this realm, since scarcely anyone,
including Freudian practitioners, can now be found who
takes them seriously. The “oedipal repression etiology” of
neurotic complaints is a dead letter, and mainstream psy­
choanalysis has backed away from its original boast of
curative power.

10. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 147-148.

295
 2. The meaning o f symptoms^ dreams, and errors. Freud s
greatest novelty lay here, in his widening of intentionality to
cover phenomena that had been thought to lack expressive
content or, in the case o f dreams, to be expressive only in ran­
dom flashes. When we get down to the details, however—for
example, Freuds attribution of '‘Doras” asthmatic attacks to
her once having witnessed an act o f parental intercourse, or his
explanation of her coughing as an allusion to her desire to
suck her fathers penis—we find that the symptomatic inter­
pretations rest on nothing more substantial than vulgar the­
matic affinities (heavy breathing in coitus=asthma; one oral
function=another) residing in Freuds own prurient mind. So,
too, the heart o f his dream theory, the contention that every
dream expresses a repressed infantile wish, was merely an
extrapolation from his etiology of neurosis; it is counter­
intuitive and has never received an iota of corroboration. As
for the theory of errors, Sebastiano Timpanaro among others
has shown that it suffers from Freuds usual overingeniousness
and wanton insistence on universal psychic determinism and
that it is unsupported, in its emphasis on repressed causes of
slips, by any of the examples provided in The Psychopathology
o f Everyday Life.^^ Having serially applied the same style of
license to the decoding of symptoms, dreams, and errors,
Freud was able to imagine that the resultant “convergence of
findings” had proved him correct in all three areas. All it really
proved is that the imperiousness of Freudian interpretation
knows no bounds.

11. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, translated by Kate Soper

(Humanities Press, 1976).

296
 3. Methodological principles for investigating the mind.
Chief among these, in Freuds view, was free association, the
correct management of which can supposedly allow us not
merely to discover the meaning of a dream but also to trace a
symptom to its traumatic source in childhood. As Ludwig
Wittgenstein suspected and as Adolf Griinbaum and Malcolm
Macmillan have shown in laborious detail, the claim is hollow.
A patients ramblings, which Freud took to be a direct window
on the invariant repressed unconscious, are channeled and
contaminated by the psychoanalytic exchange itself, and in­
stead of establishing the causes of earlier events, they merely
show what is on the patient s contemporary mind as she strives
to meet (or thwart) the analysts expectations.
O f greater intuitive appeal are the numerous “mechan­
isms of defense” that Freud invoked for retracing the psychic
compromises behind a given expression or symptom. (I have
already mentioned one of them, projection.) Here, too, how­
ever, the prospect of reliable hermeneutic insight turns to dust.
The so-called mechanisms are merely a lavish set o f options
for creating, not detecting, thematic links. In the absence of
any guidelines for knowing which “mechanism” (if any)
shaped a given phenomenon, the application o f these tools by
different interpreters yields a cacophony o f incompatible ex­
planations—and, ultimately, an indefinite proliferation of
squabbling sects.
4. The structure and dynamic operation o f the mind. Even
when he sounded most tentative in this realm, Freuds specu­
lations about conscious, preconscious, and unconscious men­
tal systems, or about the ego, the superego, and the id, or
about instincts of self-preservation and sex, or o f life and

297
death, went far beyond any data that he could legitimately
claim to have unearthed. On close inspection, the Freudian
“dynamic unconscious” turns out to be not only a morass of
contradictions between primitive and sophisticated functions
but also an ontological maze peopled by absurd homunculi
possessing their own inexplicable sets of warring motives. To
be sure, Freud was occasionally willing to admit that his
“metapsychological” constructs were speculative, even mytho­
logical. Nevertheless, he persisted in endowing them with
quasi-physical energies and seemingly precise functions, and
most of his disciples have followed suit. The result has been a
legacy of utter conceptual murk.
Where, then, are Freud’s authenticated contributions
not to ethics or mores or literary criticism but to actual
knowledge of the mind? So far as I am aware, no distinctively
psychoanalytic notion has received independent experimental
or epidemiological support—not repression, not the Oedipus
or castration complex, not the theory of compromise forma­
tion, nor any other concept or hypothesis. Nor is this negative
result anomalous in view of the reckless, conquistadorial
manner in which psychoanalytic theory was launched and
maintained in the teeth of rational criticism. What passes
today for Freud bashing is simply the long-postponed
exposure of Freudian ideas to the same standards of noncon­
tradiction, clarity, testability, cogency, and parsimonious explan­
atory power that prevail in empirical discourse at large. Step
by step, we are learning that Freud has been the most overrat­
ed figure in the entire history of science and medicine—one
who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false
etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry.

298
 Still, the legend dies hard, and those who challenge it
continue to be greeted like rabid dogs. A year after “The
Unknown Freud” appeared, I published another long article
in The New York Review, this one attacking the pernicious
“recovered memory movement” and detailing its rather obvi­
ous origins in some of the most fundamental premises of
Freudianism. The first of many lamentations—seven grandil­
oquent pages, signed by a psychoanalyst—arrived by fax on
the very day that the first half of my two-installment essay hit
the newsstands. Having been “made physically ill” by my ear­
lier effort, the writer thought it best to quit this time “after
reading less than a full page.” Thus restored to equanimity, he
set about the task of refutation.

299
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MORRIS I A(,I I

M A I I H I W I I I 1. II I R D I I Yl

M I I N I S I I RSON

ROHI R I R. l l c M I

I Wtl S H O P K IN S

I I s I I R I I HORSK^

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HI R N \ R H I . PA( I I I A

‘P I M I OPI

R HI R I s. PI YS I R

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“A dazzling book. Crews brilliantly marshals the damning new
scholarship on Freud the man and on analytic theory.”
- C A R O L TAVRIS, author of The Mismeasure o f Woman

“In the two essays that form the core of this book, Frederick Crews
convincingly dismantles the entire Freudian enterprise, from beginning
to end.”
- J O H N F. K I H L S T R O M , Department of Psychology, Yale University

“Frederick Crews s voice of common sense has cut through the mass
hysteria about repressed memory syndrome. Always fearless and provocative,
he has finally exposed a fashionable fad which has ruined many innocent
people.” -
- P H Y L L I S G R O S S KU R T H

“Few can read Crewss slashing attack . . . without realizing that for
almost a century psychiatrists, thinkers, and writers have been bamboozled
by a pseudoscience as devoid of empirical evidence as the fantasies of
Karl Marx.”
- M A R T I N G A R D NE R

I RED r R u K ( : R1 \VS s books include Out o f Afv System:

Tsychoanalysis. Ir/t olo'^y, and ( rttunl Aiethod, Shcptu a ! ¡.n^aycmrui
and The ( rines Hear It Auutv: Amenean hietiou and the Auidemy,
which was nominated lor the
National Ht>ok C riiics ('irck ISBN
Award. He is Prtifessor I nieritus
52295
and former chair of the I’ngli.sh
IXpartment at the University ol
California, Berkeley.

9 7809A0 322042