UNTIL we agree where Sigmund Freud went wrong, a reliable understanding
of mental disease will elude us, as will any sensible science of consciousness.
Richard Webster鈥檚 book, Why Freud Was Wrong (HarperCollins, 拢25,
ISBN 0 00 255568 9), advances neither cause. Freud was, of course, an IBEFU
(Intellectually Brilliant, Emotionally Fouled Up) person, a damaging but common
affliction. But not so common that Webster鈥檚 claim, 鈥淲e are all Freudians now鈥�,
rings true. This is sloppy thinking, and compounds Freud鈥檚 own
inconsistencies.
Freud was a colossus, a massive intellect, the keenest clinical observer of
mental disorders in the past 200 years. His paper on the aetiology of hysteria,
published in April 1896 is still the best account of child abuse I have ever
read. So why did he disown it? He talked to patients as if their feelings really
mattered鈥攕omething not all doctors do even today. Yet the theories he
propounded in his final years are so 鈥渇ouled up鈥�, they are
counterproductive.
There are two further bugbears. Like Christopher Columbus, Freud claimed to
have 鈥渄iscovered鈥� something that was already there. Freud also suffered bizarre
anxieties all his life, insisted his findings needed neither evaluation nor
readjustment, and remained impossibly rigid where fluidity and flexibility were
necessary.
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Second, as Jeffrey Masson has bravely documented in The Assault on
Truth, Freud underwent a cataclysmic reversal when his father died. He
couldn鈥檛 confront his father鈥檚 memory鈥攁nd says so, with characteristic
clarity, in his letter of 17 September 1897. Like post-traumatic victims today,
he felt compelled to retreat from reality into a world of symbols and
dreams, where I for one do not care to follow. He set back our understanding of
child abuse by a hundred years.
In the grip of this fear, Freud kept swapping his theoretical foundation
stones every five years鈥攄rifting aimlessly among genitals, breasts,
mouths, anuses and so on. Worse, he excommunicated anyone who, like Sandor
Ferenczi, wanted to criticise parents. John Bowlby bitterly complained about
being prevented from examining child abuse, and went on to develop attachment
theory instead, claiming that infants need to bond with their parents.
Jacques Lacan is another case in point鈥攎uch of the notorious
鈥渄ifficulty鈥� that readers encounter in his work due to his obscurantist style
and changing views reflects Freud鈥檚 intrinsic inconsistencies. Lacan For
Beginners by Darian Leader and Judy Groves (Icon Books, 拢7.99, ISBN 1
874166 31 5) shows this psychoanalytic 鈥減arent problem鈥� in action with excellent
clarity: why involve the child in verbal acrobatics when what they most need is
healthy parental attachment?
Suppose Freud鈥檚 parents had read Raising Your Child鈥檚 Inner Self
Esteem by Karen Owens (Plenum, $24.95, ISBN 0 306 45084 4). Perhaps
his self-esteem would not then have been permanently impaired by his father
bellowing 鈥淭he boy will come to nothing!鈥� at him when he was only 7 or 8 years
old. This event terrified Freud all his life, and landed us with no end of
corrosive, half-baked half-truths. Writing about self-esteem, however, demands
confidence, which Owens doesn鈥檛 always have. She is over-prescriptive at times,
wagging her parental finger too often. But she covers the major points and makes
it clear how ineffective punishment is. The trouble with this, as with all
self-help books, is that those who most need help risk being made more anxious,
not less.
This applies to Stress (Thorsons, 拢5.99, ISBN 0 7225 3192 3), a
fact that the author, Leon Chaitow, acknowledges. He also emphasises that the
deepest stress comes from what he calls early imprinting and I call faulty
attachment.
John Cutting and Anne Charlish鈥檚 look at Schizophrenia (Thorsons,
拢7.99, ISBN 0 7225 3122 2) presents today鈥檚 conventional wisdom well
enough, but in their concern to ease the parents鈥� burden they omit attachment
altogether. They castigate psychotherapy for being too unreal, but exclude clear
evidence that benign hospital regimes bring fewer relapses. They work by
boosting self-esteem, what else?
Only when the damage that faulty attachment inflicts has been more widely
acknowledged will therapies designed to 鈥渞e-attach鈥� flourish. Then the world of
mental disorder could begin to throw off its current Stygian (and Freudian)
gloom.