Author: Ophelia Benson

From B&W’s Letters page, a discussion of Freud, Webster, Masson, the unconscious, the seduction theory. Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: an Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud.

Richard R. Warnotck, 25/09/2005

Understanding history may not be absolutely essential to understanding psychology but it is at least very helpful. The truth is that Webster gets some of Freud’s ideas just wrong, so his arguments are directed not so much against Freud as against his caricature of Freud. Consider the issue of ‘unconscious emotions’.

Here is Webster, page 250:

“One of the central objections to Freud’s methodology, however, is that by positing the existence of an Unconscious he effectively deepens the very mysteries which he claims to unravel. For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination.

Of course there are occasions when it is tempting to claim that a person has an ‘unconscious memory’ of a particular incident or that somebody feels ‘unconscious rage’ towards another person. Yet although the terms ‘unconscious memory’ and ‘unconscious rage’ may seem expressive and useful, we should recognize that they are semantically trecherous. A memory is something you have remembered and it defies logic to characterise as a memory something whose salient characteristic is that it has actually been forgotten. A similar objection applies to the term ‘unconscious rage’ since to use this term is to apply a word denoting the uninhibited expression of anger to a situation defined by the fact that no anger has been expressed.”

You’ll notice that Webster doesn’t quote Freud saying that there is ‘unconscious rage.’ We’re to accept that Freud believed in it just on Webster’s say-so, apparently. The closest Webster comes to discussing what Freud actually wrote about ‘unconscious emotions’ is on page 275. Webster quotes Freud telling a story about a girl who was in love without knowing she was in love, or maybe without knowing very clearly that she was in love.

That Freud grants that the girl may have known she was in love a bit weakens Webster’s claim that Freud thought one could be in love without having any idea one was in love. Webster seems not to notice this and doesn’t address the note of uncertainty in this passage. Webster’s argument that one cannot be in love without knowing it is weak. Love is surely a fairly complicated thing that one needs to make careful arguments about. Yet the only thing Webster offers in support of his view of love is the claim that most people agree with it. No evidence is offered that most people do agree with Webster (odd, coming from a man who damns Freud for making claims without evidence), nor is it explained why it would prove Webster right if they did.

I think that if one can mistake something that isn’t love for love (and believe me, this happens; perhaps I’ve had a more interesting life than Webster), there may be no reason one cannot be in love without realising it.

Turning to other passages in Freud, one finds evidence that he thought something different from what Webster claims he thought. Probably the first indication that Freud didn’t accept ‘unconscious emotions’ is on page 46 of the Introductory Lectures on psychoanalysis: “It [psychoanalysis] defines what is mental as processes such as feeling, thinking and willing, and it is obliged to maintain that there is unconscious thinking and unapprehended willing.” Conspicuously, feeling is the only one of the three mental processes mentioned in the first half of that sentence left out in the second half. Freud seems to implicitly reject or at least question ‘unconscious emotions’ right from the start.

Freud returns to the issue pages 458-459 of the introductory lectures:

“As you will recall, we have dealt with repression at great length, but in doing so we have always followed the vicissitudes only of the idea that is to be repressed – naturally, since this was easier to recognize and describe. We have always left on one side the question of what happens to the affect that was attached to the repressed idea; and it is only now that we learn that the immediate vicissitude of the affect is to be transformed into anxiety, whatever quality it may have exhbited apart from this in the normal course of events. This transformation of affect is, however, by far the more important part of the process of repression. It is not so easy to speak of this, since we cannot assert the existence of unconscious affects in the same sense as that of unconscious ideas.”

There is a long discussion of the question of whether there are unconscious feelings in Freud’s paper on The Unconscious, pages 179-182 of Volume 11 of the Penguin Freud library, the most interesting part of which begins with:

“We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. But in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, ‘unconscious consciousness of guilt, or a paradoxical ‘unconscious anxiety.’ Is there more meaning in the use of these terms than there is in speaking of ‘unconscious instincts’?

The two cases are in fact not on all fours. In the first place, it may happen that an effective or emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued. Owing to the repression of its proper representative it has been forced to become connected with another idea, and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If we restore the true connection, we call the original affective impulse an ‘unconscious’ one. Yet its affect was never unconscious; all that had happened was that its idea had undergone repression. In general, the use of the terms ‘unconscious affect’ and ‘unconscious emotion’ has reference to the vicissitudes undergone, in consequence of repression, by the quanitative factor in the instinctual impulse. We know that three such vicissitudes are possible: either the affect remains, wholly or in part as it is; or it is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above all into anxiety; or it is suppressed, i.e. it is prevented from developing at all. (These possibilities may perhaps be studied even more easily in the dream-work than in the neuroses). We know, too, that to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression and that its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved. In every instance where repression has succeeded in inhibiting the development of affects, we term those affects (which we restore when we undo the work of repression) ‘unconscious.’ Thus it cannot be denied that the use of the terms in question is consistent; but in comparison with unconscious ideas there is the important difference that unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing. Strictly speaking, then, and although no fault can be found with the linguistic usage, there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas.”

(The point of all this seems to be that sometimes we confuse one emotion for a different emotion, or fail to develop emotions we ought to develop, not that emotions can be unconscious).

Freud was well aware that there is a problem with talking about ‘unconscious emotions’, something Webster would have acknowledged were he an honest or credible scholar. Some reviewers of WFWW pointed out that Webster got this issue wrong (eg, Timothy Kendall). Kendall is not strictly correct when he says that Freud is clear that ideas can be unconscious but emotions cannot; Freud is actually somewhat ambiguous on this point, but as far as I can see ‘unconscious emotions’ aren’t used as anything more than a figure of speech. So what Webster says Freud ought to have said about unconscious emotions was almost exactly what Freud did say about them.

Allen Esterson, 26/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “Kendall is not strictly correct when he says that Freud is clear that ideas can be unconscious but emotions cannot; Freud is actually somewhat ambiguous on this point, but as far as I can see ‘unconscious emotions’ aren’t used as anything more than a figure of speech.”

As Richard Warnotck says, there are ambiguities (and, I would add, inconsistencies) in what Freud wrote on this subject. In Studies on Hysteria he inferred that the source of Elisabeth von R.’s leg pains was her repressed love for her brother-in-law: “This girl felt towards her brother-in-law a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being” (1895, SE 2, p. 157). As she was not consciously aware of this supposed love, this sentence implies that her feelings towards her brother-in-law were unconscious.

More generally, he wrote about dream censorship that prevented an individual’s conscious access to various “lusts” and “hatreds” which reside in the Unconscious (1915-16, SE 15, pp. 142-143). Whatever he wrote elsewhere, it is difficult not to interpret this as indicating the existence of unconscious emotions.

Regarding the section of Webster’s book with which Richard Warnotck is taking issue, the central thrust (Chapter 11) relates to Freud’s extending a widely-accepted view that there are mental processes of which we are unaware by introducing an entity called “the Unconscious” which he treated as an autonomous region of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms. Regardless of his understanding of specific details about the workings of this inferred Unconscious, Webster’s central contention here is that its use in psychoanalytic writings is semantically treacherous. This remains the case regardless of what Freud wrote in his theoretical discussions. Einstein wrote of physicists something like: don’t listen to what they say [of a philosophical nature], watch what they do. Likewise, whatever Freud wrote here or there, his application of abstract entities such as the Unconscious and its constituent processes is often dubious.

In that same chapter Webster rejects Freud’s claim that his psychoanalytic technique enables the adept to uncover the contents of this subterranean Unconscious. Essentially Webster argues (p. 251-253) that the introduction of the psychoanalytic Unconscious, and the techniques that supposedly enabled him to access its contents, enabled him to provide his own hypotheses and theoretical speculations with a pseudo-empirical basis. This is what I believe is central to the chapter in question, not arguable details of what precisely Freud maintained about the workings of the Unconscious, of which he was himself sometimes confused. William McDougall’s dissection of Freud’s attempts to explain the workings of the Unconscious led him to assert that Freud’s writings on this subject resemble “a great tangle in which Freud lashes about like a great whale caught in a net of his own contriving” (1936, p. 60). (W. McDougall, Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology, Methuen, 1936.)

Richard R. Warnotck, 28/09/2005: In response to Allen Esterson, I have to insist that the problem with Webster’s criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not that he is confused about some minor details of it but that he does not know what it is.

The quote from WFWW shows that Webster thinks the unconscious equals ‘unconscious emotions’, such that showing that there cannot be ‘unconscious emotions’ means showing that there is no unconscious. Not only does Webster not succeed in showing that ‘unconscious emotions’ are impossible, even had he done so he would not have shown there was no unconscious, since, as the quotes from Freud show, the contents of the unconscious consist mainly of ideas, and only secondarily and metaphorically of emotions.

Webster’s basic criticism of the unconscious is therefore simply wrong, just as wrong as his belief that Plato lived in the first century AD.

The other criticisms are not telling either. If one has not succeeded in showing that the unconscious is incoherent or impossible in principle, and if the complaint that if the unconscious exists then anything goes is correct, it proves only that human nature is incomprehensible, an unsatisfactory outcome.

All this might not be worth pointing out were it not that, a decade after its publication, WFWW is still the most ambitious and wide-ranging critique of Freud ever attempted, and one of the most widely known ones. As a critic of Freud, shouldn’t you be concerned that this critique of Freud is also very poor scholarship?

Allen Esterson, 28/09/2005: Richard R. Warnotck writes: “The quote from WFWW shows that Webster thinks the unconscious equals ‘unconscious emotions’, such that showing that there cannot be ‘unconscious emotions’ means showing that there is no unconscious.”

No it doesn’t. In the passage that Richard quoted previously Webster chooses to discuss the notions of unconscious memory and unconscious emotions. It does not follow that he believes that the Freudian unconscious equals unconscious emotions. In fact in the same chapter Webster writes (p. 245) of Freud’s conceiving the Unconscious as an autonomous region of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms which are not in force elsewhere.

Richard writes that “the problem with Webster’s criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not that he is confused about some minor details of it but that he does not know what it is.”

If Webster is confused by the aspects of the Freudian unconscious that he highlights, he is not alone. As Richard himself acknowledges, Freud himself was “ambiguous” (not to say inconsistent) about this aspect of his conceptual schema and the psychoanalyst Timothy Kendall whose review Richard cites is also “not strictly correct” on this matter. In the previously cited critique by McDougall of Freud’s writings on the workings of the Unconscious the author demonstrates that “Freud does not scruple to change his most fundamental propositions, and pull them about in a way which, if they were the foundations of a logically constructed system, would bring the whole structure tumbling upon this mighty Sampson and his devoted followers.”

Richard writes: “If one has not succeeded in showing that the unconscious is incoherent or impossible in principle, and if the complaint that if the unconscious exists then anything goes is correct, it proves only that human nature is incomprehensible, an unsatisfactory outcome.”

The problem with this formulation is the ambiguity in the use of the word “unconscious”. If you mean the Freudian Unconscious, then successful critiques of this concept would mean only that the notion as conceived by Freud is incoherent or invalid. That says nothing about the comprehensibility of “human nature”, or indeed of the human mind.

“All this might not be worth pointing out were it not that, a decade after its publication, WFWW is still the most ambitious and wide-ranging critique of Freud ever attempted, and one of the most widely known ones.”

If by the “most ambitious and wide-ranging” you mean the most comprehensive (which is the most important characteristic of a full-scale critique), then you are simply wrong. The book that is widely accepted among Freud critics as the most comprehensive critique of Freud is undoubtedly Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (1997 [1993], MIT Press). This covers the whole field of Freud’s writings beyond any other author, and in a way Webster does not attempt. Webster examines Freud’s foundational clinical and theoretical claims as a basis for a highly individual attempt to place Freud’s theories in a particular historical context (as firmly grounded in a “Judaeo-Christian” heritage), and much of the book is devoted to this theme. To my knowledge, Freud critics have not generally endorsed that aspect of Webster’s book, and in a series of exchanges on the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement Crews took issue with Webster on this. For most of us the most valuable part of Webster’s book is his dissection of Freud’s clinical claims on which the foundations of psychoanalysis rested.

“As a critic of Freud, shouldn’t you be concerned that this critique of Freud is also very poor scholarship?”

Of course there are almost invariably mistakes and factual errors in any book, but I don’t accept that this is characteristic of Webster’s volume.

Richard R. Warnotck, 29/09/2005: Looking at it again, I can see that Allen Esterson is correct that Webster doesn’t say that the unconscious equals unconscious emotions. This does not save Webster from the charge that his arguments against the unconscious fail and misrepresent Freud.

Webster tells us that the unconscious consists of ‘thoughts, memories, and impulses’ on page 245, but five pages later claims that the unconscious is incoherent on the basis of an argument that refers only to memories and emotions. One can only guess why there is no argument against unconscious thoughts. Has Webster somehow forgotten that the unconscious is supposed to include thoughts?

One must also ask after those impulses. Are the impulses of page 245 the same as the emotions of page 250 or are they something different? If they are different, where is the argument against an unconscious impulse?

So my point against Webster remains valid. He is confused not simply by the aspects of the unconscious discussed on pages 250-3, but by all its aspects, since he is not consistent from page to page as to what the unconscious is supposed to be according to Freud. The only other possibility, that Webster thinks he doesn’t need an argument against unconscious thoughts, is even more pathetic.

While I agree with Webster that we should recognize that terms such as ‘unconscious rage’ are semantically treacherous, he is incorrect to imply that Freud failed to understand this. The quotes from Freud I provided show that he pointed this out long before Webster was born. I am inclined to suspect that Webster has taken these criticisms over from Freud without attribution and dishonestly used them against Freud.

Regarding Esterson’s other points, successful critiques of the unconscious would certainly say something about the comprehensibility of human nature. Were it not possible to understand human nature to at least some extent a successful criticism of the unconscious could not be made.

This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it. Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ p. 440.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that Webster’s book is entirely without value. Webster gets one other very important thing right: the theories of psychoanalysis are a secularised version of religious doctrines and they do resemble the notion of original sin. Here he is trying to explain not just psychoanalysis but history as well. Placing ideas in their larger context and explainining belief in them is more ambitious and more interesting than dissecting every last detail of psychoanalysis.

There is, however, a far more complex historical and psychological story behind psychoanalysis than Webster realises. I recently found an interesting article about this on the internet. If you register for Topica, which is free, you can find it here.

One may add that to begin to understand the implications of all that, one should consult both Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death and Jeffrey Masson’s The Oceanic Feeling, two very different books that deal with religious mysticism in somewhat similar ways.

Paul Power, 29/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it. Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ “

This is badly wrong. “one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it” is flat out nonsense. Are we really to be stuck with a theory that is illogical, unscientific and completely at variance with observed reality simply because we have no substitute? Does the quoted claim apply only to theories of human nature? If so why?

(Note that by “a theory that is illogical, unscientific and completely at variance with observed reality” I am referring to any theory of human nature with these characteristics and have no particular one in mind. The quoted claim above is not restricited to Freudianism and so cannot be defended by saying Freudianism does not have these characteristics).

Allen Esterson, 29/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “This does not save Webster from the charge that his arguments against the unconscious fail… Webster tells us that the unconscious consists of ‘thoughts, memories, and impulses’ on page 245, but five pages later claims that the unconscious is incoherent on the basis of an argument that refers only to memories and emotions. One can only guess why there is no argument against unconscious thoughts. Has Webster somehow forgotten that the unconscious is supposed to include thoughts?”

Richard: You give the impression that in the chapter in question Webster is concerned to “disprove” the Freudian Unconscious. The title of the chapter is “Exploring the Unconscious”, and Webster raises some points which he wishes to explore, including, e.g., the processes which Freud posits to lead from repressed memories to symptom formation. He is not formulating a ‘case’ against the Unconscious, but examining some specific features as he understands them. You’re presuming that Webster is endeavouring to ‘disprove’ the Unconscious, when he is simply putting forward some of his ideas about the inadequacies of Freud’s conceptions.

“Regarding Esterson’s other points, successful critiques of the unconscious would certainly say something about the comprehensibility of human nature. Were it not possible to understand human nature to at least some extent a successful criticism of the unconscious could not be made.”

Since this is reply to my writing (28/09/2005): “The problem with this formulation [of Warnotck’s] is the ambiguity in the use of the word ‘unconscious’. If you mean the Freudian Unconscious, then successful critiques of this concept would mean only that the notion as conceived by Freud is incoherent or invalid. That says nothing about the comprehensibility of “human nature”, or indeed of the human mind”,
I can only regard your reply as a non sequitur.

“This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it.”

Why not, if a specific theory is seriously flawed? As Paul Power indicates, am I precluded from rejecting a Catholic/Christian theory of the human personality just because I don’t have a comparably comprehensive (or even any) overarching theory to “replace” it. The fact that I don’t have (or know of) a “theory of everything” about the human mind and human behaviour à la psychoanalysis doesn’t preclude my examining its empirical claims and theoretical contentions and, when warranted in my judgement, rejecting them.

“Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ p. 440.”

From the fact that this is almost invariably the way science has progressed it does follow that in specific cases a theory cannot be rejected on rational/empirical grounds prior to the development of a comparable alternative. A strong case can be (and has been) made against the Freudian theory of dreams. We don’t (and historically people didn’t) have to wait for a comparably comprehensive theory of dreaming before rejecting Freud’s theories as flawed and unproven speculation.

Re the recommended Topica URL relating to Paglia: I registered at the site, then found I had to subscribe to a specific listserve (and receive around three messages a day) in order to access that URL. That’s something I can do without!

“One may add that to begin to understand the implications of all that, one should consult both Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death and Jeffrey Masson’s The Oceanic Feeling, two very different books that deal with religious mysticism in somewhat similar ways.”

Having perused Norman O. Brown’s speculative ramblings some decades ago I have no inclination to renew my acquaintanceship with his writings. Anyway, I’m not clear what books on religious mysticism have to do with the critical literature on Freud. What is missing from your comments is any challenge to (or even acknowledgement of the existence of) the critical literature examining Freud’s fundamental clinical claims that purportedly provide the foundations for his theorizing. Such critical writing can be found in abundance in the aforementioned M. Macmillan, Freud Evaluated (1997), on a more modest scale in my Seductive Mirage (1993), in Sections II and III of F. C. Crews (ed.), Unauthorized Freud (1998), throughout F. Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (1998), and, for people who read German: Han Israëls, Der Fall Freud (1999 [1993]).

Richard R. Warnotck, 30/09/2005: I agree with Allen Esterson that this discussion has basically served its purpose. I will however make a couple of parting remarks.

On Richard Webster’s views, let me quote him again, p 250: ‘For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination.’ This seems to be an unambiguous denial that the unconscious exists, in any sense. I have no idea what else that passage could be understood to mean.

The stuff about religious mysticism is not irrelevant. The article on the Paglia list, which I could e-mail to anyone who really wants it, points out the connection between reincarnation and the unconscious. This has been done before, but not as far as I know with regard to the recovered memory debate.

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death is part of the criticial literature on Freud and psychoanalysis. There is no contradiction here with the fact that it is also a book about religious mysticism, amongst other things. Brown is one of Webster’s major sources.

Regarding Jeffrey Masson, anyone interested in why he took the direction he did in the 1980s would be well advised to look at his earlier work in psychoanalysis. Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory were raised in the The Oceanic Feeling before being presented in The Assault on Truth. The Oceanic Feeling criticises Freud in several other ways as well, and is therefore also part of the criticial literature on psychoanalysis.

Allen Esterson, 30/09/2005: Just a couple of points on Richard Warnotck’s last posting. He quotes Webster’s writing “For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination”, and writes: “This seems to be an unambiguous denial that the unconscious exists, in any sense. I have no idea what else that passage could be understood to mean.”

It means that Webster is rejecting the concept of “the Unconscious” as postulated by Freud.

“Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory were raised in The Oceanic Feeling before being presented in The Assault on Truth.”

I think Richard may not have expressed what he really meant here. Far from having doubts about the seduction theory, Masson tried to resurrect it (albeit in the inaccurate terms that he presented it in The Assault on Truth).

Judging by his presentation of the historical facts in that book, Masson either failed to understand the seduction theory properly, or tendentiously misrepresented it in pursuance of his dramatic allegations of Freud’s suppression of the “truth”.

The key omissions in Masson’s presentation are that

(i) he fails to make clear that the supposed memories of the patients had to be unconscious (i.e., they had no memory of the supposed traumas)

(ii) he fails to mention that the supposed traumas had to have occurred in infancy (Freud wasn’t writing about child sexual abuse in general, as one would suppose from Masson’s book)

(iii) he gives the impression that Freud was concerned about the abuse of female children by their fathers. But the seduction theory was about repressed memories of sexual abuse in infancy regardless of the identity of the perpetrators. (In his 1896 papers fathers were not specifically mentioned in the lists of categories of supposed abusers. And one would not know from Masson’s book that one third of the patients involved were men.)

Contrary to the claims in Masson’s book, Freud was not concerned about sexual abuse of children per se, but about what he thought was his epoch-making discovery of the cause of the psychoneuroses, and the indispensable methodology that supposedly enabled him to analytically uncover the deeply repressed memories of infantile traumas.

I spell out more details of the episode in an article on B&W. See also this for an account of how Masson created a false impression of the background to Freud’s positing of the seduction theory in 1895.

Richard R. Warnotck, 01/10/2005: Yes, by ‘Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory’, I meant his doubts about the accepted story of why it was abandoned. I had assumed I would be understood that way.

Allen Esterson, 01/10/2005:

Masson’s explanation for Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory runs as follows: There was outrage against Freud’s child sexual abuse claims and in order to ingratiate himself with his colleagues Freud abandoned the seduction theory, now asserting that the supposed unconscious ‘memories’ of infantile abuse (later called “seductions”) were actually wishful fantasies, products of the Oedipus complex.

This explanation is erroneous in every respect.

1. Freud *concealed* his abandonment of the seduction theory from his colleagues, only making it public some seven years after reporting to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he had abandoned it.

2. In the first article (published in 1906)in which he intimated that he had abandoned his theory he still maintained that his childhood abuse claims published in 1896 were valid.

3. There was no outrage against Freud’s 1896 clinical contentions (though his highly improbable claims and flawed clinical procedures were not accepted by his colleagues, a few of whom voiced temperate objections in publications over the next few years).
(See: Esterson, A. (2002). “The myth of Freud’s ostracism by the medical community in 1896-1905: Jeffrey Masson’s assault on truth”, History of Psychology, 5 (2), pp. 115-134.)

4. Freud did not publish the “Oedipal fantasies” explanation for the 1896 claims until 1925, some thirty years after the episode. His explanation in 1914 was that the supposed unconscious ‘memories’ of sexual abuse were actually fantasies of “seduction”, the psychical function of which was to “cover up” repressed memories of infantile masturbation.

Richard R. Warnotck, 01/10/2005: In the interests of strict accuracy, Jeffrey Masson’s proposed explanation of why Freud [abandoned the seduction theory] is admittedly speculation: ‘My pessimistic conclusions may possibly be wrong. The documents may in fact allow a very different reading.’ p xxi of the introduction to Assault.

Allen Esterson makes Masson sound dogmatic in a way which he isn’t.

Allen Esterson, 01/10/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “In the interests of strict accuracy, Jeffrey Masson’s proposed explanation of why Freud [abandoned the seduction theory] is admittedly speculation: ‘My pessimistic conclusions may possibly be wrong. The documents may in fact allow a very different reading.’ p xxi of the introduction to Assault. Allen Esterson makes Masson sound dogmatic in a way which he isn’t.”

This is absolutely true, but that does not excuse his tendentious and misleading presentation of the evidence for his explanations for Freud’s change of mind (and the omission of crucial evidence against them) that I noted in my previous posting. And while Masson is not dogmatic on this specific issue, there is far more to the book than that. There is nothing tentative in his erroneous account of the historical basis of the story, which is of far greater moment than speculations about Freud’s motivations for his behaviour.