Is the Concept of "Psychic Reality" a Theoretical

Advance?
ADOLF GRÜNBAUM Ph.D.

ABSTRACT
1. "Psychic Reality" was the governing theme of the 39th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic
Association in 1995. But the concept of "psychic reality, " which originated in Freud 's modified seduction
theory, and singles out wishful fantasies from the remainder of our mental life, is quite misleading. Indeed, it
has generated dubious etiologic inferences.
2. The free associations of male patients typically lack the probative resources to li cense the
attribution of male "social anxiety " (e.g., diffidence) to hypothesized unconscious castration Phantasies,
even when these fears of castration are psychically real.
3. In Freud 's seduction etiologies of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, he offered no cogent evidence
that, before a child is socialized, any of its actual or fancied sexual experiences ("seductions" or "primal
scenes") are at ail traumatic (emotionally distressing), let alone pathogenic (morbific). Nor did later
analysts fill these evidential gaps. In all of psychiatry, traumaticity needs to be distinguished from
pathogenicity.
4. Melanie Klein 's theory and practice of child analysis are replete with the several serious
fallacies exposed in this paper.

Invited paper presented at the session on "Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Concept of Psychic
Reality," 39th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held in San Francisco on August
1, 1995. Acknowledgment. The psychoanalytic historian Rosemarie Sand has generously provided
invaluable help by her critical comments on the early drafts of this paper. She also steered me to some
useful references. 1 thank her warmly.

Adolf Grünbaum is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy, Research Professor of Psychiatry, and
Chairman, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh.

INTRODUCTION
1
It is widely held in the psychoanalytic community that Freud made a major
etiological advance between 1897 and 1909. Dur ing that period, he concluded
that repressed sexual childhood fantasies, which are the supposed residues of
phylogenetic in heritance (1917, p. 367), are major pathogens of neurosis, no
less than experiences of actual childhood molestations. And Freud employed
the concept of "psychic reality" when he stated the now modified seduction
etiology in 1917 as follows (1917):

It remains a fact that the patient has created these phantas ies for himself,
and this fact is of scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had
really experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess
psychical as contrasted with material reality, and: we gradually learn to
understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the
decisive kind [1917, p. 368].

This statement is the locus classicus of the notion of psychic reality, which
was the governing theme of the 39th Congress of the IPA in 1995.

But, in my view, the use of the term ''psychic reality" to single out wishful
fantasies from our richly variegated mental life is philosophically very
unfortunate. After all, genuine mem ories of actual seductions by an external
person, whichFreud labeled as having "material reality," are just as
"psychically real" in the ordinary sense as are mere wishful fantasies. Simi -
larly, it is obvious that the psychological experience of actually losing a loved
one from a fatal illness is just as "psychically real" as a delusional belief in
such a loss. Indeed, as Freud told us, in both the original seduction theory and
in its modifica tion, the child's mental idea of seduction is alike claimed to be
required for pathogenesis (1896a, p. 155).

Deplorably, the term "psychic reality" obscures the crucial fact that Freud's
modified version does not differ from its origi nal as to the vital pathogenic
role of psychic events as such; instead, they differ only in regard to whether
actual external molestations are causally necessary to initiate the etiologie
chain. Indeed before modifying his seduction etiology, Freud himself told us
explicitly in 1896 that the pathogenic effects of actual physical seductions are
crucially mediated by the psychic occurrence of the child's experience of the
presumed actual sexual episodes. Thus, as he opined in just this vein, any
postpu berty events that serve to precipitate a hysterical or obsessional
neurosis "enjoy a pathogenic influence ... only owing to their faculty for
awakening the unconscious psychical trace of the childhood event" (1896a, p.
155; emphasis added).

Alas, Freud's hapless term "psychic reality" also provided spurious

ammunition for Paul Ricoeur's thesis that the subject matter of psychoanalysis
defies study by the methods of the received empirical sciences (Grünbaum,
1984, pp: 49-61; 1990, 1993, chapter 4). This French philosopher, as well as
other hermeneuticists, were led astray by the false insinuation of a pseudo-
2
antithesis as to the etiologie role assigned to psychic events themselves by the
two different versions ofFreud's se duc tion-etiology of neurosis (hysteria).
Moreover, they commit the widespread fallacy of supposing that the
subjectivity of our feel ings and experiences, qua mode of their existence,
defies their being studied by the objective methods of science. Searle (1995)
has eloquently chided Daniel Dennett for having com mitted this error: "The
epistemic objectivity of method does not preclude ontological subjectivity of
subject matter" (p. 84).

EPISTEMOLOGICAL PITFALLS OF "PSYCHIC REALITY"

I main that the liabilities of the notion of "psychic reality" as used in

psychoanalytic discourse are not only con cep tual but also raise problems of
validation. For brevity,I shall refer to those problems as "epistemological"
problems. Freud acknowl edged in 1925 that the technique of free association
is incompe tent to de termine whether the patient's alleged memories of
childhood seductions were authentic or bogus (1925, p. 34). It would have
been hard enough to provide cogent evidence for the pathogenicity of actual
seductions even after their de facto occurrence is documented from
extraclinical evidence. Yet when Freud told us in 1917 that the supposedly
pathogenic "scenes from infancy ... are not true in the majority of cases"
(1917, p. 367), he created .two much more difficult epistemo logical problems,
as follows: (1) How to authenticate the actual occurrence of the hypothesized
seduction-fantasies during the adult patient's infancy, and, still more
ominously; (2) how to validate his major etiologie inference that the
presumed seduc tion fantasies are indeed the principal pathogens of two im -
portant neuroses.

True enough, as a residue from his 1895 "Project for a Scientific Psychology,"
Freud thought that neurons can be ca thected by endogenous no less th an by
exogenous sources, and thus can discharge in either case. Hence all cathexes
are alike "real," regardless of their source. And when the ego islargely un der
the dominance of the id, wishes acquire psychic reality, and their unsuccessful
repression supposedly becomes patho genic (cf. Fancher, 1973, p. 110).

As we know, Freud relied on the method free association to daim that he had
"unquestionably" validated precisely this etiologic inference (1925, p. 34).
Yet, in my principal books on psychoanalysis (Grünbaum, 1984, 1993),1 have
argued in detail that just this fundamental method of dinical investigation can -
not establish an etiology, that is, is not etiologically probative, no matter how
ably it can fathom the contents of the patient's conscious or unconscious
preoccupations or personality dispo sitions. And this, 1 daim, leaves the
purported pathogenic role of so-called "psychic reality" without foundation to
this very day. Yet, like Freud, analysts have traditionally spoken confi dently
of "tracing" symptoms, dreams, and slips etiologically to their unconscious
motives.
3
ln Charles Hanly's contribution on "Psychic Reality" at the 1995 IPA
Congress, he discussed his etiologie inference from the associative output of a
male patient.
Many of us have heard a male patient, who has come into analysis on account
of sexual difficulties, say from the couch "When 1 was six, 1 was castrated,"
having intended to say, "1 was circumcised." He is taken by surprise and
rather shaken by what he has heard himself say. In the associations that
follow, memories of his having suffered a therapeutic circumcision may
return to consciousness. He may recall his terror of the impending operation
in the doctor's office, his desperate fear of the doctor on the day of the
operation, the smell of the ether, his struggle against the loss of
consciousness, the pain-marred relief at re gaining consciousness, the pain of
urinating in the days that followed, leaving behind a depressive anxiety about
whether he would ever recover or have a penis like his fa ther's ....

Was not the ... experience sufficient, in itself, to cause a trauma? The boy
feared damage to his penis, a fear that could give rise, in a six or seven year
old, to the idea of castration. Why search further for an explanation of the slip
of the tongue? Why must the causality of an uncon scious [castration]
phantasy be invoked?

The patient's slip of the tongue was not an isolated event. He was a highly
gifted professional man in his early thirties who was unable to take an
examination that would have given him mobility and advancement in his
work. Al though he was married with two children, he was unable to have
intercourse without conjuring up a phantasy of his wife being raped by a
violent, powerful male. He had a recurrent dream in which he was attacked by
violent dogs. He dreamed that a dog took his hand in its jaws and then slowly
sucked his hand and arm into itself, as though the dog were a huge snake,
while his father stood by uncon cerned. In the transference, he took me to be a
compla cently powerful person who could not appreciate his fear of taking
action to advance his career. In the course of his associations to his
parapraxis, the patient remembered that during the summer following his
circumcision he had be come aware, with a tremendous sense of relief that his
penis was in a satisfactory condition.

Nevertheless, my patient, as shown in his slip of the tongue, retained an

unconscious phantasy that he had been castrated. It is reasonable to suppose
that an un con scious phantasy contributed to his adult sexual and aggres sive
[nonassertive] difficulties and that the phantasy had exercised an influence
upon his psychosexual develop ment no less fateful than the hallucinated
dagger that led Macbeth to Duncan.

Let me try to articulate, but then reject, the reasoning from his male patient's
associative output, on which Hanly relied to infer the cause of that patient's
afflictions. The questionable nature of that inference can best be laid bare by
focusing on Hanly' s basis for drawing the following conclusion: A supposed
4
uncon scious phantasy of dreaded castration "contributed" etiologi cally to the
talented patient's baseless, stultifying fear of taking an examination, a
challenge that had every promise of advanc ing his career.
As Hanly points out, the unfolding case history features an array of anxieties
harbored by his patient, starting with the fear, at age 6 or 7, of damage to his
penis from a therapeutic circumcision. These fears culminated in his irrational
appre hensions that he would fail the promotion-test, and that his wife would
be raped by a gorillalike man.

Clearly, fear is the shared affect of the various mental states recounted by
Hanly. And precisely that common theme of anxi ety is his principal basis for
diagnosing a supposed unconscious phantasy of a dreaded castration as the
pathogen of the pa tient's other fear-laden states: Diffidence and sexual
torments.

But, as 1 have argued in meticulous detail (Grünbaum, 1984, Introduction;

1990; 1993, chapter 4), just such an infer ence of causal relevance on the basis
of mere thematic affinity is demonstrably fallacious, though it is, alas,
inveterate in the psychoanalytic literature. Let me be clear. For argument's
sake, 1 assume that the highly atypical experience of being circum cised aslate
as age 6, rather th an shortly after birth, did leave this adult patient with a
residual fear of further injury to his penis, which cropped up in his slip of the
tongue of saying "castrated" rather than "circumcised." Charitably, 1 suppose
as well that, at this stage of the analysis, Hanly had not already insinuated the
psychoanalytic doctrine that all males uncon sciously dread castration by their
fathers for having lusted after their mothers.

Even then, there was no cogent reason at all, short of the thematic affinity
fallacy, for inferring, as Hanly did, that fear of castration caused the adult
patient's professional diffidence. Indeed, in the profession al and business
world, other far more plausible causes would first need to be ruled out. In my
own case, at age 12, a rabbi diagnosed my atheistic religious insubor dination
as due to stupidity, and he informed me that 1 would never amount to
anything. This experience might well have made me diffident, though it did
not, presumably because 1 discounted the rabbi as an authority figure.

Nor did Hanly offer any good ground for concluding that the patient's own
unconscious fear of his own genital mutila tion, if present, caused him to
imagine, whenever he was about to have intercourse with his wife, that she
would be raped by a beastlike male. Again, less far-fetched alternative
explanations need to be canvased: As Rosemarie Sand has pointed out tell -
ingly (private communication), sorne men feel enough anger and hostility
toward their wives to be incapable of making sex ual love to them without also
imagining them to be puni tively violated.

Alas, Hanly' s resort to castration anxiety to explain sun dry male

dysfunctions etiologically is a commonplace in the psycho analytic literature.

5
The writings of Fenichel and of Charles Brenner furnish revealing
illustrations. In his dassic treatise, Fenichel (1945) rashly admonishes us:
"castration anxi ety ... often very obviously is at the basis of [male] social
anxi ety," (p. 520). Many patients, we learn, use "father images" as
"castrators" when "governed by the continuous worry of maintaining the
favorable regard of physicians, dentists, bar bers, or tailors." Apparently,
Fenichel's explanatory horizons do not indude other, mundane motives for
curryingfavor, even excessively, with people whose benevolence can affect
the qual ity of their service.

Relatedly, Brenner (1982) discerns castration anxiety at the root of the

phenomenon of men who arepreoccupied with other matters stopping at a
green light while driving, or not start ing once a red light has turned green.
Brenner's example is that of a groom, en route to his wedding ceremony in his
car, who hesitated to keep driving when he came to a green traffic light and
who did not discover, until it had turned red, that he had inappropriately come
to a stop. As Brenner tells us:

The groom's hesitation, so obvious from the incidentjust described arose

[etiologically] from sources that were un known to him before his analysis ....
[T]he patient's analysis revealed that his fiancée un consciously represented
for him not only his sister, but his mother as well. To marry meant to gratify
his childhood wish to be rid of his father and to take his father's place with his
mother, a wish that was associated with ideas of being punished by being
castrated .. . (pp. 182-183; em phasis added).

Here again, the strained associative emergence of certain ideas, described by

Brenner, if not prompted by his own tutelage of the patient, is light-years
away from showing that these ideas (in this case, castration anxiety) caused
the dysfunction or bungled action at issue (in this case, the reluctance or
hesitation to drive through a green light). Etiologically, 1 daim, the thematic
affinity between fear of castration and timidity in the face of a green traffic
light is, in the parlance of lawyers, "not pro ba tive." Until analysts come to
appreciate that far more cogent methods of validating etiologies are required,
there can be no meeting of minds with honest nonideologues whom they en -
deavor to convince.

A suitable testing design as a starter for appraising the causal relevance of

hypothesized castration-fear. to adult male diffidence might take the
following form. First, analysts would specify a set of behavioral traits other
than male diffidence or "social anxiety" (i.e., other than, for example, malaise
at engaging people at social gatherings), which, according to psy choanalytic
theory, would be empirical indicators of the pres ence of the theoretical state
of unresolyed castration anxiety. The theory tells us that the existence of that
unconscious state, in turn, also generates male diffidence, at least statistically.
Thus, it would be a test of the theory to compile statistics, show ing whether
men displaying these indicators in much higher measure than do others in a

6
control group also display more diffidence, lack of assertiveness, hesitation,
and the like. The results might or might not bear out the psychoanalytic
expecta tion of a positive answer.

But, absent any such investigation, one can only deplore the peren.iial facile
use of castration anxiety to explain sun dry male dysfunctions or bungled
actions psychoanalytically, and the promiscuous use of the etiologie label
"castrated" to char-
.acterize men who are thus impaired. What of the riposte that the kind of
empirical test 1 advocate is superfluous, because aIl men are more or less
afflicted by residual castration angst? This retort would boomerang: It
completely undermines the purported explanation of why only sorne men are
diffident, while others are serenely self-confident, assertive, and even
aggressive. .

Of a piece with the thematic affinity fallacy in etiologie inferences is an.even

more prevalent insidious error: The belief that a hypothesized etiologie
scenario embedded in a psychoan alytic narrative of an analysand's affliction
is made credible merely because the postulated etiology then permits the
logical deduction or probabilistic inference of the neurotic symptoms to be
explained. An eloquent reductio ad absurdum of such crude reasoning is
offered by a telling example of a pseudo "confirmation" given by the
philosopher of science Wesley Salmon (1971). The example provides a
pseudo-explanation of the phenomenon of a man not becoming pregnant
recently: 'John Jones avoided becoming pregnant during the past year, for he
had taken his wife's birth control pills regularly, and every man who regularly
takes birth control pills avoids preg nancy"
Plainly, this deducibility of John Jones's recent failure to become pregnant
from the stated pre mises does not lend any credence at all to the zany
hypothesis that this absence of preg nancy is causally attributable to his
consumption of birth con trol pills. Yet it is even true that any men who
consume such pills in fact never do become pregnant.Patently, the fly in the
ointment is that men just do not become pregnant, whether they take birth
control pills or not. Similarly, adult male castra tion anxiety, even when
present, may well be causally irrelevant to male professional diffidence and
related deficits.

Let us return to my theme of the probative liabilities of free association as a

method of drawing etiologie inferences. Like Freud, the post-Freudian
schools of ego psychologists, ob ject relations theorists, and self psychologists
also rely on free association to validate their respective etiologies and theories
of the dynamics of therapy. Yet these post-Freudian theories not only diverge
importantly from Freud but also disagree significantly with one another.

As the psychoanalytically trained clinical psychologist Mor ris Eagle has

carefully documented in an insightful 1993 paper on "The Dynamics of
Theory Change in Psychoanalysis," Heinz Hartmann's ego psychology

7
rejected Freud's instinctual anchorage of the cognitive functions. But, more
importantly, like Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney before him, Heinz
Kohut's self psychology fundamentally disavows Freud's com promise model
of psychopathology. Indeed, self psychology has repudiated virtually every
one of Freud's major tenets (Eagle, 1993, p. 388). Thus, Kohut supplants
Freud's conflict model of psychopathology, which is based on the repression
of internal sexualand aggressive wishes, by a psychology of self-defects and
faulty function caused by hypothesized environ mental events going back to
the first two years of infancy. Relatedly, as Eagle (1993) has noted further,
Kohut (1984, p. 77) "explicitly ar gued that [the patient's] insight is not
[necessarily] curative and that the analyst's empathie understanding and other
associ ated elements ... are the curative ingredients in psychoanalytic
treatment" (p. 388). 1

Again, the object relations theorists deny that pathogenic repressions typically
contain Freudian (oedipal) conflicts and traumas involving sex and
aggression, claiming instead that the quality of maternal caring and early
interpersonal relations is the etiologically crucial content of the pathogenic
repressions.

No wonder that the analystsJacob Arlow and Charles Bren ner (1988) speak
ruefully of "the differences among all these theories, so apparent to every
observer" (p. 9), hoping wistfully that refined honing of the psychoanalytic
method of free associ ation will yield a common body of data, which "would
in the end resolve the conflict among competing theories" (p. 11). But they
are not sanguine, cautioning soberingly that the psy choanalytic community,
"should be wary of any undue opti mism about the delineation and
standardization of the psychoanalytic method of investigation. In the
foreseeable fu ture, they will probably not eliminate substantial differences in
the theoretical conclusions drawn" (p. 10).

For my part, 1 go further and doubt, in principle, that a method of putting

adults on the couch can have the epistemo logical resources to resolve the
three-way clash between the Freudian and two post-Freudian schools in
regard to the infan tile etiologies of psychopathology. Is it not too good to be
1
(1) 'Eagle (private communication) has pointed to the following passages from Kohut (1984, p. 77) as the basis for
his exegesis: "Increased ability to verbalize, broadened insight, greater autonomy of ego functions and in creased
control over impulsiveness may accompany these [psychoanalytic treatment] gains, but they are not the essence of
cure . .. according to self-psychol ogy, then, the essence of the psychoanalytic cure resides in a patient's newly
acquired ability to identify and seek out appropriate self-objects-both mir roring and idealizable-as they present
themselves in his realistic surround ings and to be sustained by them" (p. 77; emphasis added).
Furthermore, Eagle emphasizes that even when Kohut (1984) highlights the importance of "dynamic-genetie
explanations," to the patient, he attri butes their therapeutie effect not to the patient's acquisition of insight, but to the
strengthening of "the patient's trust in the reality and reliability of the empathie bond that is being established between
himself and his analyst by putting him in touch with the full depth of the analyst's understanding of him" (p. 105;
emphasis added).

8
true that one can put a psychologically disturbed person on the couch and
fathom the purported infantile etiology of her or his affliction by free
association? As compared to fathoming the causation of major somatic
diseases, that seems almost mi raculous, even if true (Grünbaum, in press).
Therefore, let me ask as of now: What are the evidential merits of the two
post-Freudian developments that are usually designated as "contemporary
psychoanalysis"? Do they consti tute an advance over Freud? The answer
turns largely, though not entirely, on whether there is better evidential support
for them than for Freud's classical edifice. But Morris Eagle (1993) argues
that the verdict is clearly negative:

[T]he different variants of so-called contemporary psycho analytic

theory ... are on no firmer epistemological ground than the central
formulations and claims of Freud ian theory. Thus, complaints such as ...
that Grünbaum's critique of Freudian theory "is like throwing out physics
because there are unresolved problems in Newtonian the ory" simply have
no force. There is no evidence that con temporary psychoanalytic theories
have remedied the epistemological and methodological difficulties that
are as sociated with Freudian theory [p. 404].

Is "PSYCHICALLY REAL" CHILDHOOD SEXUAL EXPERIENCE

TRAUMATIC AND EVEN PATHOGENIC?

Let me now turn to the critique of Freud's misformulation of an important

distinction: The psychic reality of a childhood experience as purely traumatic
or painful, on the one hand, and as pathogenic, on the other. To say that an
experience is traumatic is to claim that it is wounding or hurts (1895, p. 359).
But saying that it is "pathogenic" asserts that either singly, or only in
combination with other psychic events, the experience causes the formation of
an illness showing symptoms beyond hurting, say conversion hysteria.
Clearly, it is a question of em pirical fact, rather than true a priori, whether or
not particular kinds of traumata do play the etiologie role of being the patho -
gens of a given sort of syndrome. Thus, as 1 have noted else where
(Grünbaum, 1983, p. 20), fortunately the mere painfulness of an experience is
not itself tantamount to its be ing a pathogen: The human condition would be
much worse than it already is, if every psychic or physical blow were also
pathogenic. Yet unfortunately, the designation of experiences as traumatic in
the psychoanalytic and psychiatrie literature has often served to suppose
fallaciously without ado that these ex periences must also be pathogenic.

With these understandings, let us see how Freud used the notions of trauma
and of pathogen in formulating his seduc tion-etiology of hysteria. Again and
again in his 1896 paper on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896c, pp. 194-221),
he referred to sexual childhood molestation or seduction occurrences as
"traumatic scenes," that is, presumably as themselves painful to the child atthe
time of their (supposed) occurrence, while they "fail to arouse any sexual
excitement in him" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 467). And, in the same
9
breath, he sup posed that they are also protopathogenic.

Yet in order to explain the temporal gap between these purportedly traumatie
early experiences and the later onset of adult hysteria, Freud maintained that
their pathogenie action is "deferred" (or "nachtrâglich" in German) in the
following sense: When small, sexually undeveloped children experience
"sexual assaults," their impressions of these episodes become pathogenie only
after puberty, when they are revived by a new sexual event as a memory. As
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p. 113) put it "having reached puberty
meanwhile, the subject is capable of sexual feeling-a feeling which he will
associate consciously with the second [sex-charged] event although it has
actually been provoked by the memory of the earlier one."

Alas, nevertheless Freud (1896b, pp. 164-165) uses the term traumatic to
mean "pathogenie." Thus, in that latter con text (p. 164), he uses the terms
traumatic and pathogenic inter changeably, when he says, "it is not the
experiences themselves which act traumatically but their revival as a memory
after the subject has entered on sexual maturity" (emphasis added). But, on
the very same page, only five lines later, he incoherently speaks of the
childhood experiences themselves as "traumas." Yet elsewhere in that paper
(p. 209), hé points out that the experience of infantile sexual scenes is only
causally necessary but not causally (pathogenieally) sufficient for hysteria.

ln the same incoherent vein, in the Project, Freud had writ ten in 1895
concerning repression in hysteria: "invariably ... a memory is repressed which
has only become a trauma by deferred action" (p. 356; emphasis added). Here
"trauma" means "pathogen." Yet, in stating his standard formula for neuroso -
genesis to Fliess on New Year's Day of 1896, Freud had referred to the
"premature" sexual experience itself as being "trau matie" prior to the time
when the repression ofits subsequently revived memory coincides with the
formation "of a primary symptom" (1892-1899, p. 222). The conflation of
traumaticity and pathogenicity is hardly confine d, however, to psychoana -
lytic writings, but is rampant in the psychiatrie literature at large. Thus,
Webster's New International Dictionary states the psy chiatrie meaning of the
word trauma as follows: "A mental shock; a disturbing experience to whieh a
neurosis may be traced."

Now that we are dear concerning the necessity to heed the distinction between
them, 1 must ask a key question: What is the evidence that at a time when a
child is still sexually un de veloped, it does experience a sexual molestation by
an adult or older sibling as at all psychieally distressing or traumatic, rather
than as neutral or even pleasurable? A fortiori, if the experience is indeed
traumatic, what is the evidence that it is furthermore also pathogenie?

According to a 1896 paper by Freud (S.E. 1896b, pp. 164-165), "foremost"

among the abusers "are nursemaids, governesses and domestie servants" as
weIl as "teachers"; in the case of little girls, he mentions slightly older

10
brothers who "had been abused by someone of the female sex" as the guilty
parties. This daim occurs in his paper, "Further Remarks on the Neuro-
Psychoses of Defence, " whieh he mailed for publica tion on February 5, 1896
(Strachey, in Freud, 1896b, p. 159). But as soon as September 21, 1897, in his
famous private letter 69 to Fliess, Freud dedared that in the seduction theory
he was then abandoning, "in every case [of actual molestation] the father, not
exduding my [i.e., his] own, had to be blamed as a pervert" (1892-1899, p.
259). And in his 1932 New Introduc tory Lecture 33 on "Femininity," he
reported retrospectively that "In the period in whieh the [my] main interest
was di rected to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women
patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. 1 was driven to
recognize in the end that these reports were untrue ... " (1933, p. 120).

But paternal seduction, actual or only imagined, is a case of incest, and is

abhorrent at least in our culture. Yet, a mere child stiIllacks superego
awareness of the cultural sexual taboos in general, and of the incest
prohibition in particular, since it has hardly been socialized by then to that
point. And it strains credulity to suppose that such awareness does exist
uncon sciously after all, a priori, let alone-as Freud thought in Totem and
Taboo (1913)-qua phylogenetic inheritance from the ra cial memory of the
murder of the primal father.

Therefore, 1 must ask: Just what is the evidence that the child itself actually
experiences the incest as a distressing psy chic reality? At least for cultural
reasons, most people we know think intuitively that the child will feel
distressed, and they will therefore find the molestation scenario revolting. But
the issue is one of actual evidence, not of our adult intuitions!

Suppose that the incest taboo does not render the child's actual or fancied
seduction experience traumatic. Also suppose that the adult seducer does not
behave coercively, let alone violently. Then what else would make the
seduction traumatic? What entitles Freud to deem it traumatic, if, as he
claimed in his modified seduction theory, the child actually has wish fulfilling
fantasies of being seduced that are being fulfilled? Why would it be traumatic,
if the adult manages to behave both tenderly and lovingly toward the child?
The supposition that, despite the moral taboo and legal prohibition, sorne
adult child seducers may indeed manage such benevolent treatment of the
child is not anunrealistic expectation. As Alice Miller (1984) has pointed out:
"adults can rely more on a young child's dis cretion than [on an] older one's,
and until recently people were convinced-indeed, sorne still are-s-thar what
happens to very little children has no consequences at all and will never be
divulged to a third party" (p. 121; emphasis added).

True enough, even a younger child may register somehow that something is
awry, if the adult nonverbally communicates guilt-Iaden or prudential anxiety.
And the more so, if the adult verbally forbids an older child's disclosure of the
secret sexual activity. Nevertheless, the widespread peremptory assumption of

11
outright traumaticity, which Freud used in his own theoreti cal context, still
requires substantiation.

ln fact, the denial of this assumption has prompted sorne sexologists to

advocate the decriminalization of adult-child sex (Grünbaum, 1984, pp. 255-
256). Besides, how can Freud know reliably and retrospectively how a child
reacted to adult sex either conceptually or affectively, especially before it had
com mand of a language?

Relatedly, though no molestation is involved in Freud's case of the Wolf Man,

it is interesting to note how Freud dealt there explicitly with that patient's
conceptualization at the age of 4, of his supposed observation, at the age of 18
months, of parental sexual intercourse a tergo, which Freud had conjec tured.
At that tender infantile age, we learn, the baby Wolf Man just registered a
visual impression of this event without understanding it. Freud had inferred
this "primal event" ever so precariously from the adult patient's report of a
dream he had had around age 4 (1918, pp. 33-34). At the latter age, we are
told, the patient "understood the pro cess as well as its [sex ual] significance"
(p. 37, and n.6), and "his understanding of them ... became possible at the
time of the dream owing to his development, his sexual excitations, and his
sexual researches" (pp. 37-38, n.6).

But Freud cautions the reader that "the patient under analysis, at an age of
over twenty-five years, was putting the impressions and impulses of his fourth
year into words which he would never have found at that time" (p. 45, n.l;
emphasis added). And note that even if a corresponding account were offered
in the case of a child who had an actual seduction experience with an adult, it
would not establish that this experi ence was psychically distressing to it at the
time.

Yet two well-known writers, Sandor Ferenczi (1955) and Alice Miller (1984)
have argued that the adult's sexual acts with a child are (1) an imposition,
2
which is abusive by lacking reciprocity; (2) traumatic: and (3) pathogenic.

The pertinent 1933 paper by Ferenczi was expurgated for presentation at the
Twelfth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Wiesbaden, September
1932 in order to tone down its heretical clash with Freud's views (jones, 1957,
pp. 172- 173). 3

2
Professor Brigitte Boothe, a Swiss psychoanalyst at the University of Zürich, told me about the pertinent writings
by these two authors and gave me very helpful illuminating commentaries on the essentials of Alice Mil ler's theses.

3
Rosemarie Sand enlightened me as to the ideological coercion under which Ferenczi expurgated his original text at
the unfortunate cost of vagueness.And she made me aware ofJones's derogatory orthodox Freudian account of this
sad episode (Ferenczi, 1972). Professor Boothe also supplied me with the German original of Fer enczi's lecture. In a
footnote (p. 303), we learn that the title he originally announced was "Die Leidenschaften der Erwachsenen und deren
Einfluss auf Charakter- und Sexualentwicklung der Kinder." In English, this original title is "The Passions of Adults
and Their Influence on the Development of Character and Sexuality in Children."

12
Ferenczi's scenario is essentially as follows (1955):

A typical way in which incestuous seductions may occur is this: an adult and
a child love each other, the child nursing the playful fantasy of taking the role
of mother to the adult. This play may assume erotic forms but remains
neverthe less, on the level of tenderness. It is not so, however, with
pathological adults.... They mistake the play of children for the desires of a
sexually mature person [by projection] or even allow themselves-irrespective
of any conse quences-to be carried away [p. 161].

This much seems plausible and does not depend on so phisticated theoretical
interpretations and speculations. But Ferenczi assumes that, in the nature of
the case, the child per ceives the adult's sexual activity with it as an act of
violence:
These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not
sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought,
for [i.e., be cause] the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes
them dumb and can rob them of their senses ....

[T] hey identify themselves with the aggressor . ... The most important change,
produced in the mind of the child by the anxiety-fear-ridden identification
with the adult part ner, is the introjection of the guilt- feelings of the adult
which makes hitherto harmless play appear as a punishable of fense [p. 162].

Ferenczi does not tell us on what specific evidence he bases this theoretical
scenario in the child's mind, however plausible it may strike someone who
has psychoanalyzed adults. What assurance can he give us that it is not just a
projection of the mind of an adult therapist who imagines himself in the
physi cally helpless and emotionally dependent situation of a child? The same
question applies to the claim (Miller, 1984, p. 127) that "In his story The
Stoker (which later became the first chap ter of the novel Amerika), Franz
Kafka de scribes the abuse of a child's body as experienced from the child's
point ofview, not as interpreted by adult theory." How do either
psychoanalysts or novelists know what an infant's or young child's psychic
real ity is? As the reader will recognize, my question is essentially a special
case of the challenge posed by Fliess to Freud, when the former asked Freud
how he knows that he is reading the patient's mind, rather thanhis own.

Yet Ferenczi goes on to refine his speculative account by postulating that the
introjected guilt feelings he imputes to the child generate an ambivalent love-
hate attitude toward the adult offender. And he sees the unexpressed hate
component as, in turn, making for the traumaticity of the abuse: "It is hatred
that traumatically surprises and frightens the child while being loved
[sexually or excessively] byan adult, that changes him from a spontaneously
and innocently playing being into a guilty love-automaton imitating the adult
anxiously, self-effac ingly" (p. 167).

13
Finally, as for pathogenicity, we learn about the hypothe sized etiologie
consequences of the "precocious super-imposi tion oflove, passionate and
guilt-laden on an immature child": "If more love or love of a different kind
from that which they need, 'is forced upon the children in the stage of
tenderness, it may le ad to pathological consequences" (p. 164).

It emerges that Ferenczi has not produced a cogently sup ported answer to my
questions. Therefore, let us see whether Alice Miller, in a more detailed
treatment, did better.
Relying on her psychoanalyses of adults, Alice Miller (1984, pp. 119-122)
sums up her imputations and etiologie inferences in six points, "which
conflict sharply with Freud's theory of infantile sexuality" (p. 122). Thus,
contrary to Freud, she inter prets:

[T]he anxiety, bewilderment, and uncertainty present in every patient's

childhood ... [not] ... as a defense against the child's own sexual desires-but in
part as reactions to adults' sexual desires of which the child was the ob ject. ...
in order to survive, a little child needs love, care, attention, and tenderness
from the adult. He will do any thing in order to get them and keep them. If he
senses that his closest and most important attachment figure's interest in him
has a (conscious or unconscious) sexual content ... this will make him
insecure, sometimes fright ened, and in extreme cases totally disoriented ....
[Hence] ... One of the inescapable laws governing a child' s existence is
determined by what parents need from the child, and sexuality is no exception
here [p. 119].

Furthermore, in this vein, Miller abjures Freud's term seduction in this context
in favor of the term abuse: "The word 'seduction' reinforces the wishful
thinking of the adult, who assumes that the child shares his or her desires;
these projec tions are absent in the word 'abuse' " (p. 127). Thus, she sees child
molestation as morally objectionable (besides being ille gal), because it is an
exploitative and manipulative subordina tion of the child and is presumably
pathogenic. Yet, it appears from the above that the abuse, which is clearly
inherent in the absence of the reciprocity of sexual arousal, requires addition
al theory before it can be deemed tantamount to rendering the child's sexual
submission psychically distressing or traumatic to it, let alone pathogenic.

Miller (pp. 160-161) then elaborates six ways in which, she infers, the "plight
of being at someone's mercy and being abused by a loved object" functions
pathogenically. These "consequences," she tell us, "are not restricted to
problems in one's [adult] sexual life; they impair the development of the self
and of an autonomous personality." ln concert with Feren czi, she opines, for
example, that one of the causes of such adult afflictions is that "an
interlinking of love and hate" in childhood is produced by having "one's
helplessness and total dependency taken advantage of by the person one
loves, by one's father or mother, at a very early age."

14
It is very questionable that the productions of adult pa tients in analysis are
epistemically capable of sustaining such imputations (Grünbaum, 1984,
1993). Recent experimental in vestigations of children by cognitive
psychologists, just as stud ies in cognitive psychology generally, have
notconcerned themselves with affect. Yet in a kind of preview of her 1996
book, Alison Gopnik (1994) has reported that, "the nature of young children's
thoughts about thoughts, their understanding and knowledge of the mind [at
an age when they already have com mand of language!], has lately been
subject to a great deal of systematic experimental and naturalistic
investigation ... that does follow ... scientific canons" (p. 55). Perhaps, in the
future, these methods may be extended to the study of child hood affect.

Alas, Melanie Klein's (1932) theory of child analysis, and her fanatical
fixation on the purported formative role of the mother's breast ("bad breast,"
"good breast") and on castra tion anxiety epitomize some of the errors 1 have
been at pains to expose (cf. also Grosskurth, 1986, pp. 96-97, 153).

CONCLUSION
I conclude that the purported psychic reality of traumatic sex ual experiences
in childhood and, moreover, their alleged pathogenic roles at best require far
more cogent empirical scru tiny than they have received heretofore from their
psychoana Iytic proponents.

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