By 1897 Freud had abandoned the idea of sexual abuse origins of neuroses and in letter to Fleiss wrote that he had decided to conclude that most of these apparent memories of his patients were in fact a product of their fantasies. This idea of fantasy led to the development of the oedipal complex where children have fantasies about their parents. Freud was still concerned with determining the cause of neurosis and developed a theory of repression which originates from the oedipal complex – the fantasies that children have towards their parents are repressed by the children as they realise that the feelings are unacceptable. Recovery of these repressed feelings through psychoanalytic treatment of the patient would cure these neuroses. It must be noted here that Freud never denied the reality of his patients' memories of actual childhood traumas. Rather, he recognized that the memories of actual childhood are continually being confabulated with unconscious fantasies.
In Freud's theory of "repression," the mind automatically banished traumatic events from memory in an effort to prevent overwhelming anxiety. Freud further theorized that repressed memories caused "neurosis," which could be cured if the memories were made conscious. The popularly acknowledged syndrome of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder indicates and highlights the fact that rather than being wiped from memory, traumatic events that can be verified with ease, leave the victims of such trauma haunted by intrusive memories through which the victim is subjected to reliving the traumatic event(s). People forget most of what occurs to them, including some events that were significant to them at the time. If an event is lost from memory, there is no objective way to prove whether it was "repressed" or simply forgotten. And there is no reason that memories of sexual abuse should be handled any differently than childhood memories of physical abuse or of emergency surgery. Events that have slipped away from memory cannot be recalled with the accuracy of a videotape. Individuals forget not only insignificant events in their entirety, but also significant events. Some events (traumatic or not) are recalled, but with significant details altered.
Freud's expansion of his childhood seduction theory to include the role of fantasy has been attacked during the past decade by several psychoanalysts who feel Freud minimized the trauma of actual childhood seduction. Recall back to the refusal of lawyers and medical practitioners in the acceptance of recovered memories as being real. This was largely down to a major legal text by John Henry Wigmore (1934) who believed that women and children were not to be trusted as they were “predisposed to bringing accusations against men of good character” (Webster, 1995). Wigmore based his claims on the Freud’s theory of fantasies regarding sexual abuse. Wigmore’s beliefs were accepted by most in the legal system that women and children were unreliable witnesses that had tendencies to fabricate accusations, therefore many reports of sex abuse were treated as fabrications and not true. That is not to say that women did not have memories of sexual abuse. Indeed many women who had memories that had not been repressed were finding it extremely difficult that they were not being believed, and their neuroses were remaining untreated. Along with the feminist movement came the cries of many women who were suffering from haunting memories of sex abuse to be heard.
In 1981, psychiatrist Judith Herman wrote a revolutionary book called Father-Daughter Incest in which she insisted that this kind of assault on young women by their fathers occurred more often than was recognised. This notion was restated and reconfirmed in 1984 when Jeffrey Masson wrote a controversial book entitled The Assault on Truth, subtitled, Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. In this book, Masson argued that during the development of the seduction theory, Freud came to the conclusions outlined in the seduction theory as a result of actually listening to his female patients and letting them describe what had happened to them and actually believing them. He attributes Freud’s later rejection of the theory to Freud’s ambition of gaining the approval of his colleagues – a feat which could not be achieved by continuing the seduction theory due to the rejection of his ideas by so many of his peers.
It is interesting to note that clinical practitioners on either side of the false/recovered memory debate draw their historical evidence from the theories and original findings recorded by none other then Freud himself. Judith Herman and Jeffrey Masson are the two critics most famous for using the theories of Freud to argue Freud! They argue that Freud was wrong to abandon the seduction theory and in doing so ‘forfeited his ambition to understand the female neurosis’ (Herman, 1981). However, a number of considerations need to be addressed when assessing Freud’s theories and how he came about formulating them. We know that Freud initially used hypnosis to treat his patients’ symptoms of hysteria and that he later abandoned this method for a number of reasons (which he outlined in his autobiography, 1925) but still wished to encourage the state of relaxation achieved in the hypnotic state which created an ambience that encouraged the patient to talk more freely. He started to use the ‘pressure technique’ where he would sit behind the patient and apply pressure to their forehead ‘to reinforce his powerful exhortations that the patient could and must trace associations and uncover the links between buried thoughts and repressed memories’ (Stafford-Clark, 1967). This implies not only physical pressure applied by Freud but also the element of suggestion, the introduction of ideas into the mind of the patient that there are indeed buried memories to be recovered, often persuading people to reproduce memories of child sex abuse. If they resisted to reproduce such memories his instructions, as he himself writes were that “we must insist on doing this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, till at least we are really told something” (Freud, 1925). A growing number of practitioners that have studied Freud have come to agree the Freud himself provides a great deal of evidence that ‘he went out of his way to persuade, encourage, cajole and sometimes bully his female patients to reproduce scenes of child sexual abuse which he himself had reconstructed from their symptoms or their associations’ (Webster, 1995). In numerous letters to Fleiss he expresses his doubt at the validity of his conclusions in the light that he did put enormous pressure on his patients to produce some type of childhood memory.
This doubt that Freud had inspires more doubt concerning the empirical stability of his early research. There was no evidence that supported his claims that his patients had been sexually abused as children nor was there any sort of observer reliability when assessing his patients. Although continuously corresponding with Fleiss (using him as a sounding board, (Reich, 1952)), he came to his conclusions through a mixture of self analysis and the contemplating the inferences that only HE made from his patients. It is possible then that not only is his seduction theory to be scrutinised as being heavily influenced by his own convictions, but also the subsequent work on the unconscious sexual drives of children. Anti-Freudians throughout the last century have offered many theories contesting those of Freud and have criticised him for his methods and it is not our job to do so here. Highlighting the fact that there are problems in his methodology simply allows us to recognise that Freud was constantly revising and developing a set of ideas and that although revolutionary, some of these ideas may have been inklings and a consequence of his own neuroses, therefore to be taken with a pinch of salt.
How is all the above information about the ideas Freud entertained in the preliminary part of his career relevant to the recovered/false memory debate? After the publicity and awareness that was generated by the writings of Herman, Masson and other advocators of the seduction theory, the original tendencies of psychotherapists to disregard women’s reports of suffering from the effects of sexual abuse as a child were challenged and induced a change in the psychoanalysis of clients who claimed to remember abuse in childhood – accepting that the memories were real and not fantasies. As a result, over the last decade there has been an influx of reports of sex abuse with some therapists suggesting attributions of neurotic behaviour in clients to being the manifestations of repressed memories of child sex abuse.
There is indeed a possibility that, after reading the claims of Herman and Masson, more therapists were actively looking for evidence of child abuse in the utterances of their clients during treatment as a result of the belief that Freud’s seduction theory had some truth in it, thus abandoning their previous notions of sexual memories as unconscious child fantasies. When helping clients make sense of their utterances during free association, some therapists may be construing what they see to be evidence of sexual abuse during the client’s childhood from memories that are completely unrelated.
It is also important to note the possibility of psychotherapists actually implanting the idea of abuse into the mind of a vulnerable client and the client then, feeling pressured to produce actual memories of this alleged abuse, making inferences from remembered past occurrences and event that seem to substantiate the possibility of abuse, thus becoming totally convinced that the abuse actually occurred. Webster (1995) talks of therapy groups set up for survivors of incest in America and suggests that some of the women who attended these group therapy sessions often did not have any previous memories of child abuse but were diagnosed as having suffered from child abuse by their therapists, often came out of the programme having seen images that were totally fabricated due to the pressure they felt at achieving their goal of trying to recover these apparently repressed memories under the influence of the other women in the group. Cases such as these have indeed taken place, predominantly in the United States, where parents and other carers have filed law suits against therapists who have encouraged their clients to make false allegations of abuse against them, sometimes causing great rifts between families as the “victims” remain convinced that that these memories are in fact real and not a fabrication of their imagination. It seems that Masson’s harsh critique of the techniques of psychoanalysis, whilst being good in that many more females’ sex abuse related neuroses were being identified and treated and more people being convicted of sex crimes against women they had previously got away with; has had a rebound effect in that some therapists may be applying Freud’s seduction theory and going as far as believing, as Freud once did, that all female neuroses are indeed related to sexual abuse, thus in their conscious search for any sexual connotations in association, placing emphasis on them and translating unconscious memories recovered during therapy into having meanings that they do not necessarily have.
The legal cases provide support, along with Freud’s unconscious fantasies theory, for those whose stance is on the side of the debate that believes that ‘recovered’ memories are nothing but false memories because the reiterate what Freud said about the power of suggestion and the influence of personal biases (including neuroses) of the therapist which can sometimes be very hard to identify and overcome.
It must also be noted here that Freudian theory is not the only theory to contribute to the false/recovered memory debate. Psychologists and researchers from other paradigms have endeavoured to find the reasons for the apparent repression and subsequent recovery of memories of differing types of traumatic experiences for a number of years.
Present day research has tried to overcome this argument of whether recovered memories are false or not by investigating (in the laboratory) the content of such memories and trying to establish conditions under which, and the extent of the implications of suggestive comments made by people in authoritative positions to participants in the recall of different events (Wakefield, 1999). There have also been attempts to assess the degree of truth in allegations using assessment techniques such as the Statement Validity Assessment, used in courts in the UK which in some cases may help to determine whether some memories are true or false. As can be expected, the research in this field has developed to a point where there is almost universal acceptance of the notions of both false and recovered memories existing and some researchers have moved on to determining the differences between the details remembered of these memories in the hope of distinguishing between the two different types.
We cannot, however, underestimate the contribution of Freud’s theories to this debate, since it was Freud who first recorded the observation that child sex abuse does occur more often than is recognised and that neuroses can be a physical manifestation of the horrifying experiences of clients when they were children – an observation that is essential to the arguments of the recovered memory movement. It is difficult to determine whether the implications of child sex abuse would have been discovered by other leading pioneers of psychology as being a notable cause of neuroses in women and indeed men if Freud had not voiced his initial thoughts on the matter.
So we can see that whilst Freud’s seduction theory forms the basis of some arguments in favour of recovered memories, the Oedipus complex provides the basis for opposing arguments that such memories are false. Although Freud’s findings should not be brushed under the carpet as being nonsensical, the lack of empirical stability to support his own notions should also be noted.
References
Crews, F. (1994 November 17th) The Revenge of the Repressed, New York Review of Books, pp 49-58.
Freud, S. (1925) An Autobiographical Study. Penguin Freud Library Volume 15
Gay, P (1998) Freud: A Life For Our Time. Norton and Company Inc.
Herman, J. L. (1981) Father-Daughter Incest. Harvard University Press.
Jacobs, M. (1992) Sigmund Freud. Sage Publications Ltd
Memon, A. and Young, M. (1997) Desperatiely seeking evidence: The recovered memory debate. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 2 (2), 131-154
Reich, W. (1952) The Wilhelm Reich interview representing the Sigmund Freud Archives. In Reich speaks of Freud. Higgins, M., and Raphael, C. (Eds). Souvenir Press Limited.
Stafford-Clark, D. (1967) What Freud Really Said Penguin Books.
Wakefield, J. (1992). Recovered Memories of Alleged Sexual Abuse: Memory as Production and Reproduction. From internet site: . Retrieved on 28th April 2004.
Webster, R. (1995) Afterword to Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Harper Collins.