OTTO KERNBERG
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still are terribly upset, culturally speaking, about childhood sexuality.
Actually, all researchers who have tried to study basic components of de–
veloping infantile and childhood sexuality have found enormous difficul–
ties in carrying out such empirical work. We are still suffering from what
you could call a conventional conspiracy against the acknowledgment of
childhood sexuality. So Freud, in my view, did not deny the existence of
real incidents of child abuse, but he thought beyond it to a childhood
sexuality that was fundamental in the life not only of very sick patients
but of normal individuals as well.
Having said that, I would add that we have found out that severe
physical abuse and sexual abuse is an important, relatively nonspecific
etiological factor in a broad spectrum of psychological disorders, and that
it affects women much more than men in our culture because little girls
tend to suffer more often and are more frequently victims of severe sexual
and physical abuse, although by no means exclusively. Having said that, in
turn, I would add that I think that there is now a tendency, as part of the
cultural expression of radical feminism, to exaggerate the importance of
this etiological factor. There is also a very strong puritanical current in
American culture which has always been here, and which only superfi–
cially seemed
to
have been disrupted by the counterculture. I don't know
who said "scratch a hippie and find a hysteric," but it seems to me that
this points to some more consistent aspects of American culture as com–
pared, for example, to conventional culture in Latin countries, where
there is somewhat less of a puritanical atmosphere, I believe.
EK:
Today there are many therapists who try to find out whether a child
has been abused, or whether an adult was abused as a child, by suggesting
to the patient what might have happened. Many times, the patient affirms
the therapist's suggested reconstructions as having really happened. How
can we detennine whether the patient has had a real recollection or is re–
sponding to suggestion?
OK:
Well, there is a new syndrome that has been described, the false
memory syndrome, which indeed is an important finding. My own field
is that of severe personality disorder, so I see many patients, both those
who have been abused, physically and sexually abused, and those who
suffer from the conditions that have been described as false memory syn–
drome, where ideologically inspired therapists have inculcated in their pa–
tient the sense that they must have been abused. I think that is the cultural
fashion at this moment. And the forms that severe personality disturbances
take are very much shaped by culturally fostered expressions of pathology.
For example, if in the culture there is a kind of inhibition of the trans–
formation of emotional conflicts into fantasy, into verbal statements, into
