EDITH KURZWEIL
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF
SEDUCTIONS
The workers of the world didn't unite, but the Freudians did-finally.
Arnold Richards, editor of the
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association,
introduced the conference that started on February 28th at
New York's Mount Sinai Stern auditorium, by reminding the six hundred
participants, each of whom had shelled out two hundred and fifty dollars
to
hear the stars of the profession, that they had gotten together to repair
the damages caused by innumerable organizational splits-beginning with
Adler and Jung over eighty-five years ago. Richards, diplomatically, stressed
that the impetus for reconciliation came from the journals and from the
"science and the search engines that manage to transcend the divisions." In
other words, now that the articles published between 1920 and 1994 in the
major journals have been joined on a single CD-ROM, he (and his care–
fully balanced conunittee) thought that the members of the innumerable
warring factions of analysts might be able to meet in the same room. The
issues did not revolve, as outsiders might think, around notions of psycho–
analysis versus chemical alternatives of treatment, the advantage
(?)
of
having an MD or a PhD, or the means of defending themselves against
popular attacks and misconceptions. Instead, they focused on the clinical
methods that until now have divided them.
George Makari, of the Col umbia U niversi ty Center for Psychoanalytic
Training and Research, began by asking whether, as Jeffrey Masson claims,
"truth was suppressed [by Freud] in favor of a socially palatable lie." In his
(to me) convincing paper, he documented why Freud had to address the
theories of 1890s sexologists to have them pay attention to his trauma the–
ory. That is why after diagnosing sexual seduction as the cause of hysteria,
he then hypothesized that it engenders repression and hysteria in women
and perversion in men. But Freud had doubts: two months after the death
of his father in December 1896 he sugges ted that in all cases the father was
the perpetrator of abuse. In the now famous letter of September 21, 1897,
he renounced this theory-due to failure in treatments; to the unexpect–
ed frequency of hysteria;
to
the indistinguishability of truth and fiction in
the unconscious; and to the fact that memories of seduction did not sur–
face in psychosis. Thus Freud relinquished seduction as the cause in favor
