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"helped... [him] become a distinct person" by "correcting" his earlier,
pathological relationships and familial adaptations. And she suggested that
a psychoanalytic paradigm for the next century must "recognize the inter–
penetration of relational factors with internally generated needs and
satisfactions,
whether or not we label them traumatic."
Anna Ornstein, representing the self-psychology school, stated that
analysts continue to differ on whether to view the roots of psychic trauma
from a hermeneutic, a developmental, or an adaptational perspective. Since
early trauma was thought to create structural
difects
or
difrcits
and later trau–
ma to have been engendered by
conflicts
related to sexual and aggressive
fantasies, Freudian ego psychologists had to reconstruct the events of ear–
liest childhood. Self-psychologists, however, focus on the parents'
personalities, and especially on the same-sex parent's reactions to specific
childhood emotional states-to
a sense of loneliness, compulsive daydreaming,
grandiose fantasies. Patients get better, she held, when they recover specif–
ic intrapsychic experiences and repair them in the analytic transference.
Ornstein then demonstrated how she had worked with a handsome male
patient who suffered from sexual dysfunction, could not commit himself,
and feared
firs
t being exploi ted and then abandoned. She cured him by
helping him reconstruct the micro-traumas of his childhood-the fantasies
and disillusionments in a father who could "shield [him] from the world
but not from his anxieties."
Jacob Arlow (NYPA), one of the deans of the ego psychology domi–
nating the profession well into the 1970s, recalled that in the 1940s and
1950s he had been intrigued by the seduction hypothesis because it
assumed that an as yet unreported crime had been committed, which the
analyst, like a detective, had to solve. At the time, analysts-most of whom
were physicians-took to the idea that the repressed memory of seduction
was like a foreign body in the psyche and fashioned their theory of cure,
and of technique, in line with it. Popular movies, such as
Spellbound
with
Ingrid Bergman, reinforced misperceptions of the transference and helped
change the culture. Again, I thought of
Good Will Hunting
and how the
current disdain for psychoanalysis is expressed by Will who had gotten rid
of all sorts of therapists without ever finding out that he had been trau–
matized. N ei ther he nor his audiences seem to be aware that
psychoanalysts, in adapting to the culture as well as to more knowldge
rarely sit behind the patient, rarely interpret, and don't tell their patients
what to do.
Plus
fa
change.
..
Arlow went on to say that the metaphor of seduction, whose victim
usually was a female child, generated even greater attention when Masson
revived it, probably because it bolstered attempts to discredit psychoanaly–
sis and fit into the agenda of political activists-who could use it as a
