Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’

Abstract

Some ten or fifteen years ago, when feminists began thinking seriously about psychoanalysis, the most common expression of doubt was: but isn't Freud culturally specific? Weren't the illness and disturbance he described true for the period, but times have changed? Today we have the appearance of a reversal: now that the extent of child sexual abuse is increasingly recognized, some people are asking the other side of the question: if Freud was so mistaken about the reality of the 'real event', does psychoanalysis have any credibility at all? In one sense nothing has changed: there will probably always be rational and irrational forms of ambivalence, not to say scepticism, about the validity of Freud's theory of the mind and its motives. However, in this article I want to look at the implications for psychoanalysis, and the varieties of feminist response to psychoanalysis, of these specifically new terms of discussion. For there is no doubt that the current, unprecedented concern with the reality of child abuse must lead one to look again at the methodological implications of Freud's work during the period which resulted in his writing, of the women patients who spoke of having been seduced as girls by their fathers, 'I no longer believe in my neurotica' (Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 21 September 1897, quoted in Clark 1980: 161). There has always been a debate inside psychoanalysis about the status of 'real' and 'fantasy', but nothing compares, for events in the public domain, with the recent furore over Freud's seduction theory, and I'll begin by sketching the facts of the Malcolm-Masson controversy. In December 1983 the New Yorker ran a two-part article by Janet Malcolm, author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. 'Trouble in the Archives' went over, in Malcolm's elegant and intelligent way, a sequence of events between 1974 and 1981 with three main protagonists: Kurt Eissler, a senior New York analyst and secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives, established in the 1950s to secure a collection