Limiting the Effects of Memory and Chance

It is ironic that, at the same time Freud made his breakthrough by radicalizing memory in the Project, he was also radically narrowing the type of memory involved in his etiologies of hysteria. The Project was written during 1895 when Freud was steeped in his attempt to find a "caput Nili," the origin and etiology of hysteria. "Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences" (II 7) is Breuer’s and Freud’s closing line of the first part of the "Preliminary Communication" in Studies on Hysteria, written just before the Project. Though they agreed on the central role of memory in the creation of hysteria and its symptoms, Breuer and Freud disagreed on whether these memories were necessarily sexual. For the Freud of the Project, the original event was necessarily of a sexual nature, even if it was not experienced as such by the child who was still considered by this Freud to be pre-sexual. The power of sex, according to Freud, fueled the pathogenic repression of hysterical symptoms. I try to show in this project overall how, throughout his theorizing, Freud’s tendency is to move away from his "otherwise" positions toward more "establishment" ones when he includes sex and sexuality in his theorizing. Given the potentially very "otherwise" position Freud takes on memory in the Project, it is important to see how he moves away from this position as sexuality is introduced through the theory of the etiology of hysteria he presents in the "Psychopathology" section of the Project, and in similar works of 1895 and 1896.

The original cause of hysteria, the event, according to the Project and the later "Aetiology of Hysteria," always occurred during early childhood. In the Project, and later in "Draft K: The Neuroses of Defence" (sent to Fliess on January 1, 1896), Freud would allude to a complex connection between the memory of the original event of early childhood and the pathogenic trauma that leads to hysteria with the concept of Nachträglichkeit. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Freud " never offered a definition [of Nachträglichkeit] … [although] it was indisputably looked upon by Freud as part of his conceptual equipment" (Lap67111). Actually, Freud never offered a psychoanalytic definition of Nachträglichkeit, though he used it in his psychoanalytic cases. The Nachträglichkeit of the "seduction" theory was well-defined, and dependent on his conception of childhood as a period of life prior to sexuality. With Nachträglichkeit the path from the hysterical symptom back to its origin was not a simple one that leads directly through a psychical engram to the traumatic event that it represents. Nachträglichkeit problematizes any simple or linear form of psychical determinism where the past simply affects the present. The deferral of Nachträglichkeit would posit that the original event and the memory of it formed by the young child were not pathogenic in themselves. The sexuality of the event would not have a meaningful context for the young child since he or she was pre-sexual. The sexuality of puberty would create the context which would then transform this memory into a trauma once it was activated or energized associatively by a second event during puberty. This trauma would be kept from consciousness (repressed) creating a gap in the narrative that the hysteric told Freud. Thus the origin of hysteria, according to the Freud of the "seduction" theory, was a sexual event that occurred during early childhood or infancy but was not experienced as sexual since the child would not be a sexual being according to this theory. Thus so-called hysterics, according to this "seduction" theory, don’t only suffer from reminiscences of sexual events during childhood; they also suffer from the sexualization during puberty, the association of pubertal experience with their memory of the earlier sexual event, a delayed process of traumatization, and the after-effects of repression.

The Freud of the "seduction" theory was different from the Freud that worked with Breuer on Studies, though the time difference between these stages was only a matter of a few years. During the "seduction" theory stage his etiology had become much more structured and specific, and it had been limited to the realm of sexual development. Freud’s theories of hysteria prior to the Project were often a jumble of vague propositions and concepts, sometimes even contradictory ones. In the cases Freud presents in Studies, each one has a different approach, and, in several cases, it is far from clear what constitutes the therapy, and if the therapy given is at all effective. More specifically, it is unclear in many of the cases what Freud uncovers in terms of pathogenic reminiscences. With the case of Cäcilie M., Freud wrote that by "hypnotic influence" he was able to make it "possible for her to lead a tolerable existence" and he "was always able to take her out of the misery of her condition" (Api92 89). However, Freud admits, "she always relapsed again after a short time" (ibid.). The case of Emmy von N. saw Freud using more traditional methods than the cathartic method developed by Breuer and himself: massage and hydrotherapy. Moreover, the patient suffered from memories of family deaths and loved ones being committed to insane asylums, and none of these potentially traumatic memories seem to have been particularly sexual, repressed, or infantile. The case of Katharina in Studies was a harbinger of his later theory of seduction, though the sexual trauma, the "seduction," occurs in adolescence rather than in childhood. Of course, Freud would certainly have argued later that Katharina’s adolescent trauma was a repetition of an infantile one. Again, the method used here is quite different than the cathartic method common to Studies and his later work using the "seduction" theory. What Freud calls Katharina’s "period of working-out, of ‘incubation’" (131) of the pathogenic memory can be interpreted as a germ of the seduction theory’s Nachträglichkeit. In the final case of Studies, the case of Lucy R., Freud does not uncover a pathogenic repressed memory but a pathogenic repressed fantasy: Lucy, a nanny, fantasizes that her recently widowed employer would take her as his wife and she would become the mother of the children under her care. This case is thus a harbinger of psychoanalysis in that it is focused less on memory and more on a fantasy conducive to an oedipal reading. I have mentioned the cases of Studies to suggest certain progression and inconsistencies in Freud’s theorizing during these years when he wrote mostly about his treatment of patients diagnosed as hysterical. His later theory of the etiology of hysteria would in at least one way invalidate his argument as presented in every one of the cases of Studies. More importantly for our purposes, the cases of Studies and his later theories show a progression towards circumscribing the potentially pathogenic memories, the displacement of trauma away from the origin of hysteria (from event-trauma to meaning-trauma), and movement toward fantasy. All three of these progressions potentially delimit the influence of chance on the etiology of hysteria.

By demanding that pathogenic memories were necessarily of a sexual nature, Freud was going against much of the theorizing that preceded him and that linked trauma and hysteria, including much of Charcot’s work, and even much of his own prior work, most notably his work on male hysteria, which he attributed to a shock such as a train wreck. Violence causing trauma in the same moment or immediately afterwards (event-trauma) was rarely a part of Freud’s theorizing. This type of trauma would later cause Freud to reevaluate psychoanalysis in 1920 after encountering the effects of the violence of war on veterans: what was called shell-shock. Though Freud’s insistence on the deferred trauma in the realm of meaning is an important aspect of both the "seduction" theory and of psychoanalysis, there is also a disavowal of the importance of non-sexual events that cause trauma because the "content" of this type of trauma can be radically other to the realm of meaning: it is full of chance. There are a similarity and a connection between Freud’s stereotomy of psychic determinism and the realm of meaning. Thus there is more than a hint of Freud attempting to reduce the effects of what he would later think of as the chance of the external world on his etiology’s development by introducing deferral and sexuality. In other words, the violence and chance of what Freud constructs as the external world–he often refers to simple "reality" in contradiction with his theories of perception and memory in the Project and in psychoanalysis proper–and the disruption they can cause to ordered life are radically delimited by both the "seduction" theory and psychoanalysis.

Freud’s theory of "seduction" had many forms, but its final public and "formal version" (Bla92 173n) was presented by Freud in "The Aetiology of Hysteria," a lecture given to the Viennese Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie on April 21, 1896. In this lecture, Freud never used the term "seduction theory" for the theory he described; and, as Jeffrey Moussaief Masson explains, given the violence Freud depicts there, the name was an odd choice made by Freud’s followers:

Freud’s theory that child rape was the origin of hysteria received renewed interest in the U. S. starting in 1984 with the publication of a book by Masson, a staunch advocate for the "recovered memory" movement: The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Proponents of "recovered memory" argue that there has been extremely wide-spread sexual abuse in the U. S. and that the memories of these supposedly real scenes of abuse are being repressed by many ofthe victims, and consciously and unconsciously disavowed by therapists of all ilks. Masson argues that Freud’s supposed abandonment of the child rape theory was a similar "assault on truth." This argument assumes that Freud had indeed helped his patients recover a true memory of an event of child rape. Freud’s eventual disbelief in the child rape theory would seem to stem from his later disbelief that the narratives he constructed with his patients corresponded to an event in their lives. Beginning in 1905, Freud would argue that these narratives were actually his patients’ fantasies, and even their "falsifications" (VII 274). In The Assault on Truth, Masson cites Freud’s 1925 autobiography: "… I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up. [sic]" (11). Here I shall switch the focus from Freud to Masson. The period at the end of Masson’s quotation is either disingenuous or a bit of careless scholarship. The actual quotation should contain an ellipsis at both ends:

I suspect that Masson’s erroneous period is not a minor mistake of scholarship since Masson has had a lot invested in the absence of suggestion in Freud’s practice during the 1890s. If Freud had "forced" the narratives of "seduction" on his patients, then there would have been no truth to assault. In a way, Masson attempts to sanctify the Freud of the child rape theory and villainize the later Freud, by arguing that Freud assaulted the truth to gain acceptance from the leaders of the Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Though I agree that Freud was motivated by his desire for this acceptance when he turned away from repressed memories and trauma toward repressed phantasies as the caput Nili–and, I would add, that this acceptance would probably outweigh any hesitancy toward shocking the fin-de-siècle public with the concept of infantile sexuality–I disagree with Masson’s ungrounded claim that Freud had had access to truth with the child rape theory, and would point to Masson’s own arguments on Freud’s powerful tendency to find what he wanted despite what the evidence showed or what his patients said. As Masson repeatedly shows in his book, there were many reasons Fliess would write to Freud in 1901 that "the reader of thoughts merely reads his own thoughts into other people" (Mas85 447). Freud was driven to find a very specific origin of hysterical symptoms in order to make a scientific discovery that would bring him respect. This origin would have to be specific yet at the same time have a very general applicability–as would be the case as Freud saw it with the Oedipus complex of psychoanalysis proper (never mind it could not be applied to females without assuming that little girls were really "little men" (XXIII 118; see chapter five below). In order to support this drive, Freud would not directly deal with potential traumas that didn’t fit his scheme because they were not sexual, or because they were simply reported to him, which meant they hadn’t been repressed and weren’t in need of Freud’s (re)construction. In other words, Freud was driven to construct the etiological narrative he needed, which would hardly constitute a "truth" that might be suppressed or "assaulted." For example, in his letter to Fliess of April 28, 1897, Freud writes about a female patient who remembers being "seduced" by her father, no (re)construction by Freud needed:

Freud told this patient "that similar and worse things must have happened in her earlier childhood" because, if they did not, then there would have been no repression and therefore no pathogen.

The etiological origin of Freud’s "formal version" of the "seduction" theory is made more specific via several means: by ruling out the trauma of violence in the moment, by making it age specific (prepubertal, but usually three or four years), and by making it sexual. By making the origin more specific, Freud would then have a unique discovery that would differentiate his work on hysteria from that of others, such as Charcot. Memory and trauma were non-specific and more appropriate to models of chance and dispersal that spread out like a root system of a tree as one digs deeper. Freud would use archeological metaphors when he thought of his work in terms of digging, and he imagined himself more in terms of finding the single artifact that would fill all the gaps in a certain history: a singular caput Nili.

During the evolution of Freud’s work with so-called hysterics in the 1890s, he seems to be searching for ways to limit the "otherwise" effects of memory and trauma. And indeed, after the formal version of the "seduction" theory, Freud would make his etiological origin even more specific. Freud called his very specific theory of 1896, his belief that the rape of the child was always done by the father, his "paternal etiology" (Mas85 237). Freud would use the case reported above in the letter of April 28, 1897, as evidence for his confidence in the paternal etiology, even though the "scene of seduction" didn’t require (re)construction (the supposed earlier events, however, would). In their essay, "Freud on His Own Mistake(s): The Role of Seduction in the Etiology of Neurosis," Rachel B. Blass and Bennett Simon write that Freud "never publicly presented" the "paternal etiology," and that they find it strange that, despite this fact, "it is this formulation of the seduction theory that is most directly addressed in Freud’s later, public comments on early psychoanalytic theory" (167). I do not find this strange at all given that Freud at that later point was trying to establish the untenability of the "seduction" theory at the same time that he wanted to establish the ubiquity of the patrocentric Oedipus complex. These patients, the psychoanalytic Freud argued, all had fantasies of being "seduced" by their fathers. All hysterics being seduced by their fathers would be less believable as memory than as phantasy, and the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex would then match up with the supposed universality of the "paternal etiology" of hysteria–though this very universality, as I address in later chapters, raises the question of whence the neurosis. The mistake made by the "seduction" theory Freud, according to the psychoanalytic Freud, was to attribute his (re)constructions to memory rather than fantasy. By referring to the "seduction" theory in terms of the "paternal etiology," however, Freud could argue that the (re)constructions of the "paternal etiology" were in many ways correct. Therefore he would not be vulnerable to suspicions of suggestion with respect to the (re)constructions that were the very foundations of both theories. These examples of Freud narrowing memory and then abandoning the (re)construction as memory are crucial examples of Freud moving away from the chance of memory and the external world toward what I will argue is the determinism of fantasy and what the psychoanalytic Freud calls "psychical reality."

When Freud began using the cathartic method with so-called hysterical patients, there were a variety of "reminiscences" from which they suffered, the age at which they suffered them was unspecific, violence was often posited as the cause of the trauma, the trauma was not deferred, and, if there had been violence, the actant could have been anyone or any thing. As with Lacan, who called his psychoanalytic school "the Freudian cause"–"cause" being in the singular–Freud would not be satisfied theoretically with overdetermination, if this word is defined as multiple causes, and especially if the definition allows for chance. Freud’s mastery of hysteria had to include a mastery of the causes, which would then lead to a mastery of its cure. Memory and trauma do not easily allow for such mastery, mastery of a single narrative, a singular cause and predictable evolution along the line of a known etiology. Indeed the establishment Freud would attempt to secure such mastery by first making the pathogenic memory very specific, and then by repressing throughout the psychoanalytic years what had been that aspect of the psychological system based on memory and the "scene of writing" in the Project. The psychoanalytic Freud represses the importance of memory, and with regard to this repression we could say that psychoanalysis itself suffers from reminiscences, especially if reminiscences or memory are thought of in terms of something akin to the Derridean trace. Memory, trauma, and chance pose a threat to Freud’s stereotomy of the realm of meaning–the inside, the psyche–and therefore would pose a threat to his ability to be the master. And, ironically, it may be Freud’s own theory of memory, as Derrida reads it, that best defines that threat–or, at least, it would be difficult to define this threat without some debt to Freud.

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