The revelations in the British media about the predatory paedophile activities of Clement Freud, Sigmund Freud’s grandson, will have shocked many – but not me.
Two years ago I had a paper published in a psychotherapy journal which made the case that Sigmund Freud had himself been abused as a two-year-old by his nurse – there was abuse in the Freud family.
I had hoped the revelations about Jimmy Savile, then fresh, would open a space in which my case about the abuse of Freud could be taken seriously.
Yet while the evidence of the paper was not questioned, its contents languished.
Sporadic references to Freud’s dubious relationship with his nurse stretch back over 40 years. But as the case of his grandson, Clement, demonstrates again, it is incredibly difficult to cast aspersions on someone once they’ve reached a certain level of fame and veneration.
Yet the evidence about Freud’s abuse is “hidden in plain sight”, in his letters of the 1890s to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, where he describes his self-analysis.
They contain material which points incontestably in the direction of child sexual abuse. For example, as a result of a dream on the night of 3–4 October 1897 Freud recalls in telling detail: “My nurse was my teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was clumsy and unable to do anything.”
And in a parenthetic comment, he says: “Neurotic impotence always comes about in this way. The fear of not being able to do anything at all in school thus obtains its sexual substratum… The whole dream was full of the most mortifying allusions to my present impotence as a therapist.”
It is clear that Freud is connecting his scholastic and professional failings to his nurse’s inappropriate sexual activity with him as a very young child.
However, Freud almost immediately turned away from his new awareness of his own abuse. This is quite visible in an October 1897 letter when he says: “If the self-analysis fulfils what I expect of it, I shall work on it systematically and then put it before you.”
One would expect the letter to end here, but without any further ado Freud proclaims: “A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found [the phenomenon] of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and now I consider it a universal event in early childhood…
“If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex… Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfilment here transplanted into reality.”
Unmistakably, here is the prototype of the “universal” Oedipus complex which Freud came to consider as the irreducible bedrock of his psychoanalysis, and which caused endless schisms with some of his leading followers who didn’t accept the “libido” was principally sexual.
In fact what had been evacuated from Freud’s revised schema was the very widespread occurrence of child abuse in late 19th century European society, and its associated emotional damage which, alas, still continues.
Could there be any link between Freud’s repression of his own sexual abuse and the abusive activities of his grandson?
Well, Freud did discover that what is repressed into the unconscious has a tendency to return and be “acted out” unless brought into self-awareness.
Had Freud not turned away from the very painful emotions and humiliation associated with his own early trauma, a quite different sort of psychoanalysis might have emerged.
It could have been of a kind which helped society at large face up to the reality of child sexual abuse. Instead of blaming the “seductive child”, it could have developed prophylactics for those unfortunate enough to suffer from its often devastating consequences.
It is high time that Freudian psychoanalysis openly confronted the profound wounds of its founder, and apologised for letting down many of its patients – myself included – by failing to address the real childhood traumas from which many clients suffer.
To read Simon Patridge’s full article on Freud in New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, click here.