Freud, the Serpent and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children ¹
DANIEL BURSTON

But a mere three years later, in Totem and Taboo, Freud speculated that a hellish and ultimately insurmountable ambivalence toward the father and its belated consequences -- guilt, repression and reaction-formation -- form the bedrock of cultural and political existence. This had a twofold effect. It meant that the relative freedom from fear and intimidation that Freud had celebrated in Leonardo can no longer be considered a genuine option for humanity, since abortive attempts at rebellion and restitution with the father represent an inherited constitutional pre-disposition. By linking rebellion against the father to events in a remote, pre-historic past, rather than real life contemporary conditions, and by emphasizing the cyclic, repetitive and ultimately self-defeating patterns of obsessional neuroses that are presumably at work here, Freud started a trend among the orthodox, who characteristically link rebellion against the father to infantilism, irrationality and the avoidance of maturity (e.g. Rudnytsky, 1987b).

Up until 1910, Leonardo was Freud's intellectual hero. His next role model, Moses, cuts a very different figure. Moses resembles Leonardo in that he dies before reaping the benefits of his efforts, or entering the 'promised land.' But Moses is no scientist. He is a law-giver and a group leader, whose prodigious capacity for sublimation gave him a moral authority that his followers admired, envied and feared (Freud, 1914). Like Leonardo, Moses was an outsider, in that he is not Jewish, but Egyptian. Indeed, Freud declares that Moses attempted to revive Ahkenaton's monotheistic heresy, only to be murdered for his zeal. But the practical consequence of Moses' murder by the Israelites is that Moses was an outsider who is loved and feared by his followers ,who organize their society (or cult) around his memory in perpetuity.

In view of the complexity of Freud's character, it is impossible to trace all the threads uniting Freud to his imaginary others here. Suffice it to say that Leonardo and Moses are emblematic of Freud himself at different stages in his career. At first, like Leonardo, he is a loner and outsider, in danger of dying in obscurity, to be discovered centuries hence. By contrast, the Moses material attests to Freud's ultimately triumphant conviction that, instead of being rediscovered by more enlightened people generations hence, he had a palpable impact on human affairs by mustering a sufficiently devoted following to carry on his work and memory.

The critical difference between Leonardo and Moses lies in their relationship to paternal authority. Leonardo rejects it, and gains immeasurably in scientific objectivity, only to die in obscurity. Moses, by contrast, embodies it, and gains a firm grip on posterity -- a surrogate immortality -- though he must sacrifice his life to do so. Freud's Leonardo and Moses express the pathos appropriate to different stages of Freud's life. What emerges, however, is that Freud's yearning for immortality probably prompted his increasing identification with the father, which dictated his abandonment of infantile sexual researches and his increasing emphasis on the Oedipus motif .

The process begun by Freud was carried on by his followers in the International Psychoanalytic Association. As a result faith in the child's disposition to truth became divorced from the idea of infantile sexual researches and forgotten by the mainstream. The second major instalment in this story is the reception accorded to Sandor Ferenczi in the late 1920's and 30's. Unlike Freud, Ferenczi became increasingly impressed by the child's disposition to truth, and provided Freud with an unwelcome reminder of his earlier ideas and commitments in this regard (Fromm, 1970a). Though attempts to rehabilitate Ferenczi have been increasingly successful of late (e.g. Stanton, 1990), the prevailing consensus for many years was that Ferenczi was mad. Indeed, until very recently his advocates, like Erich Fromm and Ian Suttie, were treated as marginal or unbalanced figures by the analytic mainstream (Burston, 1991).

As another illustration of this trend, when Erik Erikson introduced the disposition to truth as a uniquely adolescent preoccupation in connection with Dora (Erikson, 1961), he made a sensible allowance for the pathogenic impact of adult duplicity and seductiveness on a teenager whose passion for simple fidelity to fact struck her adult guardians and seducers as naive and querulous. But Erikson never asked whether her insistence on fidelity to fact was merely a more mature expression of a more general human tendency that Freud once thought he saw in children. This shows how profoundly repressed the subject was in the wake of Ferenczi's dissension.

Finally, in 1964, Ronald Laing and Aaron Esterson published a brilliant and deeply disturbing book entitled Sanity, Madness and the Family, which thematized the role of parental duplicity in the psychogenesis of schizophrenia. It is a sad but striking commentary on the history of psychoanalysis that a half a century after Freud’s initial reflections on this topic, they did not have a well developed body of analytic theory to draw on, and that in order to make their point, they even felt constrained to adopt a phenomenological approach, and to bracket all psychodynamic interpretations in the process (Burston, 2000).

But if the child's disposition to truth and its struggle with adult authority have not been addressed adequately in the analytic literature, in another sense the whole issue simply will not go away. Recent years have witnessed a whole new literature which purports to explain how Freud went wrong by blaming the victim for their own victimization, and his (conscious or unconscious) complicity in veiling the existence of the seductive, punitive and duplicitous adult world that the child must adapt to. Of these, the writings of Jeffrey Masson and Alice Miller, both former psychoanalysts, are the most widely read and discussed outside the profession nowadays.

In fairness to Masson, Freud may have minimized the extent to which real seduction occurs after 1897 (Masson, 1984). But Masson mistakenly argues that the validity of psychoanalysis hinges on a single etiological hypotheses -- namely, the seduction theory. In fact, the validity of psychoanalysis does not rest on any individual etiological hypotheses, but on the method employed in the analytic dialogue, in which a variety of etiological hypotheses are entertained, and if need be, discarded with the passage of time. Admittedly, Freud's later insistence on the centrality of the Oedipus complex may diminish an analyst's capacity for radical openness and receptivity to the patient, by encouraging him to fit the data onto a Procrustean bed of theoretical assumptions that do not fit the case. But the attempt to debunk the theory of unconscious fantasy by returning to the seduction theory is not progress. On the contrary, it is a retrograde motion, which is even more simplistic and doctrinaire than the ideas Masson attacks (Lothane, 1987).

As for Miller, the concept of 'poisonous pedagogy' has much to commend it. But contrary to what Miller claims, Freud did not drop the traumatic theory of the neuroses in the 1880's and effect an immediate Oedipalization of his clinical theory, buttressed later with his drive theory (Miller, 1985). On the contrary, the rudiments of Freud's drive-theory predate Oedipal hegemony, and are already adumbrated alongside the traumatic theory of the neuroses, as the Fliess material amply attests (Masson, 1985).

Moreover, there is something cranky and sectarian in Miller's insistence that the correct theory of therapy is Freud's notion of the traumatic neuroses circa 1896. By adopting this posture, she invalidates a wealth of wisdom that has accrued since Freud. And whether from prudery or short-sightedness, Miller jettisons something integral to Freud that is scientifically sound. Freud erred in attempting to derive scientific curiosity from childish sexual fantasies exclusively, but the fact remains that children's curiosity about their erogenous zones, those of their parents, and the role of the genitalia in producing new babies is as deep and compelling as Freud depicted it. Miller seems to think that the recognition of adult duplicity and seductiveness, and the frequent invocation of phantasy to dismiss or minimize real traumas, proves the child's "innocence" in the obsolete, Victorian sense of the term. Nothing is further from the truth. Sexuality is too deeply woven into the fabric of nature for children not to be sexual beings, and Miller's rhetoric sounds suspiciously similar to the old-fashioned Victorian homilies about children that Freud and his followers rightly challenged.

In view of recent history , and the artificially polarized climate of opinion created by Miller and Masson, it is not clear whether the child's disposition to truth and the abrupt attenuation of Freud's interest in infantile sexual researches will ever be addressed in analytic circles with the clarity and seriousness they deserve. Freud himself was averse to doing so, and even now, resistances to tangling with these problems in the analytic community are strong and deeply rooted. Nevertheless, if we can set aside our misplaced loyalty to the master, and the simplistic polemics of his harshest critics, the resulting discussion could be extremely productive from both a clinical and theoretical point of view.

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"Freud, The Serpent, and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children"
International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 1994 vol. 3, pp. 205-219.


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