Freud's Traumatic Memory: Reclaiming Seduction Theory and Revisiting Oedipus

NOTES

186 NOTES NotestoIntroduction 1. Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (1935; reprint, London: Free Association Books, 1988). With new prefaces by John Bowlby and Dorothy Heard. 2. Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959). 3. Morton Schatzman, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (New York: Random House, 1973). 4. Marianne Krüll, Freud and His Father, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986); Marie Balmary, Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 5. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Alan Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1993). 6. Bennett Simon and Rachel Blass, “The Development and Vicissitudes of Freud’s Ideas on the Oedipus Complex,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 161–74; Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 96–114. 7. Sachs cites Freud in a lecture of 1917: “[a patient’s] conflicts will only be successfully solved and his resistances overcome if the anticipatory ideas he is given [by his analyst] tally with what is real in him.” Quoted in “In Fairness to Freud: A Critical Notice of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, by Adolph Grünbaum,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 311. Marshall Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 8. See Jeffrey Masson, A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986); The Assault on the Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). 9. The question remains when. Schatzman, Soul Murder, writes, “Freud almost certainly knew this part of the myth [concerning Chrysippus and Laius]; Rank, his close disciple for many years, reported it (1912)” (115). It seems less clear that Freud knew about Chrysippus at the time of his letter to Fliess, unless he was being entirely disingenuous, or had repressed his own knowledge of it from previous reading. 10. A good example of such a view is Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Oedipus Rex and the Ancient Unconscious,” in Freud and Forbidden Knowledge, ed. Peter Rudnytsky and Ellen Handler Spitz (New York: New York University, 1994), who argues that the Greek sense of Oedipus exonerates him because he is presumed innocent. 11. For example, George Devereux, “Why Oedipus Killed Laius: A Note on the Complementary Oedipus Complex in Greek Drama,” in Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook, ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983), 215–33. 12. D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1987), 88. NotestoChapterOne 1. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 268–69. Hereafter cited in the text as Letters. 2. Ernest Jones, of course, followed up Freud’s speculations regarding Hamlet and attempted to present a credible account of Hamlet as an Oedipal figure in Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Norton, 1949). However, Jones’s reading of Hamlet is even more tendentious and filled with a priori-isms than Freud’s reading of Oedipus, if one cares for the story at all. It is a convincing account to those who have already accepted Freud’s major premises regarding Oedipus, but adds little to our understanding of Hamlet if one does not. 3. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1953); Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 7, 94–104; Marianne Krüll, Freud and His Father, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Norton, 1979); Sulloway, Freud, 206–16; Gerald Izenberg, “Seduced and Abandoned: The Rise and Fall of Freud’s Seduction Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25–43; Peter Newton, Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 38–41; Esterson, Seductive Mirage, 138–39; Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (New York...