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

8. Freud as Twentieth Century Patient

178 Freud’sTraumaticMemory 178 EIGHT Freud asTwentieth Century Patient Judith Herman has written that after the rejection of his seduction theory by the Viennese establishment, the only source of support that could have enabled Freud to sustain his theory was the nascent feminist movement. This, of course, he rejected.1 The subsequent development of psychoanalysis was certainly shaped by Freud’s desire to reinstantiate himself within the prevailing views of his times, which granted him certain privileges by virtue of being a man. It was also formed, though, by his primordial experience with his female nurse, a wound that remained unhealed for the rest of his life. Freud’s great imagination remained boxed up, just as he feared his mother had been. He would never be able to generalize past his own experience. Like the Viennese journalists of his day, Freud sought, in the face of real tragedy, an immediate literary gloss to overtake and domesticate the facts.2 The Oedipus complex arguably kept Freud from experiencing the kind of complete posttraumatic breakdown that he had witnessed in his own patients. It did not prevent him from dying a painful death from an addiction. But then, existentially, he saw himself as alone, especially after the break with Fliess. And as Herman has observed, no one recovers from trauma alone. So we come to an answer, after considering both the external and internal reasons, for why Freud turned away from the seduction theory and created the Oedipus complex and psychoanalysis. Freud did not Freud as Twentieth Century Patient 179 only turn blame away from perpetrators and onto generations of anonymous victims; he created the Oedipus complex to turn blame away from his own perpetrator and onto himself. He stopped his pain by cutting himself. Blunted in his efforts to convince his colleagues that victims deserved care and compassion, he regressed in his own self-analysis to the reasoning of children: it must be my fault. Even as he remembered his molestation by his nurse, and the recriminations for his infantile sexual “incompetence,” he remembered the secondary result of the molestation: a precocious sexual arousal response at the sight of his nude mother, whom he no doubt expected to treat him as his nurse (now incarcerated) had treated him. Instead, while he experienced the physical reaction he had been conditioned to by abuse, his mother did not behave as his nurse had. Thus, he was left with an unbearable shame and embarrassment. What kind of terrible little son gets sexually aroused at the sight of his mother? In Freud’s mind, of course, the answer was waiting close by. Oedipus, of course: King Oedipus, who unknowingly slept with his mother after unknowingly killing his father. The terrible shame of Oedipus Freud immediately universalized to all men (and then all children regardless of sex), thereby diluting its particular power to damn him by instantaneously making all men such tiny criminals. In fact, it was not the baby Freud who had first attached his illicit desire to his mother, but his aged nurse who had attached hers to him. Freud never makes literary his abuse by his nurse. Instead, he, like Oedipus, focuses on the triumphs of his adult life, and the trauma at one remove, which he can talk about. As Oedipus never knows that his father Laius’s act of raping a boy doomed him to crime and social demise, Freud likewise never publicly writes about his own rape by his nurse as the true foundation for his shame before his mother. Instead, like Oedipus, who blinds himself at the moment of discovery of the incest, Freud, too, at the moment of remembering his arousal before his nude mother, blinds his public self. He turns away from the incomprehensible pain of the nursemaid’s abuse, a scenario in which he is a helpless child-victim betrayed by a most trusted adult and motherfigure . He regains his sense of agency by taking the blame for arousal 180 Freud’sTraumaticMemory at matrem nudam. He purifies himself through self-mortification before the mother. The difference is that Oedipus never knew about his father’s crimes. Freud knew about his nurse’s. The strategy, however, is created out of an attempt to tame the trauma. The Oedipus complex becomes Freud’s posttraumatic symptomology. If he desires his mother, he is King Oedipus. If he is raped by his aged female nurse, he is merely...