Criticism
Peter Gay, author of Freud: A Life For Our Time, emphasizes that Freud continued to believe that some patients were sexually abused, but realized that there was a difficulty in determining between truth and fiction. Therefore, according to Gay there was no sinister motive in changing his theory; Freud was a scientist seeking the facts and was entitled to change his views if new evidence was presented to him.
A criticism from a completely different direction comes from Freud scholars who have examined the original documents and argue that the above account contains several misconceptions. Florence Rush based her account on Freud's later retrospective reports of the 1895-97 episode, which are seriously at variance with the original 1896 papers and other documents which show that it is not the case that Freud's female patients at that time consistently reported childhood instances of sexual molestation. Prior to the 1896 papers he had not reported a single instance of early childhood sexual abuse (and very few cases of any kind of sexual abuse). The very essence of the seduction theory entailed that only unconscious memories of early childhood sexual abuse could result in hysterical or obsessional symptoms, which is inconsistent with the notion of patients coming to him with reports of childhood sexual abuse; on Freud's theory the putative memories were deeply repressed and not accessible to consciousness in normal circumstances. (It is also the case that Freud's 1896 clinical claims were not restricted to women: in the 1896 "Aetiology" paper one third of the patients were men.)
Freud twice stated that he would be presenting the clinical evidence for his claims, but he never did so, which critics have argued means that his clinical claims have had to be taken largely on trust. Numerous Freud scholars and academics have voiced serious doubts about the validity of his claim in 1896 to have uncovered unconscious memories (later unconscious fantasies) of infantile sexual abuse, mostly below the age of four.
Read more about this topic: The Freudian Coverup
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)