The most important physician in modern history was a 19th century Frenchman named Jean Charcot. He was concerned about the way French society treated people who were suffering from serious mental problems. They were handed over to the police and treated as though they were criminals. Usually locked away in what we today would call prison…
The most important physician in modern history was a 19th century Frenchman named Jean Charcot. He was concerned about the way French society treated people who were suffering from serious mental problems. They were handed over to the police and treated as though they were criminals. Usually locked away in what we today would call prisons. This is punishment, said Charcot. Why punish them? there are people in society who act in a bizarre fashion and we fail to understand what is the wellspring of their behavior. We are repulsed by them and hand them over to the criminal justice system. This is cruel, inappropriate and unnecessary said the great doctor. Charcot said we should treat them as though they have a disease and hand them over to the medical community. He did not say they had a mental illness. He was clearly using an analogy, a metaphor. Unfortunately he was misinterpreted and some thought he meant literally: mental disease.
Many of his students became important influencers later in their professional lives. One of them was Sigmund Freud, a man of limited intelligence but a highly developed phantasy life involving sex. Freud misinterpreted Charcot completely and thought the great doctor was speaking of a literal mental illness. Freud developed phantastic explanations for people who behave in a bizarre fashion. As if this were not bad enough; he then began to say that ordinary people with behavioral problems can be explained by his outlandish, phantasies as well. Freud borrowed from Hebrew and Greek myths for his explanations of human behavior. He did not use them metaphorically; he was, like so many people of limited intelligence, literal.
The entire edifice of Freud's ideas was based upon the experiences of less than a dozen women who came to him for counseling. They told him they were the victims of incest. Freud simply could not, or refused to, believe them and assumed they were suffering from false memories. He then built a truly phantasmagorical series of explanations for their words which they addressed to him while he was counseling them.
I read the complete translation ( by George Simpson, I believe) of Freud's ideas when I was young, and even at a young age I could see that Freud was himself psychotic (meaning, out of contact with reality). He has done more harm to the discipline of Psychology in the U.S. than anyone in history. His ideas enjoyed great popular acceptance in the U.S. But not in Europe. That is another story altogether.
Many of those who use the term Psychopath mean that there are people with a mental disease even though there is no lesion to be found on their central nervous system. It is true that there are some people with a lesion on their central nervous system and it affects their behavior. But these people constitute less than 1% of all those labelled as suffering from mental illness, a Psychopath. Mental illness as it is commonly expressed is a myth. One might wish to look into the writing of Thomas Szasz THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILNESS, and David Mechanic's work also.
Near the end of his life Freud eventually came to realize that he was wrong. He said so in his personal journal. After he died this journal was hidden from the public by his daughter for a generation or more. Eventually it urned up in the archives of a Canadian university; I think McGill. It made a big, nasty splash in the academic Psychology community as you can imagine.
"Sociopath" is used by Sociologists to refer to someone who is so far removed from the shared experiences and sympathetic understandings of the general culture that they seem to have a social disease, metaphorically. Trump qualifies, clearly.
Gerald, I love to hear you mention Jean-Martin Charcot. It's my understanding that he was trying to understand and treat patients humanely, and educate doctors regarding the existence of unconsciousness. If, under hypnotic suggestion, he could relieve a patient's "hysterical paralysis," for example, he could explain that the malfunctioning part of the body wasn't physically incapacitated, but that something in the patient's unconscious mind was causing the paralysis. Charcot never proposed a specific theory regarding what was emotionally troubling the patient and how these feelings got repressed into unconsciousness, but the young Sigmund Freud did.
Freud was in Paris in the late 1880's doing research on the brain, specifically looking for physical signs of neurological damage which might correlate to emotional distress and the symptoms lumped together by neurologists at the time called, "hysteria." To do this research he had to go to the morgue in Paris and obtain brain samples to investigate under a microscope. While in the morgue he saw many deceased children with obvious signs of physical and sexual abuse. Freud began to wonder if children who weren't outright killed by their abusers, became the "hysterics" that Charcot was exhibiting in his medical teaching clinic. In Vienna,
Freud had already become good friends with Josef Breuer, a highly acclaimed doctor who'd experimented with emotionally distressed patients by listening to them talk about their troubles. Freud had been doing the same with some of his patients and they were telling both of these doctors about sexual abuse by fathers and others that had occurred in their childhoods. Combining these three phenomena, deceased children who'd obviously been massively abused, the stories of abuse he was hearing from his young adult patients, and the demonstrations in Charcot's clinic of the existence of unconscious processes in the mind, Freud arrived at his first theory, which he called, euphemistically, "seduction." The theory stated that children were being sexually abused, that the feelings associated with being abused were repressed into unconsciousness because they were too unbearable to tolerate, but they emerged indirectly and got expressed in previously inexplicable symptoms of physical or emotional distress. He further explained that treatment involved helping the patient remember events that were previously unrememberable, along with the original feelings that were too terrible to endure at the time.
Freud's original theory was absolutely correct and so was his prescription for treatment. However, in 1896, when he presented the case histories of several patients, along with his theoretical explanation of the etiology and treatment of "hysteria," his colleagues fell silent. One version of the story goes that they began to shun him, they stopped referring to him, and after 18 months of feeling ostracized, with six children and a wife to feed, Freud retracted "seduction" and replaced it with the theory of intrapsychic fantasy. Now the story was that children yearned for and fantasized about sexual union with the parent of the opposite sex, there was sibling rivalry and oedipal competition, and it all got suppressed into unconsciousness to emerge later in the symptoms called, "Hysteria."
Contemporary psychoanalysts have returned to Freud and Breuer's original observations and improved on treatment for early childhood trauma. But I completely agree with your observation that his theories of intrapsychic fantasy were somewhat tortured, and they did much harm to victims of childhood, sexual abuse for 6 decades until they were questioned and re-considered. Our culture can now talk more freely about abuse and offer a variety of treatment approaches. Collectively, we are definitely more empathetic with trauma victims and are coming to recognize how much physical and emotional violence there is in average, American child-rearing. :(
Ms. Taylor, thank you for your thoughtful response. You appear to know a great deal about the activities of Freud in his early years as a student of Charcot. I thank you for informing me.
I have always viewed the concept of "repression" with a certain amount of doubt. I believe it is more likely that a horrible experience does not create a problem because it is repressed and then subsequently it re-appears in some altered form. I think the problem with a horrible experience is more likely to create pain because the person who experiences it cannot stop thinking about it. It sticks in their mind consciously;. They cannot stop reliving it over and over and this is a terribly painful, disabling experience. My friends and relatives who have been in terrifying combat in Vietnam , Korea, and WWII told me they would like to forget it; but they cannot. That is the problem for them: they cannot forget it.
On a related topic I wonder about the whole concept of "hysteria." Hyster is greek for womb. Scholars commonly turn to ancient languages as they search for names to give to the new concepts they are developing. Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are often chosen as the reservoir of terms to borrow from. When a surgeon removes a woman's womb that is said to be a "hysterectomy." A sensible term for womb- removal.
Irrational, nonsensical behavior was and still is claimed to be a typical response of females. Thus, people suffering from irrational thoughts and frightening feelings and allowing these to take control of their behavior are said to be "hysterical" according to Freud. A claim which is clearly born of a bias against females. This bias is a common cultural trait. We are culturally predisposed to label such behavior as female. I love that sequence in THE AFRICAN QUEEN when Humphrey Bogart's character "Mr. Allnut" drunkenly shouts at Katherine Hepburn's character "Rosie," calling her "a bible thumping, psalm singing old maid." But then he changes his view of her entirely after he shares the warmth of her wonderful lips with their first kiss and is overwhelmed by her courageous determination to attack the german warship.
I suspect a better place to look for an explanation for human behavior is in society itself, as all human behavior is social. I prefer to not look into human biology for explanations of inherently social phenomena.
Hi gerald, I totally agree that "all human behavior is social." The human context in which experience takes place affects the experiencer's reaction. Experiences that are emotionally traumatizing in childhood, when the child victim is dependent upon the parental perpetrator and has no escape, are happening under different circumstances than adult soldiers in warfare. Nature makes it possible for children who are trapped in assaultive or massively neglectful environments and must stay there for years before they're capable of taking care of themselves, to deny that what's happening to them is that bad, to consciously suppress feelings that would further infuriate the abusive parent upon whom the child is dependent, repress these experiences into deeper regions of unconsciousness, or completely dissociate from them, removing themselves from the situation as if it were happening to someone else.
The way that Freud and others subsequently learned about this is through careful listening to patients over the last 100 years and devising treatment relationships that were safe enough for repressed memories or dissociated experience to gradually emerge into conscious awareness. Often, painful memories emerge first in dreams, another somewhat unconscious realm of the mind, before the person feels safe enough to manage these memories with full consciousness. None of this remembering process is willful or consciously intended, but it happens as the person begins to feel safer with a therapist who demonstrates qualities of acceptance and compassion, unlike the traumatizing parents of the patient's childhood.
You are correct that there's another result of trauma that occurs in adults exposed to mortal danger, physical and/or emotional, and also cannot escape. There are forms of PTSD where the sufferer can't forget painful memories by which they are haunted. Abused children and soldiers in war are living under similar circumstances. But children are living in a traumatizing environment 24/7 with people upon whom they must depend for years. Abusive parents usually can't tolerate the child reminding them in any way of the abuse they are inflicting so there's one more requirement that author Alice Miller points out..."Thou Shalt Not Be Aware." Children are forced, by their fear of the parent's retribution, to tolerate the abuse but suppress, repress, or dissociate from the emotional effects of living with abusive parents. They dare not allow themselves to become fully aware of just how unbearable the situation is because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most.
A good book about these two, similar but different circumstances is, Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman.
Ms. Taylor, your comment "because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most." is an eye opener. Yes, that does make the child's situation different from the soldier's. The soldier can fight back while the child cannot, dares not. The soldier also has colleagues to whom he or she can turn for help. The child likely does not. I had not thought it through even though I, like many other children had an alcoholic German-American father and a somewhat negligent, emotionally distant mother.
I also had not thought about the potential of dreams as an opening in investigating trauma. This is not to say I have not wondered about the nature and significance of dreams in human existence. I have. I regret to say I did not here. The subject of dreams in this context probably seems obvious to you; as it seems you have experience in this subject which I lack. Thanks again for your response.
The most important physician in modern history was a 19th century Frenchman named Jean Charcot. He was concerned about the way French society treated people who were suffering from serious mental problems. They were handed over to the police and treated as though they were criminals. Usually locked away in what we today would call prisons. This is punishment, said Charcot. Why punish them? there are people in society who act in a bizarre fashion and we fail to understand what is the wellspring of their behavior. We are repulsed by them and hand them over to the criminal justice system. This is cruel, inappropriate and unnecessary said the great doctor. Charcot said we should treat them as though they have a disease and hand them over to the medical community. He did not say they had a mental illness. He was clearly using an analogy, a metaphor. Unfortunately he was misinterpreted and some thought he meant literally: mental disease.
Many of his students became important influencers later in their professional lives. One of them was Sigmund Freud, a man of limited intelligence but a highly developed phantasy life involving sex. Freud misinterpreted Charcot completely and thought the great doctor was speaking of a literal mental illness. Freud developed phantastic explanations for people who behave in a bizarre fashion. As if this were not bad enough; he then began to say that ordinary people with behavioral problems can be explained by his outlandish, phantasies as well. Freud borrowed from Hebrew and Greek myths for his explanations of human behavior. He did not use them metaphorically; he was, like so many people of limited intelligence, literal.
The entire edifice of Freud's ideas was based upon the experiences of less than a dozen women who came to him for counseling. They told him they were the victims of incest. Freud simply could not, or refused to, believe them and assumed they were suffering from false memories. He then built a truly phantasmagorical series of explanations for their words which they addressed to him while he was counseling them.
I read the complete translation ( by George Simpson, I believe) of Freud's ideas when I was young, and even at a young age I could see that Freud was himself psychotic (meaning, out of contact with reality). He has done more harm to the discipline of Psychology in the U.S. than anyone in history. His ideas enjoyed great popular acceptance in the U.S. But not in Europe. That is another story altogether.
Many of those who use the term Psychopath mean that there are people with a mental disease even though there is no lesion to be found on their central nervous system. It is true that there are some people with a lesion on their central nervous system and it affects their behavior. But these people constitute less than 1% of all those labelled as suffering from mental illness, a Psychopath. Mental illness as it is commonly expressed is a myth. One might wish to look into the writing of Thomas Szasz THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILNESS, and David Mechanic's work also.
Near the end of his life Freud eventually came to realize that he was wrong. He said so in his personal journal. After he died this journal was hidden from the public by his daughter for a generation or more. Eventually it urned up in the archives of a Canadian university; I think McGill. It made a big, nasty splash in the academic Psychology community as you can imagine.
"Sociopath" is used by Sociologists to refer to someone who is so far removed from the shared experiences and sympathetic understandings of the general culture that they seem to have a social disease, metaphorically. Trump qualifies, clearly.
Gerald, I love to hear you mention Jean-Martin Charcot. It's my understanding that he was trying to understand and treat patients humanely, and educate doctors regarding the existence of unconsciousness. If, under hypnotic suggestion, he could relieve a patient's "hysterical paralysis," for example, he could explain that the malfunctioning part of the body wasn't physically incapacitated, but that something in the patient's unconscious mind was causing the paralysis. Charcot never proposed a specific theory regarding what was emotionally troubling the patient and how these feelings got repressed into unconsciousness, but the young Sigmund Freud did.
Freud was in Paris in the late 1880's doing research on the brain, specifically looking for physical signs of neurological damage which might correlate to emotional distress and the symptoms lumped together by neurologists at the time called, "hysteria." To do this research he had to go to the morgue in Paris and obtain brain samples to investigate under a microscope. While in the morgue he saw many deceased children with obvious signs of physical and sexual abuse. Freud began to wonder if children who weren't outright killed by their abusers, became the "hysterics" that Charcot was exhibiting in his medical teaching clinic. In Vienna,
Freud had already become good friends with Josef Breuer, a highly acclaimed doctor who'd experimented with emotionally distressed patients by listening to them talk about their troubles. Freud had been doing the same with some of his patients and they were telling both of these doctors about sexual abuse by fathers and others that had occurred in their childhoods. Combining these three phenomena, deceased children who'd obviously been massively abused, the stories of abuse he was hearing from his young adult patients, and the demonstrations in Charcot's clinic of the existence of unconscious processes in the mind, Freud arrived at his first theory, which he called, euphemistically, "seduction." The theory stated that children were being sexually abused, that the feelings associated with being abused were repressed into unconsciousness because they were too unbearable to tolerate, but they emerged indirectly and got expressed in previously inexplicable symptoms of physical or emotional distress. He further explained that treatment involved helping the patient remember events that were previously unrememberable, along with the original feelings that were too terrible to endure at the time.
Freud's original theory was absolutely correct and so was his prescription for treatment. However, in 1896, when he presented the case histories of several patients, along with his theoretical explanation of the etiology and treatment of "hysteria," his colleagues fell silent. One version of the story goes that they began to shun him, they stopped referring to him, and after 18 months of feeling ostracized, with six children and a wife to feed, Freud retracted "seduction" and replaced it with the theory of intrapsychic fantasy. Now the story was that children yearned for and fantasized about sexual union with the parent of the opposite sex, there was sibling rivalry and oedipal competition, and it all got suppressed into unconsciousness to emerge later in the symptoms called, "Hysteria."
Contemporary psychoanalysts have returned to Freud and Breuer's original observations and improved on treatment for early childhood trauma. But I completely agree with your observation that his theories of intrapsychic fantasy were somewhat tortured, and they did much harm to victims of childhood, sexual abuse for 6 decades until they were questioned and re-considered. Our culture can now talk more freely about abuse and offer a variety of treatment approaches. Collectively, we are definitely more empathetic with trauma victims and are coming to recognize how much physical and emotional violence there is in average, American child-rearing. :(
Ms. Taylor, thank you for your thoughtful response. You appear to know a great deal about the activities of Freud in his early years as a student of Charcot. I thank you for informing me.
I have always viewed the concept of "repression" with a certain amount of doubt. I believe it is more likely that a horrible experience does not create a problem because it is repressed and then subsequently it re-appears in some altered form. I think the problem with a horrible experience is more likely to create pain because the person who experiences it cannot stop thinking about it. It sticks in their mind consciously;. They cannot stop reliving it over and over and this is a terribly painful, disabling experience. My friends and relatives who have been in terrifying combat in Vietnam , Korea, and WWII told me they would like to forget it; but they cannot. That is the problem for them: they cannot forget it.
On a related topic I wonder about the whole concept of "hysteria." Hyster is greek for womb. Scholars commonly turn to ancient languages as they search for names to give to the new concepts they are developing. Ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are often chosen as the reservoir of terms to borrow from. When a surgeon removes a woman's womb that is said to be a "hysterectomy." A sensible term for womb- removal.
Irrational, nonsensical behavior was and still is claimed to be a typical response of females. Thus, people suffering from irrational thoughts and frightening feelings and allowing these to take control of their behavior are said to be "hysterical" according to Freud. A claim which is clearly born of a bias against females. This bias is a common cultural trait. We are culturally predisposed to label such behavior as female. I love that sequence in THE AFRICAN QUEEN when Humphrey Bogart's character "Mr. Allnut" drunkenly shouts at Katherine Hepburn's character "Rosie," calling her "a bible thumping, psalm singing old maid." But then he changes his view of her entirely after he shares the warmth of her wonderful lips with their first kiss and is overwhelmed by her courageous determination to attack the german warship.
I suspect a better place to look for an explanation for human behavior is in society itself, as all human behavior is social. I prefer to not look into human biology for explanations of inherently social phenomena.
Hi gerald, I totally agree that "all human behavior is social." The human context in which experience takes place affects the experiencer's reaction. Experiences that are emotionally traumatizing in childhood, when the child victim is dependent upon the parental perpetrator and has no escape, are happening under different circumstances than adult soldiers in warfare. Nature makes it possible for children who are trapped in assaultive or massively neglectful environments and must stay there for years before they're capable of taking care of themselves, to deny that what's happening to them is that bad, to consciously suppress feelings that would further infuriate the abusive parent upon whom the child is dependent, repress these experiences into deeper regions of unconsciousness, or completely dissociate from them, removing themselves from the situation as if it were happening to someone else.
The way that Freud and others subsequently learned about this is through careful listening to patients over the last 100 years and devising treatment relationships that were safe enough for repressed memories or dissociated experience to gradually emerge into conscious awareness. Often, painful memories emerge first in dreams, another somewhat unconscious realm of the mind, before the person feels safe enough to manage these memories with full consciousness. None of this remembering process is willful or consciously intended, but it happens as the person begins to feel safer with a therapist who demonstrates qualities of acceptance and compassion, unlike the traumatizing parents of the patient's childhood.
You are correct that there's another result of trauma that occurs in adults exposed to mortal danger, physical and/or emotional, and also cannot escape. There are forms of PTSD where the sufferer can't forget painful memories by which they are haunted. Abused children and soldiers in war are living under similar circumstances. But children are living in a traumatizing environment 24/7 with people upon whom they must depend for years. Abusive parents usually can't tolerate the child reminding them in any way of the abuse they are inflicting so there's one more requirement that author Alice Miller points out..."Thou Shalt Not Be Aware." Children are forced, by their fear of the parent's retribution, to tolerate the abuse but suppress, repress, or dissociate from the emotional effects of living with abusive parents. They dare not allow themselves to become fully aware of just how unbearable the situation is because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most.
A good book about these two, similar but different circumstances is, Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman.
Nice talking to you!
Ms. Taylor, your comment "because they are dependent on the very people they fear the most." is an eye opener. Yes, that does make the child's situation different from the soldier's. The soldier can fight back while the child cannot, dares not. The soldier also has colleagues to whom he or she can turn for help. The child likely does not. I had not thought it through even though I, like many other children had an alcoholic German-American father and a somewhat negligent, emotionally distant mother.
I also had not thought about the potential of dreams as an opening in investigating trauma. This is not to say I have not wondered about the nature and significance of dreams in human existence. I have. I regret to say I did not here. The subject of dreams in this context probably seems obvious to you; as it seems you have experience in this subject which I lack. Thanks again for your response.
You're awesome, gerald...keep thinking. :)