Freud and #MeToo

I’ve been thinking a lot about Freud and the 2017 inversion of his theories in the #MeToo movement. Freud was always obsessed with grand explanations of mental phenomena, and his views on hysteria were no exception¹. First, mid-1890’s Freud argued that all his hysterical patients had been sexually abused. In stage two, about the time he starts to abandon the first view, he refers to that theory as verführungstheorie (i.e. the seduction hypothesis). In 1905 came the final stage, where he abandoned the sexual abuse hypothesis entirely and stated that all hysteria was caused by sexual fantasies.

But here’s the thing, psychologists don’t distinguish the first explanation (sexual abuse) from the second (where Freud renames it the seduction hypothesis). For myself, I’m genuinely baffled as to why Freud renamed abuse “the seduction hypothesis”.

However, I can see the damage renaming does. There is no sense in which we can think that children are seduced by adults. Seduction implies some sort of desire or consent on the part of the seduced, and this is never the case with children. Children cannot consent. And if we start thinking that children have desire, we end up in victim blaming. Similarly, the powerless cannot be seduced by the powerful, there is no true consent, just abuse. Freud’s final theory of unconscious desires allows aggressors to commit crimes and then say the victim was complicit due to the victim’s unconscious desire.

And hence the reversal that I’m glad we’ve seen this year. We have seen a year where, instead of victim blaming and denial, victims are now believed. We have seen a year where, instead of imagining that the powerless desire to assaulted, we recognize that some powerful people commit sexual assault regularly.

So perhaps, too, we can turn the clock back on Freud, ignoring his post-1900 sexual fantasy explanation, moving back past his renaming of the seduction theory, and instead going back to his original insight, that mental illness is related to sexual abuse. It will never be the all-or-nothing that Freud wants, mental disorders are caused by a variety of things. But abuse is a factor in lots of mental disorders, a fact acknowledged by psychoanalytic therapy since at least the 1980s. Perhaps we could follow suit by never again saying that abuse is the same as seduction.

Footnote: 1. This black-and-white flip from sexual abuse to fantasy has been disputed by some scholars but is completely consistent with Freud’s published works (of which I read about a volume each year). Take for example The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which Freud claimed that behind every forgotten action there is a counter-wish, and that we can’t ever think of random numbers because any number we generate has an unconscious psychological meaning. That’s Freud the ‘scientist’ right there, always looking for the single cause.